Discrimination of roast and ground coffee aroma

Different methods offered complimentary results for the discrimination of products; the concentration in the coffee brew was found to be the least discriminatory and concentration in the headspace above the roast and ground coffee was shown to be most discriminatory.All approaches should be taken into consideration when classifying roast and ground coffee especially for alignment to sensory perception and consumer insight data as all offer markedly different discrimination abilities due to the variation in volatility, hydrophobicity, air-water partition coefficient and other physicochemical parameters of the key aroma compounds present.The aroma of roast and ground (R&G) coffee is critical to consumer liking and is perceived by consumers in one of many ways: the period directly after opening the pack is representative of the static partitioning of volatile chemicals between the R&G coffee and the pack headspace; during early brewing the aroma is characteristic of the dynamic partitioning of volatile aroma compounds between the coffee, water, steam and air due to the infusion of water with the R&G coffee; the process of extraction involves the kinetic partitioning of volatile aroma compounds between the coffee and the water [1]; and finally the partitioning of volatile aroma compounds between the filtered aqueous brew, R&G fines, coffee oil and the headspace both above the cup and within the buccal and nasal cavity drives in-cup aroma [2,3]. All mechanisms are important to the overall perception of coffee aroma, and each contributes individually to key drivers of liking.Differences in aroma between R&G coffee originate from a number of sources: coffee beans may originate from different coffee plant cultivars (for example Arabica, Robusta) [4]; intrinsic bag to bag and seasonal variation may also contribute to differences [5,6]; in addition, sourcing from different geographical locations [7], differences in processing (wet vs. dry processing) and ageing before roastin