You may love the taste of coffee, but you hate the taste of caffeine. That’s because the psychoactive compound is repellently bitter on its own (take it from someone who’s made the mistake of chewing NoDoz tablets while cramming for exams). So why is coffee relatively palatable? New research published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry has the answer, and it’s the same reason steaks are so delicious.
To find out which compounds in coffee curb the astringent taste of caffeine, biochemists with the American Chemical Society set up a taste test. Brewed coffee, they found, was able to mask the caffeine’s bitterness as they intensified the concentration up to 10 times the normal amount.
Read more: “How Does Caffeine Shape the Way We Spend Money?”
To uncover the mellowing culprit, the team provided taste-testers with solutions of caffeine mixed with some of the other compounds found in coffee: chlorogenic acid and melanoidins. While the former is a potent antioxidant that occurs naturally in coffee beans, the latter is produced during the roasting process through the Maillard reaction. This chemical reaction, which occurs in the presence of amino acids and sugars, is also responsible for the flavorful crust that develops when you sear a piece of meat.
The tasting panel reported that while chlorogenic acid didn’t mask the bitter caffeine taste on its own, both compounds in conjunction cut it in half. According to the researchers, when combined with caffeine, the melanoidins form a high molecular weight complex that’s too bulky to interact with the tongue’s bitter taste receptors. Essentially, coffee’s pleasant taste comes from addition, not subtraction.
Something to remember when you take that first sip of java in the morning. 
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Lead image: dimakp / Adobe Stock
