Page 13 - EUREKA Winter 2017

Previous spread, left to right: Bridgehead’s Ian Clark, head roaster Cliff Hansen and Carleton chemist Jeff Smith in the company’s
warehouse. Above: Bridgehead’s café and roastery in Ottawa’s Little Italy.

Seeking to solve this problem, Clark and Hansen checked that will last for six months, we lose the opportunity to take
out an open house at Carleton’s Front Door initiative in Janu- advantage of that, if we don’t buy now. And we just don’t
ary 2016. The program links local businesses with Faculty of know, so we have to manage the risk.”
Science expertise and infrastructure, and provides guidance on There are theories in the industry about why this hap-
which people and techniques are best suited to address prob- pens. The prevailing thinking is that uneven moisture content
lems particular to their business. Working with more than a created by drying processes contributes to ongoing cellular
dozen facilities on campus, Front Door, through fee-for-service respiration, consuming nutrients that result in better flavours.
contracts, consulting services, R&D partnerships and other “The bean is essentially a seed,” Hansen says, “and the
interactions, generates revenue for university researchers and, point of that seed is to germinate: it wants to stay alive so
at the same time, helps companies get smarter. it can grow a new coffee tree. It’s going to do everything
Canada’s $6.2 billion coffee industry is big business. More that it can to do that. If you make it harder to do that, it’s
than 160,000 people work in cafés and coffee shops, and going to use up all of its energy stores. Those energy stores
roughly 5,000 are employed on the manufacturing and are delicious to us. Because we like sugar, and we like fruit
roasting side. But the opportunities in this industry come acids, and those are the things that actually develop into
coupled with risk. The five cups of exceptional Congolese coffee flavours. So when the bean uses those up trying to
coffee sitting on the table in front of Clark and Hansen are a stay alive, it’s way less delicious for us.”
case in point. But this is only a theory. Very little is known about how
“Historically, we’ve had problems with coffees from coffee beans age on a cellular level.
Congo,” says Clark, who has a bachelor’s degree in Law and
Legal Studies from Carleton. “This one smells beautiful. It’s
got a really floral character. Congos, in our experience, can On the ground floor of Carleton’s Steacie Building, the
be really good at first, but we have to be really careful about buzz of bean roasting is replaced by the resonating hum
buying too much because they do die pretty quickly. They of machines inside the Carleton Mass Spectrometry Cen-
turn, and develop this bushy, woody flavour instead of the tre (CMSC). This multi-million-dollar lab is brewing a new
elegant floral character. So it’s smelling great — right now, approach to understanding coffee: gas chromatography
it’s fantastic — but there’s this uncertainty. How long is this techniques enable scientists to observe chemical changes
going to last? We don’t really know. We can use our experi- that accompany changes in aroma.
ence and be a bit cautious, but say this is an amazing coffee Funded by a $50,000 grant from the Ontario Centres of

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