From an early age I became passionate about flavours, and my journey into food science always had a strong bias towards deconstructing taste and aroma experiences into their respective ingredients. I didn’t know that my journey would take me into the world of coffee, but I am glad it has.  Coffee science has retained so much of its innovation potential, but it relies on the right questions being asked.

My Ph.D. in Food Chemistry from McGill University in Canada, was with Prof. Dr. Varoujan Yaylayan, an expert in the Maillard reaction. There I learnt to pay attention to the dynamics of flavour generation in real and model systems. He always encouraged me to “write down all [my] crazy ideas”.  This has helped me stay curious and avoid adopting popular opinions simply because everyone else thinks they are true.  

I moved to more applied research when I became the Aroma and Flavour Lead at ZHAW’s Coffee Excellence Centre.  My expertise allowed me to lead and contribute to numerous successful industry projects. That’s when I decided to make my knowledge more relatable, in order to communicate with the broader coffee community.  I became a Q & R Grader [1], in addition to taking a number of SCA courses to understand how coffee professionals were being taught and related to the product.

I moved into industry in 2019 to become JDE-Peet’s Principal Coffee Chemist.  I enjoyed seeing how the knowledge that I had accumulated through my unwavering curiousity was capable of elegantly resolving multi-million dollar issues, while at the same time making my colleagues' lives easier.  My interest in coffee agriculture also led to JDE-Peet’s participation in the Horizon 2020 project BOLERO.

To give myself the space and time to research and write I went independent in 2023. I can now collect the many pieces of knowledge scattered throughout over a century’s worth of coffee science literature and assemble them into a narrative that reveals how they influence cup quality.

Myths about how a good cup of coffee is produced abound within the coffee community. If you want someone to repeat those myths, I’m not the person to ask. If you want to challenge these beliefs with someone who is curious about the science behind coffee and interested in figuring out what is really going on, then let’s talk.

Details will be added at a later date.