New coffee center in Northern California aims to give a jolt to research and education
DAVIS, California — A Northern California university is now home to a center dedicated to educating students and closely studying one of the most consumed beverages in the world known for helping people get through the day: coffee .
The University of California, Davis, launched its Coffee Center in May with research aimed at providing support to farmers, examining coffee sustainability and evaluating food safety issues, among other topics. The launch comes about a decade after the university offered its first course on the science of coffee.
At the center in Davis, about 14 miles west of Sacramento, director Bill Ristenpart said there has historically been much more emphasis on studying a beverage like wine, and less on studying coffee.
“We are trying to take coffee to the next level and make it a subject of academic research and a pipeline of academic talent to help support the industry and what is arguably the most important beverage in the world,” said Ristenpart, professor of chemical engineering .
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, most people in the United States buy coffee imported from countries including Brazil, Colombia and Vietnam; However, California is one of the few places in the country where coffee is grown. The US is the world’s second-largest importer of coffee after the European Union, the agency says.
UC Davis also has programs focused on winemaking and brewing industry research. The 6,500-square-foot Coffee Center facility is the first academic building in the country dedicated to coffee research and education, Ristenpart said. It is located in the UC Davis Arboretum near the Robert Mondavi Institute of Wine and Food Science on campus.
Laudia Anokye-Bempah, a graduate student in biological systems engineering, said she wants to research coffee in part “to determine how your roasted beans get to the roaster.”
“We can control things like acidity,” Anokye-Bempah said.
There are other American colleges, including Texas A&M University and Vanderbilt University, who have delved into the study of coffee. But the UC Davis Coffee Center stands out in part because it focuses on many aspects of coffee research, including agriculture and chemistry, says Edward Fischer, professor of anthropology and director of the Institute for Coffee Studies at Vanderbilt.
“Coffee is such a complex compound,” says Fischer. “It’s really important to bring all these different aspects together, and that’s what Davis does.”
Students often come out of Fischer’s coffee classes seeing the world differently than what is normally discussed in an academic setting, he said.
“In the Western academic tradition, we divide the world into all these silos, right – biology and anthropology, economics and all that stuff,” he said. “Coffee is a way to show how all the boundaries we draw in the world are actually arbitrary.”
Camilla Yuan, a UC Davis alum and director of coffee and roasting at Camellia Coffee Roasters, a coffee shop in Sacramento, visited the Coffee Center in Davis last week, she said.
“Having a center and having resources for people who are interested in specialty coffee or just the coffee world in general, I think is super fascinating and cool,” Yuan said. “I’m glad something like this is happening.”
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Austin is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Austin on social platform X: @sophieadanna