UC Davis also has programs focusing on research related to winemaking and the brewing industry. The 7,000-square-foot Coffee Center is the nation’s first academic building dedicated to coffee research and education, Ristenpart said. It is located in the Arboretum of the University of California at Davis, near the Institute of Wine and Food Sciences. Robert Mondavi.
Laudia Anokye-Bempah, a biological systems engineering graduate student, said she wanted to study coffee in part “to be able to control how roasted beans get to the roaster.”
“We can control things like acidity levels,” Anokye-Bempah said.
There are other American universities, including Texas A&M University and Vanderbilt University, that have delved into coffee research. But UCLA’s Coffee Center stands out in part because it focuses on multiple aspects of coffee research, including agriculture and chemistry, said Edward Fischer, professor of anthropology and director of the Institute for Coffee Studies at Vanderbilt.
“Coffee is a very complicated compound,” Fischer said. “It’s really significant to bring all of these different aspects together, and that’s what Davis does.”
Students often come away from Fischer’s coffee classes looking at the world differently than is typically discussed in academia, he said.
“In the Western academic tradition, we divide the world into all these silos, right – biology and anthropology and economics and things like that,” he said. “Coffee is a way of showing that all the boundaries we set in the world are in fact arbitrary.”
Camilla Yuan, a UC Davis graduate and director of coffee and roasting at Camellia Coffee Roasters, a Sacramento coffee shop, visited the Coffee Center in Davis last week, she said.
“I think having a center and resources for people interested in specialty coffee or just the world of coffee in general is extremely fascinating and cold,” Yuan said. “I’m glad something like this is happening.”
