Online direct sampling system coupled to gas chromatography

for chemical profiling of coffee roasting volatiles

Ademrio Iris da Silva 1
Junior ; Fbio Junior Moreira 2
Novaes ; Chadin 3
Kulsing ; Yada 3
Nolvachai ; Philip John Marriott 3

(1) Instituto Federal do Rio de Janeiro; (2) Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro; (3) Monash University;
ademario.junior@ifrj.edu.br
INTRODUCTION
SOLID PHASE EXTRACTION APPROACH
Coffee is the 2nd commodity in the world, but coffee without roasting is 42.5
not the coffee as we know it. The best produced coffee is levelled and 50 More volatile
falls flat with bad roasting and consistent roasting is important for coffee release around 3-

Normalized Values
40 6 min ??
cupping or tasting consistency. 14.5
21.4 21.6

Coffee roasting entails an endothermic phase at first and an exothermic 30

step later. Chemical reactions inside the beans are extremely complex. 20
Routinely used indicators of roasting evolution Temperature and Color Total Semi-VOC
Heavy & Polar (HP)
are only indirectly related to this evolution. On the other hand, the 10
Heavy & Nonpolar (HN)
evolution of organic volatiles are directly related to process evolution. 0 Light & Polar (LP)

Organic volatiles can be measured with trapping systems, but usual 0-3 min
3-6 min
Light & Nonpolar (LN)

trapping devices using solid phase extraction, for example, can show bias 6-9 min
9-12 min
related to more affinity to certain classes of compounds. Direct Roasting Sampling to Gas Chromatography
There were several attempts to monitor coffee roasting directly, for
example: Near infrared of the bean wall (Santos et al., 2016), Acoustic of
the cracking system (Wilson, 2014), Electronic nose (Radi et al., 2016),
and Direct Mass Spectrometry the most successful (Dorfner et al., 2004
and Hertz-Schnemann et al., 2013).
Direct mass spectrometry objectively measures organic volatiles and
helped develop an online control of the roasting process. However, this
strategy entailed high costs and a lack of separation and identification
power the soft ionization was restricted to low-mass substances.
The direct measurement of organic volatiles developed in this work
aimed at avoid the bias (e.g. in solid phase extraction) of trapping
systems, lower the cost of studying roasting processes, improve the
separation and identification power of the whole set of volatiles and
improve the knowledge on roasting process.
METODOLOGY
100 g of green coffee beans (Coffea arabica L). 12 min of roasting at 230
C to develop the characteristic conditions associated with light roast.
Commercial benchtop air stream coffee bean roaster from Gene Caf
(model CBR-101, Gyeonggi - Do, Korea). Vacuum pump drew the
exhaust roasting gases at 5 L min-1 through the sampling system. 10-way
valve at 250 C and inlet at 300 C in splitless mode.
The chromatographic run starts with the roasting. Valve acquisition starts
at each pre-determined time. 3 s for each loop sampling, 10 loop
injections (total of 30 s for each roasting injection). GC oven at 30 C until
2.5 min after pre-determined roasting injection time, then at 10 C min-1
until 300 C that stays for 10 min. Column DB-17ht (10 m x 0.25 mm I.D.
x 0.1 m film thickness; SGE) coupled to FID at 300 C, H2 at 30 mL
min-1 and air at 300 mL min-1. Coffee bean mass loss was 13.8% w/w.
CONCLUSION
The coupling of direct roasting gas extraction to gas chromatrography is a
promising and low cost technique to monitor coffee roasting evolution
without the bias of other extraction systems, achieve higher separation
power and improve the understanding of this complex chemical process.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Monash Workshop facility, Bennetts Coffees, Anne Cooper (Equilibrium
Master Roasters), Bruno de Sousa (Academia do Caf).
REFERENCES
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