In Class: Brew Master
At one time, José Andino
Martinez thought he didn’t really like coffee. “Then I found out how much better and cheaper coffee is when you make it yourself!” he says (Image by Fred Zwicky) I teach general chemistry and an introductory lab for chemists and chemical engineering majors. Last fall, I began teaching an eight-week course on chemistry and coffee that’s open to all students.
The students brew and roast coffee, and we use the lab—it’s the best place to do the roasting because of the ventilation.
There are hundreds of chemicals in coffee, including organic compounds that provide subtle flavors when you roast the beans to medium or light. Other organic compounds in coffee have health benefits, such as the antioxidant chlorogenic acid and caffeine, which helps people who have type 2 diabetes produce insulin.
Preserving these chemicals is ideal. But when you roast coffee beans too dark, what you get are a lot of oxidized molecules that are the product of burning coffee.
I’m from El Salvador and, like many other countries in Central America, its main export is coffee. In January, we took a group of nine students from my class to Panamá, which produces some of the best coffee in the world. It has soft and subtle flavors that are unique, supposedly because air from the Caribbean and the Pacific collides in the highlands
in a way that doesn’t happen in any other place.
Coffee is one of the top-traded commodities in the world. But a person picking coffee beans makes about five bucks a day. And we just go and buy a $5 cup of coffee here in the U.S.
I wanted the students to understand how they get their coffee every day. They talked to farmers and café owners and learned that harvesting is done daily, by hand, and that some coffee plants don’t become productive until five to eight years after planting. They also learned that rain patterns can completely kill a crop—meaning
a total loss for the farmers.
In my family, we all drank coffee, but mainly instant coffee mixed with milk. It wasn’t until graduate school that I began to drink it to stay awake.
A lot of people sell coffee that’s burnt, and I used to think, “I don’t really enjoy this, but I guess everyone drinks it.” Then I found out how much better and cheaper coffee is when you make it yourself!
Edited and condensed from an interview conducted on May 18, 2026
Illinois Alumni, Fall 2026
