Coffee: the roasted bean behind toasty, nutty gourmand notes

Where does coffee come from?

Coffee is brewed from the roasted seeds of Coffea plants, mostly arabica and robusta, grown in more than 70 countries across the equatorial Americas, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent and Africa, says Wikipedia's article on coffee. After picking, the fruit flesh is removed by a dry or a wet process, and the green beans are sorted.

Roasting creates the aroma. It begins when the inside of the bean reaches about 200 °C: starches break down into sugars that caramelise, and caffeol, formed at around that temperature, is largely responsible for coffee's aroma and flavour. The French Wikipedia entry counts more than 800 volatile compounds in roasted coffee, among them furans, aldehydes and pyrazines.

What does coffee smell like?

Roasted coffee smells toasty and nutty. The IFRA Fragrance Ingredient Glossary describes roasted coffee absolute and CO2 extract as food-like, coffee and nutty, and coffee oil as gourmand, nutty and roasted. Several synthetic pyrazines in the glossary carry the coffee descriptor too.

What does coffee do in a perfume?

Coffee lends a roasted facet to gourmand accords, a category of dessert-like scents often built on vanilla and tonka bean, according to Wikipedia's perfume article. It sits next to cocoa, whose aroma is also born in the roaster. In the Middle East, coffee is traditionally flavoured with cardamom, a pairing you can smell in your own kitchen. Coffee belongs to the amber family.

What else should you know about coffee?

• IFRA standards prohibit furfuryl alcohol as a fragrance ingredient, but note that coffee extracts contain it only at trace levels that IFRA does not regard as a consumer safety concern.
• Supercritical CO2 extraction is one of the techniques covered in the Class on how fragrance is extracted.