Coffee College

University of California, Davis, is known as one of the preeminent schools for enology in the country. For nearly a decade, it’s applied a similar rigor to coffee. Currently, a new 6,000-square-foot coffee center is being built, with support from Peet’s Coffee and others.

- By Mark Pendergrast

It all began in 2012, when William Ristenpart discovered a great cup of coffee on a road trip to British Columbia. “I was gobsmacked by an amazing coffee I had from 49th Parallel Coffee. It had this amazing citric-orange aroma,” he recalls.

Ristenpart had majored in chemical engineering at U.C., Davis, then did research on suspended nano-particles at Princeton and Harvard. He ended up back at Davis teaching engineering, with a membership in the Food Science graduate group.

“Almost every food we eat has some kind of small particle physics at a micro scale, so this made sense,” Ristenpart says. “I had drunk a lot of coffee in grad school, but it wasn’t until I drank that coffee in British Columbia that I realized how great coffee could be.”

He began reading about coffee. In 2012, he was sipping coffee with fellow chemical engineering professor Tonya Kuhl, talking about how to improve their lab experiences. Kuhl asked, “Why don’t we have students take apart a drip-brewer to see how it works and how it might be improved?”