Avaliação sensorial e química de café natural com inoculação e controle de secagem

Abstract

Brazil is the largest producer of Arabica coffee in the world and the specialty coffee market has also gained importance, on average these coffees are traded at a premium of 27.1%. To be considered special, coffee must express a high potential for aroma and flavor, in addition to an intrinsic quality, and this quality comes from the interaction between genotype, environment and processing. Thus, the objective of this work was to evaluate the quality of natural coffee beans with and without yeast inoculation with different fermentation times and the drying kinetics of two methods: continuous and intermittent drying. The drying method, after fermentation, affects the quality of the coffee beverage, and the quality of the fermented and dried coffee via intermittent drying was higher with the lower effective drying time. Fermentation combined with continuous drying intensifies negative attributes of the coffee beverage. The longer fermentation contributed to increase the contents of succinic and acetic acids, reducing the concentration of sugars and higher concentration of linolenic, behemic, stearic, arachidic and oleic acids. For natural coffee in continuous and intermittent drying, the mathematical models that best describe the experimental data of equilibrium water content were the two-term and modified Henderson & Pabis models.