I’m mostly a purist when it comes to coffee. There are times when I’ll add cream and sugar to make “cream of coffee soup”, but it’s rare. The goal there isn’t so much to enjoy the coffee so much as it is to enjoy something sweet and creamy with some coffee flavor. The rest of the time, almost always, I’ll go for a nice hot cup of black coffee. There’s something comforting about coffee for me. When I’m stressed and everything in the world has gone to hell in a handbasket, a quiet moment with a cup of hot, black coffee really improves my mood.
Over the last year or so, I’ve seen various articles about how adding salt to coffee improves the flavor. Alton Brown says it removes the bitterness and stale flavor that might come from the water tank. I like the scientific approach Alton Brown takes with food and the idea of adding just a pinch of salt to my coffee doesn’t sound horrible. It still maintains the purity of the prototypical “cup of hot, black coffee”. This morning, I thought I’d give it a try. Instead of just adding the salt to the grounds before brewing and possibly ruining an entire pot of coffee, I just added a pinch in a mug and added my regular, unsalted coffee.
It’s just a tiny bit. Alton says to add a quarter of a teaspoon to six tablespoons of grounds, so this is maybe just a little more than would be present in my coffee if I used that method. For comparison, I also poured myself a plain mug at the same time to use as a control.
I first inspected the control mug. The coffee was hot, decidedly black, and smelled like my regular coffee. I tasted it to make sure there was nothing weird about it that would interfere with the comparison. It was a normal mug of coffee. The salted coffee was equally hot, and there was no noticeable difference in the color or smell of the coffee. Had I been clever, I would have figured out some way to do a blind taste test to eliminate any conscious bias I might have. Sadly, I’m not that clever.
For my first taste of the salted coffee, I didn’t really notice any difference. It seemed identical to my regular coffee. I tried several more sips and really tried to notice any differences, but there really weren’t any. It just seemed like a normal cup of coffee. I continued the test by alternately taking sips from the salted and control mugs. With repeated tasting and careful comparison, I started to notice a little difference between the two. The salted coffee did taste just a little more mellow than the control, but it also seemed to have a slightly acidic aftertaste. I might have just been imagining the difference though. The initial bitter bite of the coffee might have been dulled a bit by the salt, but the change was really subtle and possibly all in my head.
After drinking about half of each of the mugs, I decided to try increasing the salt. I added another pinch approximately equal to the amount I started with, but because it was only half of the original volume of coffee it greatly increased the concentration of the salt. The difference in taste was very apparent. I could definitely taste the salt, so I probably overdid it. I believe Alton Brown’s goal was to not add so much salt that you could really taste it. The coffee flavor was much more mellow. The initial bitter bite was mostly non-existent, and the coffee tasted richer. The control coffee seemed brighter and more refreshing while the salted coffee seemed more earthy. The acidic aftertaste of the salted coffee was much more pronounced. With repeated alternating sips of the two, I found that I looked forward to the cleaner and brighter taste of the regular coffee after tasting the salted coffee.
Which one was better? I can’t really say. They were both good. While there are coffees that I like more than others, there are very few that I thought were bad enough that I wouldn’t drink or even enjoy them. I think adding the extra salt helped me understand how the flavor changes, but I would advise against using that much. I feel that the salt fights with the coffee flavor a bit and creates a somewhat unpleasant acidic aftertaste. I don’t think that would be a problem with the small amount that Alton Brown recommends. The water where I live is really good, and I’m pretty careful about keeping my coffee maker clean. I don’t really get the stale water tank flavor, so the salt doesn’t really matter there. Going forward, I don’t think adding salt to my coffee will become a habit. At the lower concentration, the salt didn’t really make much of a difference for me. At the higher concentrations, it was too much. I don’t want to taste salt in my coffee. If I encounter coffee in the future that seems overly harsh, I might try to mellow it by adding a little salt. Otherwise, it’ll be the normal cup of hot black coffee for me.
