Most coffee drinkers use cream, milk or sugar to mask the bitterns of the popular morning booster, but one Seattle-based company claims it has engineered a type of “beanless, molecular coffee” that retains the full flavor of the real thing, but none of its characteristic bitterness.
Atomo is the brainchild of experienced food scientist Jarret Stopforth and entrepreneur Andy Kleitsch. They started out with the idea of optimizing coffee and spent four months in a garage-turned-brewing-lab running green beans, roasted beans and brewed coffee through gas and liquid chromatography in order to identify over 1,000 components in coffee, all the way to molecular level. After analyzing all the essential compounds that gave coffee its natural aroma and flavor, they were able to design their own version, which didn’t include the stuff that gives natural coffee its bitterness.
