Christopher Hendon — Performing a good experiment

All Barista Camp 'coffeetalks' - by speakers such as Scott Rao, Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood and Rina Paguaga - were recorded by our media partner European Coffee Trip. We'll be releasing the videos of these talks over the next months so we keep fuelling discussion and building an inventory of knowledge. Don't hesitate to add your comments here, or on our Youtube channel.

Chemist Christopher Hendon is the final instalment in our series of talks from Barista Camp 2015. Chris has been adopted by the industry due to his connections with 3-time UK Barista Champ and SCAE UK National Coordinator, Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood. Chris and Maxwell became acquainted when then Bath resident Chris became a frequent customer of Colonna and Small's. It wasn’t long before Hendon opened up to CD about his chemistry background and his PHD in Computational Chemistry and for them to forge a partnership which has been going strong for 3 years.

Hendon is no stranger to coffee as he spent his formative years in Australia after leaving his birthplace of Colorado. He now resides at proclaimed no.1 university in the world, MIT in Boston, where he is a scholar and theoretical chemist. "Water For Coffee" is the title of Hendon's and Maxwell’s well-received textbook which fills a gap in the industry for water research.

In his talk, Chris introduces us to the act of performing a good experiment with four clearly recommended steps. Highlighting potential failures along the way and using the audience to demonstrate how to conduct a basic statistical experiment, the viewer can feel confident that Hendon's science background is serving us well. Closing his talk with the proclamation that he has no vested interest in the 'business' of coffee and is motivated by wanting everyone to ‘make better coffee’, we hope he sticks around!

As always, make sure to scroll down to the links below, for further reading and watching, and don't hesitate to share more!

Christopher Hendon — Performing a good experiment

Further Reading