Brewing Coffee: Extending STEM Across the SJSU Campus

Story by Derrick Meyer

Walking into Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering Liat Rosenfeld's class in the engineering building at San José State University, the aroma of fresh coffee hit me before I even saw the lab equipment. Students surrounding hot plates, timers ticking, beakers steaming - it looked more like a café run by scientists than a laboratory classroom. Which begs the question: Why coffee?

Rosenfeld grinned. "We wanted to introduce engineering principles to non-engineering majors in a way that's fun and tangible. And coffee? Everyone drinks it. It's the perfect entry point."

She wasn't exaggerating. This new course - designed for non-STEM students - uses coffee brewing as a hands-on way to explore core scientific concepts like mass, density, chemical reactions, pH and even process design. It's not just fulfilling a chemistry GE, either. This class checks multiple General Education science boxes, including physical science, giving students an engaging alternative to traditional science lectures.

And they're loving it. Out of 108 students enrolled this semester, only 18 students are majoring in engineering. The rest come from across campus - music, art, psychology, business, and social work. What unites them? A curiosity about how something as seemingly ordinary as coffee can reveal the principles behind engineering and chemistry.

"The idea is to teach quantitative thinking," Rosenfeld says. "They're scaling recipes, analyzing extraction times, calculating how much water gets absorbed into the grounds - all the while learning the fundamentals of experimentation, data collection, and analysis."

Digging deeper, it became clear that this was not a solo effort. Anand Ramasubramanian, Chair of the Chemical and Materials Engineering Department, explained how the course came to life.

"The inspiration had been brewing for a while," he says. "Back when I lived in San Antonio, I was introduced to specialty coffee. I always saw the connection to chemical engineering, but it was Liat who really pushed to make it happen here."

After connecting with faculty at UC Davis - who've run a wildly successful version of the course for over a decade - Rosenfeld and Ramasubramanian worked with SJSU's updated GE curriculum to create something interdisciplinary, hands-on and scalable. They credit the support of Dean Sheryl Ehrman, Associate Dean Nicole Okamoto, Facilities Manager Neil Peters and others in the College of Engineering who helped secure the space, funding and enthusiasm to launch the lab.

Students aren't just brewing for fun. They're tasting and evaluating different brew ratios, experimenting with grind size and extraction time and learning to scale small-batch recipes into larger processes - all while thinking like process engineers.

And yes, they're loving it. "We had Voyager Craft Coffee come in and teach a tasting workshop," Rosenfeld says. "The students were all in. Some said they'd never thought about coffee this way before."

Even faculty drop by to see what's brewing - and to grab a cup. As for the future, plans are already underway to expand the class to 180 students next semester and to offer summer workshops for high schoolers, community college students and even local companies.

This class doesn't just teach students about coffee. It teaches them how to think like engineers - one brew at a time.