Exploratory and discriminative studies of commercial processed Brazilian coffees with different degrees of roasting and decaffeinated

Abstract

The fingerprints of the volatile compounds of 21 commercial Brazilian coffee samples submitted to different industrial processing i.e. decaffeinated or different roasting degrees (traditional and dark) were studied. The volatiles were collected by headspace solid phase microextraction (HS-SPME) and analyzed by GC-FID and GC-MS. The chromatographic data matrices (fingerprints) obtained were explored by the principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least squares – discriminative analysis (PLS-DA). Initially the chromatographic profiles were aligned by the algorithm correlation optimized warping (COW). The PCA showed the discrimination of the decaffeinated coffees from the others with both the SPME fibres used. This separation probably occurred due to the loss of some volatile precursors during the decaffeination process, such as sucrose. For both the fibres tested, PDMS/DVB and CX / PDMS SPME, the PLS-DA models correctly classified 100% of the samples according to their roasting degree: (medium and dark), the main differences being the concentrations of some of the volatile compounds such as 2-methyl furan, 2-methylbutanal, 2,3-pentanedione, pyrazine, 2-carboxyaldehyde pyrrole, furfural and 2-furanmethanol.