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STORY: At the University of California’s Davis campus, students are serious about their coffee.

The academic research facility here boasts that it's the first in the United States dedicated to the bean.

“I first started with the coffee kinetics project, so we did stuff about the roast of the coffee beans…”

Students like Kylie Umeda roast, brew, sample and scrutinize their cup of joe as credit toward their chemical engineering degrees.

The 7,000-square-foot facility recently opened officially after a $6 million renovation.

Among its features is a tasting room with red lights, which Umeda says is to discourage bias when sampling.

“When people are looking at the samples, they are not able to determine the difference in color between the different samples that they're trying." // "When people taste the coffee we like to determine if the sensory notes in it — so if it's like a little sour, if it's a little earthy, if it tastes like a little burnt, and we use that to determine the flavor profile of the coffee beans and then that could be tied to the roast profile when we were making the beans.”

Chemical engineering professor and director William Ristenpart said coffee is understudied in academic spaces.

“Given how important coffee is to our culture, to our economy, our society — coffee needs academic study. It needs an academic pipeline.”

He added that professors of food science, plant science and agronomy, business, law, religious studies and sociology lend their expertise to ongoing work at the center.

RISTENPART: "We want to help elevate the world of coffee."