Coffee Seed Oil

For this oil alone at 5 % superfat, with pure sodium hydroxide (NaOH) or pure potassium hydroxide (KOH); in brackets, across the published range of its saponification value. KOH is usually sold at 90 %: divide by 0.9. For a whole recipe, open the calculator.

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UNSAPONIFIABLE MATTER 8.09 +/- 0.39 % IS A DIRECT MEASUREMENT, not a quoted figure: Table 1 of Raba et al., PLoS ONE 10(9):e0138080 (2015), column GCO - crude green coffee oil, Soxhlet-extracted with petroleum ether from Arabica Typica beans grown at Guaxupe, Brazil. The same table and column give saponification value 185.86 +/- 3.1 mg KOH/g, iodine value 88.91 +/- 2.47 g I2/100 g, free fatty acids 1.91 % as oleic and peroxide value 3.20 meq O2/kg, all by standard oil-analysis methods. THIS IS WHY THE OIL BEHAVES ODDLY IN A RECIPE: about an twelfth of the mass is unsaponifiable - diterpene alcohols of the kaurene family (cafestol, kahweol, 16-O-methylcafestol) and their fatty esters, plus sterols, tocopherols and waxes - and unsaponifiable matter does not react with lye. The measured 185.86 sits about 5.5 % below the 196.7 mg KOH/g that the recorded fatty-acid profile implies by stoichiometry, and the unsaponifiable fraction accounts for that gap almost exactly. A calculator that ignores it and saponifies coffee oil as if it were pure triglyceride will leave the batch lye-heavy. Note also that whatever is not saponified stays in the bar as free oil, so coffee seed oil superfats harder than its usage rate suggests, and the diterpenes are heat- and light-sensitive. THE FATTY-ACID PROFILE comes from a different sample: Table 2 of Dong et al., Ultrasonics Sonochemistry 74:105578 (2021), Coffea arabica cv. Catimor 7963 grown in Yunnan, China, wet-processed, extracted four ways (ultrasonic/microwave-assisted, ultrasound-assisted, microwave-assisted, pressurised liquid). The min/max here span all four columns: myristic 0.25-0.29, palmitic 36.57-38.71, palmitoleic 0.22-0.26, stearic 6.70-7.11, oleic 8.54-9.94, linoleic 40.67-43.77, arachidic 2.77-2.90. Coffee oil is unusual in being roughly half saturated (SFA 46.7-48.9 %) and yet soft, because the saturated half is almost all palmitic and the unsaturated half is almost all linoleic - there is very little oleic. Recorded ranges sum to about 99.4 %; the paper also reports C15:0 0.10-0.12, C17:0 0.32-0.43 and C21:0 0.07-0.11, which have no key in this database, and it did not measure alpha-linolenic, behenic or lignoceric, which other coffee-lipid work reports at roughly 1-2 %, 0.6-0.9 % and 0.2-0.4 %. TWO DISAGREEMENTS WERE JUDGED. First: Dong et al. also print saponification values, but they range from 88.49 to 230.04 mg KOH/g across four extractions of the same beans, a spread no oil can have, so none of those figures is used and the Raba value stands alone. Second: reviews of coffee lipids describe the unsaponifiable fraction as much larger than 8 % - the composition table reproduced from Speer & Kolling-Speer in Molecules 30(14):2951 (2025) puts diterpene esters alone at 18.5 % of the lipid, with free diterpene alcohols 0.4 %, sterol esters 3.2 %, sterols 2.2 % and tocopherols 0.04-0.06 %, and the Foods 2024 review cites 12.8 g/100 g for a screw-pressed oil. Those are compositional accountings, not gravimetric unsaponifiable-matter determinations on one sample, and they include ester-bound diterpenes whose fatty-acid half does saponify. 8.09 % is recorded because it is the measured number, on a named sample, by the standard method; a soapmaker should treat 8 % as a floor and expect a pressed oil to be less predictable. Melting point not measured (liquid at room temperature). INCI name from CosIng.

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