Jeffrey Grossman has a lot of strong opinions about coffee. But the thing he hates most is when people microwave it.

“My dad nukes his coffee all day,’’ Grossman says. “And I’ve always told him, ‘You’ve gotta stop that crap.’ And he’s like, ‘No, no, I’ve gotta heat it.’’’

Naturally, Grossman set out to prove his dad wrong.

Inside a multimillion-dollar lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that Grossman — a professor of Materials Science and Engineering — built, he and his students used an electron microscope and an infrared spectrometer to research whether microwaving your coffee physically makes it worse. Their hypothesis held up.

“30 seconds and the chemistry doesn’t change,’’ says Grossman. “But 60 seconds? It’s totally different.’’

This February marks the second year of Grossman’s MIT class “Coffee Matters: Using the Breakerspace to Make the Perfect Cup.’’ In the semester-long course, Grossman and lab manager Justin Lavallee delve into the science of coffee. They teach students to roast and brew coffee beans, then use the Department of Materials Science and Engineering “Breakerspace’’ lab to uncover the physics and chemistry hidden within each cup.

Materials science is all about how materials work, why they succeed and fail, and how to engineer better materials. Coffee is far from Grossman’s specialty — his work focuses on developing materials for sustainable energy production — but he believes his coffee class is a perfect example of materials science in action. His students see coffee as a material that can be studied and engineered.

“That’s why it’s ‘Coffee Matters.’ It’s a matter,’’ says Grossman.

“But now, how do you engineer it? How do you understand it? How do you see it and then change it?’’ he asks me, a glint in his eye. “This is related to that space in there.’’

He points to a glass-walled room brimming with lab equipment: the Breakerspace.

Grossman created this lab to bring together students from many disciplines through materials science. While serving as the director of the Materials Science department, he raised money to build the Breakerspace. Although the lab was originally departmental, Grossman insisted on opening it to all majors.

“The role of understanding materials … is broader than just our department,’’ he says. “You need physics and biology and chemistry to understand materials and how to make them, and then all these other engineering disciplines to do the engineering.’’ He envisions the Breakerspace lab as somewhere students from all majors can “get excited about understanding materials.’’

This idea grew into “Coffee Matters,’’ which Grossman hopes will challenge students to think critically about materials they interact with every day. Ironically, he says getting the class’s espresso machine was more difficult than getting any of its high-tech lab equipment. The Breakerspace uses a cafe-style La Marzocco espresso machine, which generally sells for upward of $20,000. Initially, MIT’s administration thought it was far too expensive.

“This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to justify as a professor here, and I’ve been here 15 years,’’ Grossman tells me, gesturing at the machine. “When they thought it was just for a lounge, they were like, ‘Sorry, man, it’s 10 times too much.’ But when we told them we were going to use it for a class, they were all in.’’

Grossman begins showing me how to use the espresso machine. He removes one of the machine’s portafilters — detachable, handled baskets you fill with coffee grounds — and shows it to me. Grossman places the portafilter in a different machine that grinds and releases the perfect amount of coffee grounds. Then, he uses a small device to smooth out the grounds.

“This helps before you tamp it because if there are any little pockets, the water will find that path and go unevenly,’’ he says. “It’ll over-extract, and then it’ll under-extract in the rest.’’

When he’s done, Grossman places the portafilter in a tamper that packs down the ground coffee. Finally, he screws it back into the espresso machine and presses a button marked with a tiny cup. Out comes espresso!

We watch the coffee brew, which takes about 30 seconds. Grossman shows me a panel on the espresso machine where we can see the growing mass of the espresso shot and how long it’s been brewing. He tells me mass matters most when making good espresso.

“Everyone, including myself before I taught this class, thought, ‘It’s all time.’ But it’s not,’’ he says. “It’s mass within time that matters most. If you weigh the beans after you grind them, and then you weigh the espresso that comes out, that’s got to be a factor of two within 30 seconds.’’

The brewing process ends, and I remove and clean the portafilter. Then I pick up the espresso and take a sip. It’s delicious.

Grossman immediately starts on another shot, this time for Jonathan Wiggs, the Globe photographer who accompanied me to this interview. Wiggs’s shot is slightly too bitter for his taste, but Grossman has a quick fix. He hands Wiggs a bright orange box of baking soda and tells him to sprinkle a pinch in the cup. Wiggs does, and the bitterness evaporates.

It’s easy for coffee to come out either too acidic or too bitter, Grossman says. If coffee is under-extracted, it’ll be acidic; if it’s over-extracted, it’ll be bitter. But these are both easy problems to solve. Add salt to coffee, and it’ll cancel out the bitterness. Add baking soda, and it will cancel out the acidity. Grossman advises us to always bring baking soda when we visit Starbucks.

“They should have baking soda as one of the things they offer you when they give you your coffee,’’ he says.

Now that we have something to drink, Grossman takes us into the room containing the Breakerspace’s lab equipment. His students aren’t allowed to have coffee here, but he gives us special permission, and I sip my espresso as he shows us around.

Many of MIT’s open labs are called “Makerspaces’’: defined by the MIT website as places for students to “bring their ideas to physical life.’’ But Grossman wants the Breakerspace to be somewhere for students to understand existing materials, how they work, and why they go wrong. He envisions students taking broken items and using the lab’s equipment to figure out why they failed.

“It’s a Breakerspace instead of a Makerspace,’’ he says.

The Breakerspace’s state-of-the-art equipment includes an electron microscope, an infrared spectrometer, and an X-ray diffractometer. Many students cannot use tools like these until they reach the PhD level, but Grossman says the Breakerspace can train inexperienced students to use nearly all of its equipment in around 10 minutes per machine. At the end of “Coffee Matters,’’ students experiment with their coffee — the effects of microwaving it, how to extract the most caffeine — and use this equipment to assess their results.

Grossman shows us a row of three machines. They all use light to analyze materials: “This shines X-rays on it, this shines ultraviolet light on it, and this shines infrared light,’’ he says. He puts some ground coffee under the first machine: a Fourier transform infrared spectrometer, which uses infrared light to assess materials’ chemical composition. With the coffee grounds in place, the machine generates a spiky graph on a nearby monitor. It looks like an EKG’s output or a seismograph’s trail.

“There are peaks here that are associated with the caffeine molecule. So you can see when those peaks go up or down as a function of, say, roasting or grinding,’’ says Grossman. The machine takes less than a minute to use, which he says allows students to “really quickly iterate on their ideas.’’

Next, Grossman uses an optical microscope to compare the quality of two hand-powered coffee grinders. The first is a Comadante C40, a top-of-the-line German hand grinder that sells for between $260 and $360. The second is a 1Zpresso hand grinder, a more mid-range grinder that is about $130. Magnified a thousandfold, I can see the cheaper grinder is covered in chips and scratches, while the more expensive grinder has smooth, shiny blades.

Finally, Grossman leads us to the lab’s electron microscope. He shows a black-and-white image filled with blotchy craters — a coffee bean magnified to the molecular level. He points at the little craters on the screen. Before a coffee bean is roasted, these craters are filled with chemicals like caffeine. As the coffee roasts, these pockets hollow out, and the chemicals inside them splatter across the edges of each cavity. Then, brewing the coffee flushes these chemicals out and into your cup.

Like a proud parent, Grossman tells us his students’ coffee research continues a century-old tradition at MIT. In the 1920s, during the height of prohibition, people began to turn their attention to coffee as the next thing to get rid of. So, coffee companies gave MIT professor Samuel Cate Prescott a large grant to study the science behind how coffee is made and whether caffeine is safe. He was the first MIT scientist to research coffee and began a long tradition of food science at MIT.

Prescott published his final report in 1924, almost exactly a century ago. (Grossman is quick to tell me that it proved coffee was safe.) But after Prescott’s report, MIT pivoted away from coffee — at least, until Grossman came along.

“I tell students on the first day, ‘Guys, it’s been 100 years,’’’ says Grossman. “It’s time to get back to coffee.’’

Adelaide Parker can be reached at adelaide.parker@globe.com. Follow her on X @adelaide_prkr.