Reddit reviews Coffee Flavor Chemistry

The actual dissolved stuff should probably be treated from the suspended stuff. Any oil, presuming you haven't used a paper filter which would trap most of them, is suspended and over time can usually be seen to separate out. In some methods there are some suspended fragments of coffee too.

As for the dissolved stuff - there are the compounds that make up the flavour, there's quite a long list here from many different groups - aldehydes, esters, terpines etc etc. For an exhaustive and extremely dull look through each of these discovered so far there is this book. Before you rush out to buy this incredibly expensive tome, be aware that it is basically just a long list of compounds, with drawings and information about when they were identified in coffee. It does say what they taste/smell like but this book has no practical value if you're trying to make better coffee or understand why coffee tastes like it does.

The colour of the coffee comes mostly from the melanoidins I think - they're a byproduct of the roasting process and proteins reacting and degrading. They're also the reason that coffee foams because they act as surfactants.

I'm sure there is probably some medium and long chain carbohydrates in there, there is very little short chain, simple sugar after roasting as most gets used up in Maillard, Strecker and Caramelisation reactions.

There's other stuff too but all my textbooks are at work and it is a Sunday.

It's been done.

Even absent all oxygen, those compounds degrade over time, just like hop oils do.