Boing Boing » Coffee

HOWTO spot a counterfeit Aeropress

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 19:33:45 +0000

Adam P sez, "I first found out about the Aeropress on Boing Boing and it has dramatically improved my quality of life as an expat here in China. When purchasing another one online for a colleague, I was well titillated by the shop's 28 point photo guide to the differences between a real and fake Aeropress."

官方金牌授权美国原装爱乐压Aeropress 便携咖啡压滤器包顺丰-淘宝网 (Thanks, Adam!)

Short video about latte portrait artist

David Pescovitz — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 16:42:17 +0000

NYC barista Mike Breach paints milk portraits in lattes.

HOWTO hotel-room upside-down cold-brew coffee

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 14:52:51 +0000

Kent sez, "Here's a travel hack that came to me all at once in a flash at SxSW this year: how to make cold-brewed coffee out of the horrible filter pack and inadequate equipment you often find in hotels in the USA."

Carefully unwrap (don't tear!) one or two of those premeasured filter-packs that came with your coffee service and stuff it gently into the cup. Ideally you want four parts water to one part coffee, but this is tough to estimate with filter packs.
Fill the remaining space in the cup all the way up with water. Tap water works; filtered or bottled is better. Try not to leave any air bubbles.
Don't worry if it seems it will result in a tiny amount of coffee; it will be concentrated, intensely flavored, and—assuming you're not stuck with decaf—highly caffeinated.

Kent's method is clever and upside-down-y, but I still like my method, which involves using your own coffee and a disposable plastic breast-milk bag.

Cold-Brewed Coffee In Your Hotel Room

"Most expensive" Starbucks order ever

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 18:51:53 +0000

Beau Chevassus resolved to order the most expensive coffee drink in the world, so he went to Starbucks and ordered a 48-shot Frappuccino with every single revolting additive, had it blended and drank at least one slurp of it. Total cost was $47.30. I believe that Mr Chevassus could probably have spent more had he visited a Starbucks in Dubai or Moscow, and possibly have availed himself of even more revolting adulterations courtesy of the local variations available in different regions (caviar?).

The Quadriginoctuple Frap. Previous record: $23.60. I used a 52 oz bucke--I mean mug. (it really is a legit mug). The drink had 48 shots. Filmed in Washington State, home of Starbucks.

($47.30) World's Most Expensive Starbucks Drink - "Quadriginoctuple Frap"

How much caffeine is too much caffeine?

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 17:12:59 +0000

To overdose on caffeine, you'd probably have to drink around 75 8oz cups of brewed coffee over the course of just a few hours. The effects vary from person to person, but that's a good estimate for a toxic dose. On the other hand, it doesn't take much caffeine at all to start experiencing negative side-effects, like heart palpitations or mood swings. A review of 200 studies suggests that a safe dose for an adult is only about 3 8oz cups.

How to Aeropress like a champ

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 23:17:12 +0000

The winning recipes from the 2012 Aeropress championships give me the fear. Clearly I have not been paying enough attention to this.

17 grams of coffee (light roasted fresh crop washed Sidamo from Heart roasters)
fine filter grind on a Mahlkönig Tanzania
paper filter rinsed with hot water
water from Maridalsvannet (brought in glass bottles from my flat in Oslo, Norway)
inverted brewing method
preheat aeropress for 10 sec
96 Celcius pour temp (gives ca 90 C actual brew temp)
260 grams of water
no stiring
50 sec steep time
20 sec press time – slow enough to get a clean brew but also some fines (yuck) and oils (yum)
stop pressing before air comes out
wait for the fines to sink and temp to cool, then pour but hold back the last part with the fines (taste sample for yourself!)
The cup: a clean brew with floral notes and taste of sweet lemons.

Aeropress remains my all time favorite cup of joe, and my go-to method when I'm on the road.

Recipes

Breville variable-temperature kettle

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 14:47:10 +0000

After I converted my parents from drinking filter coffee to making their morning brew with an Aeropress (something I do with missionary zeal wherever I go), the next step was to replace their antiquated electric kettle with something smarter. Living in the UK has accustomed me to the wonder of electric kettles (240V AC FTW!) but even in Canada, where my folks live, the weedy 110V mains can still produce a decent boil in reasonable time.

I shopped around a lot, and hit on the Breville BKE820XL Variable-Temperature 1.8-Liter Kettle, based both the online reviews and the feature-set, which allows you to set a specific temperature and tell the kettle to keep it there, much like the ubiquitous water-heaters you find in Asian hotels.

It's been more than a year, and the Breville is a winner. The lowest setting ("Green tea") heats water to perfect Aeropress temperature, and the thermostat makes the kettle perfect for making multiple cups (when I stay at my folks' place, my nickname is "coffee slave" and I often make three or four cups in a row). The additional temperatures are great for oatmeal, hot water bottles, black tea, etc.

I'm presently on a family holiday at a winter resort in Ontario with my folks and my brother and his family, and we brought the Breville, Aeropress, a small grinder, and some very nice beans (thank you, Sam James Coffee!) along, and as I marvelled anew at the kettle's usefulness and quiet design flourishes (in addition to being rather handsome, it has lots of grace-notes, like a pull-ring integrated into the AC plug to make it easy to unplug without stressing the cord), my mom said, "Why don't you blog it?"

So there you are. Happy, Mom?

Breville BKE820XL Variable-Temperature 1.8-Liter Kettle

Beautiful art from used glasses of Scotch (Plus some nifty fluid mechanics)

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 20:55:54 +0000

After you drink some Scotch, there's usually a thin film of the liquor left clinging to the bottom and sides of the glass. If you leave it out overnight, it'll dry and be a pain to wash off in the morning. But the same dried booze leavings can also be the beginnings of some really lovely art.

Ernie Button takes photos of the waving, swirling patterns left behind on Scotch glasses. This one — part of a series called Vanishing Spirits — is a picture of glass that once held a nice measure of Balvenie.

The idea for this project occurred while putting a used Scotch glass into the dishwasher. I noted a film on the bottom of a glass and when I inspected closer, I noted these fine, lacey lines filling the bottom. What I found through some experimentation is that these patterns and images that can be seen are created with the small amount of Single-Malt Scotch left in a glass after most of it has been consumed. It only takes a very thin layer of Scotch to create; the alcohol dries and leaves the sediment in various patterns. It’s a little like snowflakes in that every time the Scotch dries, the glass yields different patterns and results. I have used different colored lights to add 'life' to the bottom of the glass, creating the illusion of landscape, terrestrial or extraterrestrial.

Interestingly, there was a recent article that was published in the Journal of Nature (I think) by Dr. Peter Yunker on the Suppression of the Coffee-Ring Effect by Shape-Dependent Capillary Interactions i.e. how are coffee rings made. I contacted him to see if he could see any obvious connection between the two liquids and the rings / patterns they create. He got back to me and unfortunately could not explain what was happening with the Scotch.

That paper Button mentioned was published in 2011. It explores the physics of particles suspended in liquid — not just coffee, but lots of things. Turns out, if you put a drop of liquid on a solid surface, it will tend to dry in a circular shape. As it dries, anything suspended in the liquid will migrate to the outside of the circle. If you put a drop of coffee on a table and leave it to dry, what you'll get is a round spot ringed by a narrow band of dark coffee gunk.

Why does the gunk form a ring, instead of evenly covering the whole circle? Yunker's research showed that it has to do with the shape of the particles that make up the gunk.

In this video, you can see those microscopic particles and how they behave.

The video is divided into five parts.

In the first, you can watch a "coffee ring" form, as spherical particles move toward the outside edge of a drop of liquid and stick there.

In the second part, ellipse-shaped particles form little blobs throughout a drop of liquid. Some of them migrate to the edge, but not all. Not even most. If this were a drop of coffee on a table, you'd get a solidly brown round spot — no coffee ring.

The third part of the video gives you a closer look at the edge of a drop of liquid filled with ellipse-shaped particles. You can see the particles clump together and move away from the edge.

The fourth part is the close-up of spherical particles as they rapidly pile up on the edge of the drop, forming a ring.

In the final part, Yunker's team shows that it's possible to get the ellipsoid particles to form a ring at the edge of the drop. The key: Using a surfactant to decrease the surface tension between the particles and the liquid. Spherical particles move right to the outside edge because the attraction between particles is weak (relative to the elliptical particles). As liquid moves to the outside edge, it just pushes the spheres along with it. Normally, the elliptical particles are attracted to one another strongly enough that they don't get swept along with the current, so to speak. But the surfactant reduces that attraction and, like the spheres, they go slip sliding away.

Button is right that this particular paper doesn't offer much of an explanation for the shapes he sees in his Scotch glasses. They aren't all as circular as the the picture at the top of this post. Some look more like undulating hills and valleys, rather than coffee rings.

This paper of Yunker's certainly suggests that there's some interesting fluid mechanics at work here, though. I'm going to look into it and will report back on what I find.

Read Peter Yunker's full paper on the "coffee ring" effect

Check out Ernie Button's full series of Scotch glass photos, called Vanishing Spirits.

English town wins its war against chain coffee

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 20:42:13 +0000

Totnes, the English town with no chain coffee shops, has won its fight to keep Costa Coffee out of town. Although Costa was given approval to open its shop, they have voluntarily agreed not to: "Chris Rogers, managing director of Costa, said the company had 'recognised the strength of feeling' against national brands in the town."

La Colombe Cold Brew: jet fuel in a beer bottle

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 14:00:15 +0000

My hosts at last night's signing at Philadelphia's Indy Hall co-working space did a lot to make me welcome, but most of all, they supplied me with rocket-fuel. The fuel took the form of a bottle of La Colombe Pure Black Cold Brew, a deceptively smooth, dark, chocolately cold-brew coffee that comes in a 12oz beer bottle. Deceptively smooth because this stuff is, as noted, pure rocket-fuel. They gave me a bottle for the road that I cracked in my hotel room this morning before heading to DC, and it practically had me plastered to the ceiling, despite its mellow flavor, and in a very good way.

I drink a lot of cold-brew on the road (I use the radical hotel-room coffee independence method to make cold-brew in breast-milk bags that I put in the minibar fridge overnight) but La Colombe was a cut above even the excellent stuff I make myself.

Pure Black Cold Brew

Crowdfunding a 10-year-old's cup design for her grandad, who's got Parkinson's; and her dad, who is a klutz

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 16:02:37 +0000

Lily is a ten year old girl who's into pottery. Her grandpa has Parkinson's disease and is prone to spilling his coffee due to his tremors, and so she invented the "Kangaroo Cup," a stackable, reusable cup that is hard to knock over or spill from (she modified it for her dad's use, so that he wouldn't spill coffee in his keyboard anymore, too). It's got a inward-curving lip to make it less spill-prone when you carry it, and its legs make it super-stable (you also don't need a coaster for it).

Lily's dad is a product designer who's brought other products to market successfully, so he and his daughter are raising funds on IndieGoGo for bulk manufacture (in JingDeZhen, China) and sale.

We are launching this project to fund our first production run of 1000 pieces. The samples pictured here and in the video are 1st production samples made at the same facility that will do the production run. The facility we've selected for this first run is not a mass production, low cost factory, but a high quality porcelain producer that generally makes decorative vases and tea pots and such. They make the kind of ceramics that JingDeZhen is famous for: "white as jade, bright as a mirror, and harmonic as a bell." In addition, because they are high temperature fired, they are stronger and less porous that standard ceramics. This makes them more hygienic, easier to clean and harder to stain.
We chose JingDeZhen for our source because of the high quality and the ability of the artisans there to help us work through our initial production issues. If the project is successful, we will likely need to move to more conventional manufacturing sources to reduce cost, but today, JingDeZhen China provides a nice reward for our early supporters.

No Spill Kangaroo Cup (Thanks, Alex!)

PSY foam-art

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 22:31:18 +0000

Redditor DivineBaboon posted an unattributed photo of an espresso drink with a beautiful PSY (of Gangnam Style fame) portrait in the foam.

My friend ordered a cappuccino and this is what he got.. (i.imgur.com)

Mug appears to be stuck in table

David Pescovitz — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 18:32:04 +0000

The Treasure Mug is a delightful illusion cup available directly from Japan via Plywood or Amazon JP. (via Spoon & Tamago)

English seaside town with no chain coffee shops fights off Costa Coffee incursion

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 12:36:38 +0000

The Guardian's John Harris looks at the battle taking place in the Devon town of Totnes, a kind of counterculture/hippie haven on the "English Riviera," where residents are furious at the plan to open an outlet of the Costa Coffee chain. Harris paints a picture of Totnes as the kind of place that would be pretty nice to live in: they issue their own currency that only works with local businesses, have a record store that puts the best music shops in Manhattan to shame, and have dozens of nice coffee shops where skilled baristas ply their trade -- like Portland, OR crossed with an English seaside village.

For Harris (and the Totnes residents with whom he speaks), the fight to keep Costa out of town is a microcosm for the fight against global capitalism, and the triumph of profits and shareholder value over local community and mutual aid.

Totnes's local economy looks to be in reasonable health, which is surely down to the fact that it is about as far from being what we now call a "clone town" as could be imagined. The local record shop, Drift, is mind-bogglingly great: the kind of place that you'd think was amazing if you found it in New York. The quality and diversity of restaurants is amazing. Most pertinently, the town has 42 independently run outlets that serve coffee, and – so far – not a single branch of any of the big caffeine-selling multiples.
Now, though, Costa – whose most visible slogan remains "Saving the world from mediocre coffee" – is on its way, as part of programme of expansion that will look either worryingly aggressive or admirably ambitious, depending on your point of view. Certainly, it seems to be bucking the prevailing trend of our flatlining economy, opening scores of new outlets while independent coffee shops are truly feeling the pinch.
A fully owned subsidiary of the food and hospitality conglomerate Whitbread, it currently operates 1,400 British outlets, and recently announced plans for 350 more. Thanks also to a snowballing presence in petrol stations, pubs and motorway services, its logo is becoming inescapable, which is exactly the point: the chief executive, Andy Harrison, has talked about increasing the number of branches to 2,000, and thus making them ubiquitous. "People really don't want to walk very far for a coffee," he has said. "We can have them a couple of hundred yards apart on a really busy high street, then another at a retail park and another at the station."

Totnes: the town that declared war on global capitalism

Coffee ad from the 1650s

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 08:50:12 +0000

This handbill -- which can be seen in the British Museum -- dates back to the 1650s, and was produced by the first coffee shop in London, in St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill.

It is a simple innocent thing, composed into a drink, by being dryed in an Oven, and ground to Powder, and boiled up with Spring water, and about half a pint of it to be drunk, fasting an hour before and not Eating an hour after, and to be taken as hot as possibly can be endured; the which will never fetch the skin off the mouth, or raise any Blisters, by reason of that Heat.
The Turks drink at meals and other times, is usually Water, and their Dyet consists much of Fruit, the Crudities whereof are very much corrected by this Drink.
The quality of this Drink is cold and Dry; and though it be a Dryer, yet it neither heats, nor inflames more than hot Posset.
It forcloseth the Orifice of the Stomack, and fortifies the heat with- [missing text] its very good to help digestion, and therefore of great use to be [missing text] bout 3 or 4 a Clock afternoon, as well as in the morning.

The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink.

3D printed rocket-ship espresso cup

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 16:00:20 +0000

Shapeways contributor Isohedral came up with this awesome design for a two ounce stubby rocketship/espresso cup, which is available as a 3D print in ceramic:

Rocket Espresso Cup 3D Printed in Ceramics All Systems Are Go!!!!

How to make Vietnamese coffee (video)

Mark Frauenfelder — Wed, 23 May 2012 17:11:01 +0000

[Video Link] My friend Andrea James sent me this video. She said, " I thought it was nicely shot, and I like the music!" I agree. The song is called "Ding Ding Dong," and it is by Waipod Phetsuphan (Thailad). It's on a compilation album called "The Sound of Siam: Leftfield Luk Thung, Jazz & Molam from Thailand 1964 -1975."

Coffee associated with the opposite of death, according to new scientific study

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 18 May 2012 00:19:45 +0000

"Sexy girl in coffee beans," by Marcel Jancovic, via Shutterstock.

A large prospective study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that "coffee consumption was inversely associated with total and cause-specific mortality."

In other words, data showed that there is a connection between drinking coffee and not necessarily dying. Sort of.

"Whether this was a causal or associational finding cannot be determined from our data," the summary concludes.

Boing Boing science editor Maggie Koerth-Baker is on the road today, so I can't enlist her science-fu in interpreting the details of this study. But I think what they're trying to tell us is that while drinking coffee does not necessarily cause you to live longer, it is associated with the opposite of dying sooner. I'm going to have a cup while you all argue it out in the comments.

Thermos-Nissan 61-oz Insulated Bottle

Cool Tools — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 20:59:46 +0000

Three times a week I get up early to go lift weights with a colleague. One of the main motivations for getting out of bed is the knowledge that I'll have ample coffee throughout the day to keep me going post-workout. In the past I've carried the previously reviewed Contigo (which is still the best travel cup around) but found it held too little, especially if I share coffee with my work out partner. I've also used my fiancee's grandfather's old Thermos built around an insulated glass bottle which, while larger, is too fragile for daily use that involves rolling around in the trunk of my car. I realized I needed a replacement. Luckily, in the modern world of insulating containers there is a clear king: Thermos-Nissan. Their stainless steel high-vacuum thermoses are renowned for their ability to keep beverages hot or cold for days at a time (previously reviewed here and here), and the 61 oz stainless-steel bottle is no different. While holding an enormous volume (seriously, this thing is huge) it provides unparalleled insulation and usability. Embarassingly, on several occasions I have made coffee and forgotten it on the counter only to find it piping hot a full 24-hours later. In terms of use, pouring a thermos can be a drippy affair (especially those with larger volumes), but the foldable handle built in to the 61-oz model coupled with the flow controlling lid makes it easy. And while I was initially wary of any coffee container that needed a shoulder strap, after putting it through months of use I have found it incredibly handy for when I'm carrying anything else. Be warned, though, as people will struggle to understand why you're carrying something that looks like a cross between a battering ram and a missile launcher (someone else mentioned that it looked like it should carry radioactive material). A thermos is a weird thing to geek out about, but in this case the praise is well deserved. Between the heating and cooling curves provided in the literature that I've personally verified, to the lifetime warranty and solid stainless steel build, this is one hell of an insulating bottle. --Oliver Hulland Thermos Nissan 61-oz Stainless Steel Insulating Bottle $28 Manufactured by Thermos Nissan Know of a better tool, or need a recommendation? Submit a review or request!

Barista plunges three Aeropresses at once

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 21:43:58 +0000

Johanna writes, "Carlos Aguirre, a trainer at Academia Barista Pro, stunned audiences worldwide when he pushed not 1, not 2 but 3 aeropresses at the same time for his signature drink during National Salvadoran Barista Competition."

That's a lot of aeropressin'. The key scene starts at 20:41.

SUBCAMPEON de Baristas en El Salvador GANA Mejor Espresso del País - Entrenador Carlos Aguirre (Thanks, Johanna!) h

Ambiguously ironic superfluous grocer's apo'strophe

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 05:55:34 +0000

Alice spotted this coffee cart from the (above average) London coffee chain Apostrophe, which includes a superfluous apostrophe. It's either ironic or too clever by far.

Oh the irony.

Japan's high-detail coffee, booze, food, and fashion simulacra

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 02:45:24 +0000

Writing in the WSJ, Tom Downey describes what he perceives as a new shift in the way that Japanese food, coffee, cocktails and fashion relates to the outside world; according to Downey, the ideal now combines the much-vaunted Japanese attention to detail and precise copying with a kind of remaking that produces a "replica" Brooklyn coffee that's better than the best coffee in Brooklyn, a "replica" vintage pair of jeans that look more vintage than the actual item, and so on. It's Baudrilliard's simulacra, with more denim and espresso.

"It's not so difficult to make something that's 100 percent the same as the original," he says. He holds up a heavy, metal zipper, American-made new old stock. "I've got 500,000 of these. Enough for the next 40 years.
"But the key isn't just getting the details right—it's knowing when to change things," Tsujimoto continues. "My style has to be an improvement: With 1 percent more here, 2 percent less there, we create something that looks better. You have to change the fit because all these classic garments were designed with extra room to carry tools or weapons."
He takes a deerskin-lined flight jacket off the rack and points out the colorful American military design stitched onto the back. He passes me what appears to be a standard-issue '50s-style gray cotton sweatshirt until I actually touch the thing. The heft of the loop-wheeled cotton makes it the thickest, heaviest sweatshirt I've ever felt.

Made Better in Japan (via Kottke)

(Image: downsized crop from a photograph by Tung Walsh)

Cat-butt coffee: A critical review

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 16:44:14 +0000

Kopi Luwak is the most expensive coffee in the world. At my local specialty coffee bean store, it sells for $420 per pound—or $10 for a 10 oz. brewed cup.

Kopi Luwak is very different from that cheap, gauche coffee you and I drink every day. This is because each hand-harvested bean of Kopi Luwak has been artisanally shat out of the digestive system of a small Indonesian pseudo-cat.

Yesterday, my husband and I split a cup of Kopi Luwak in an attempt to figure out whether having cat butt all over your coffee beans really did noticeably improve the flavor, or whether this was all just an elaborate practical joke on the part of Indonesian farmers.

The Asian Palm Civet is not really a cat, per se. It's a viverrid, a family of animals not found in North America. Viverrids belong to the same suborder as cats, so they are related. But, if you're not from Asian or African tropics, these animals will probably look a little weird to you. Imagine what might happen if the bastard love child of a ferret and a lemur had babies with your house cat. That's an Asian Palm Civet.

And Asian Palm Civets, as it turns out, really like to eat the fruits off of coffee plants. Although the civet can digest the fruit itself, the same can not be said for the bean at the center. Coffee beans pass through the civet whole. But they don't leave unchanged. Enzymes in the civet digestive tract break down proteins in the coffee beans. We know this because researchers at the University of Guelph actually did a detailed analysis in 2002, comparing Kopi Luwak and normal Columbian coffee beans. (You will be pleased to note that the same study confirmed that Kopi Luwak is safe to drink.)

Civets poop out coffee beans. This can happen on farms, or in the wild. Either way, once the pooping is done, somebody comes along to harvest the "processed" beans, cleans them, and roasts them. And then you have Kopi Luwak.

Here are the two things you need to know about the taste of Kopi Luwak:

• There is a difference in flavor. Kopi Luwak is noticeably not bitter. Swallow a sip, and it's like you just drank some water. There's no sting or heavy flavor left in the back of your throat. That makes sense. Proteins are part of what is responsible for the bitterness of coffee. Kopi Luwak beans have fewer whole proteins than normal beans. So they're less bitter, but still taste good. As my husband put it, "Everything that is wrong with cheap gas station coffee is right about this."

• That difference is totally not worth the price. Again, to quote my husband, "If I were a Russian oligarch or an investment banker or something, and $420 a pound represented a much smaller amount of my time worked, I'd probably drink this. As it is, not worth it."*

Cat-butt coffee: The coffee of the 1%?

Interestingly, Wikipedia tells me that Kopi Luwak originated during Dutch colonization of Indonesia, when Indonesians were banned from drinking any of the coffee they worked to grow and harvest. Instead, they gathered beans from civet poop and brewed that. And they talked about how great this cat-butt coffee was. Eventually, the Dutch colonists got curious, tried it for themselves, and then pretty much took it over. That's how Kopi Luwak became a luxury item. It's been expensive since the 19th century.

Of course, that history also lends a little more evidence to the theory that, somewhere, Indonesian farmers are having a good, long chuckle.

• • • •

Read more about Kopi Luwak in a 2010 New York Times story.

If you'd like a smoother brew at a more reasonable price, I'd recommend the Aerobie AeroPress. It's $30, makes a damn fine cup of coffee, and does not contain any cat butt.

Image: Kopi Luwak, Kaffee, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from ohallmann's photostream

HOWTO make a home-made pocket-sized espresso machine with tiny alcohol stove

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 19:41:27 +0000

Instructables user Urant decided to create a pocket-sized espresso machine that could be built using simple tools and parts from a local home-improvement store. He came up with a tiny, soldered contraption with its own tinsy winsy alcohol stove that uses a filed-down syringe to deliver a very slow drip of fuel for a boil that goes long enough to extract a single shot. It's a great design.

Design constraints are some of the most important points of any product design; they tell us what the limits are. The tighter the constraints, the more limited the design, and we have to be more creative to be able to meet them.
On this project, I set the following ones.
1- The product had to fit in the pocket of my jeans.
2- The product had to be made out with common, cheap and easily obtainable materials from any home improvement store or corner hardware store.
3- The product had to be made using simple tools that most makers would probably already have, or could easily borrow or buy cheaply.
4- The product had to be self-contained.
5- The budget was maximum 30 dollars.

Pocket size Espresso Machine with integrated alcohol stove. (via Make)

HOWTO attain radical hotel-room coffee independence

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 10:30:51 +0000

I travel a lot -- book tours, sf conventions, paid lectures, activist visits -- and I am no stranger to jet-lag (I even wrote a novel about it). My favored tonic when I find myself restless and awake in the middle of the night (or worse, gummy and semi-zombified after the alarm goes off) is coffee. Very, very good coffee. There's something really wonderful about having a great cup of coffee in your hotel room, especially when you're on a brutal 6AM-10PM tour schedule that has you bouncing around like a hyperactive ping-pong ball.

Last year, I got wise to the Aeropress, a great, cheap way of making hot (delicious!) coffee concentrate. It requires hot water, though, and that's not always easy to get at odd hours in a hotel room. Many European hotels offer an electric tea-kettle (not Italy, randomly, where the things are allegedly banned as a fire-hazard, though I keep finding myself in Italian hotels that offer convenient bedside ashtrays for people who want indulge in a little in-bed ciggie) (fire safety, you're doing it wrong), and US hotels often have a Mr Coffee or similar. In a pinch, you can always pick up a water-immersion heater on eBay, usually imported from Asia or Eastern Europe, where they are still barely legal (an immersion heater is basically the heating coil from inside an electric kettle with a wire and a plug. When they're not horribly burning their owners or setting things on fire, they're overheating and exploding, showering their environs with red-hot shrapnel. Use with care!).

But there's Another Way to do hotel-room coffee: cold-brew. I fucking love cold-brew coffee. Sorry, but strong sentiments demand strong language. Cold-brew coffee is extracted at room temperature or below, and is substantially less acidic than even the best hot coffee. The low-temperature extraction preserves the very volatile aromatic acids, and cold-brew coffee has a lot of chocolatey, caramel notes that are scrummy. Cold-brew tastes very strong, but without any bitterness, and is ferociously caffeinated. A couple glasses of cold-brew turn me into an ALL-CAPS TWEETING HYPERACTIVE SUPERHERO.

There's lots of ways to do cold-brew. My wife surprised me on my fortieth birthday with a Yama Cold Brew Coffee Dripper (sometimes called a Kyoto coffee dripper) that is not only beautiful, but also makes wonderful coffee. It's also the least portable coffee apparatus imaginable, and is permanently installed in my office. There's also the cheap and cheerful Toddy machine, which is more portable, but not easy to slip in the suitcase.

But you don't need a tower of lab-glass to cold-brew. You can make it New Orleans style, in which coarse-ground coffee and water are refrigerated in an airtight jar overnight, strained and served. I tried this out at Burning Man last summer, and attained coffee nirvana as a result.

My Burning Man experiments got me thinking about how I could cold-brew in hotels. A mason jar wasn't ideal, obviously. But in the UK, we've got these clever Pour and Store ziploc bags that stand up on their own. I figured I could fill one with one-third coffee, two-thirds water, slide it into the minibar fridge (where available) or even leave it on the window-sill, strain, and drink. ~~(If you know of a US equivalent to these, please leave a link in the comments -- I'd love to be able to resupply in America).~~ Breast-milk bags look like a good alternative (Thanks, Tara!)

My first attempt was a bit of a mess, as I tried to lay the bag on its side, and the seal gave way, filling the minibar with mucky grounds. After that false start, I attained a higher degree of success, experimenting with several methods for straining -- paper filters, cheese-cloth, etc.

But my real breakthrough was when I realized that my Aeropress was a perfect cold-brew filter. I fit the press with a mesh tea-strainer (from a cheap ceramic teapot) to catch most of the grounds, pour the cold-brew into the press, strain, and serve. It is astounding. It is also incredibly neat: 95% of the grounds stay in the baggie, which I zip shut and toss out.

I travel with a very handy adjustable ceramic hand-grinder. ~~I can't find the manufacturer's mark on it; I could swear it was a Hario, but I can't seem to locate the model online anywhere.~~. It's a Porlex (thanks, Johannes!). The grinder is great (if tiring) for hot Aeropress grinding, but it's even better for doing coarse grinding for cold-brew, since the looser setting demands a lot less work. I used the grinder at Burning Man to hand-grind a kilo every day, a process that took less than 20 minutes. When I grind for myself in a hotel, before bed so I can put up a cold-brew baggie for the morning, it only takes a minute or two.

Here, then, is my hotel-room coffee-independence inventory:

* Aeropress
* Mesh filter from a teapot
* Porlex hand-grinder
* Beans (usually Red Brick roast from the incredible Square Mile coffee in London
* Pour and Store baggies (you might try breast milk bags as an alternative)
* Immersion heater
* Aerolatte (for frothing hot milk for lattes)
* Denture-cleaning tablets (for cleaning scorched milk off of immersion heater coil)

It's a fairly compact rig, and it gives me an awful lot of pleasure.

Cold-brew in the baggie, fresh out of the minibar

Fitting the filter to the Aeropress

Pouring the coffee

Spent grounds

Easy disposal

Ready to drink

Killer coffee without having to get out of your pajamas!

Great old letters: 19th-c. Smithsonian Institution Secty. on "superior excellence" of a good cup of coffee

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 21:45:20 +0000

Samuel P. Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Photograph by R. H. Lord.

Boing Boing pal Isabel Lara of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum sends along a fantastic little gem from the museum's Archives Division, unearthed during their ongoing epic move to the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center.

Within their collection of the aeronautical papers of Samuel Pierpont Langley (1834-1906), the third Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, a letter of note to coffee lovers.

This intellectually curious man, whose interests ranged from "astronomy, astrophysics, aeronautics, and bird flight, mathematics, and the reckoning of standard time," was also really into "observing and describing all sorts of processes — and then suggesting improvements."

One of those processes, which he describes in loving detail here, is the preparation of of a really good cup of coffee at the Posthof café in the spa town of Carlsbad in Bohemia, then part of Austria-Hungary (now Karolvy Vary in the Czech Republic). The letter is addressed to his niece Mary.

Dear Mary, I hope this will interest you.

Affectionately,
Your Uncle Samuel

The best coffee in Carlsbad is at the Posthof, and is as good as I know of anywhere. I have been looking into the kitchen this morning and seeing it prepared. The statement that figs or anything of the kind are employed is legendary. There is absolutely nothing but coffee, and it owes its superior excellence to the freshness and the pains taken in its making.

1. The coffee in the berry.

There are four kinds of coffee bean employed: the Menado, Ceylon, Java and Preanger. I do not know the English equivalents for the first and last. They are of very different sizes indeed, and this difference in size of the berry must make it difficult to burn them equally.

2. Roasting.

The roasting is done in a rotary wire mesh over a slow fire. The coffee is renewed three times daily. Each time 10 to 20 pounds of coffee is roasted, a girl turning the handle, and the process occupying in each case nearly an hour. In spite of this care, when the beans come out some of them are very dark and these are picked out.

Read the rest here.

Coffee: An antidepressant and religion preventative?

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 18:09:15 +0000

A recently published study found a correlation between higher rates of coffee drinking in women and decreased risk of depression. Naturally, that finding made headlines. But blogger Scicurious has a really nice analysis of the paper that picked up a significant flaw in the way the data is being interpreted. There was a correlation between drinking more coffee and a lowered risk of depression. But that wasn't the only correlation the researchers found—just the only correlation they made a big deal of in their conclusions.

On her blog, Scicurious lists the other correlations and explains why it's hard to draw any solid conclusion from this data set:

1) Smoking. The interaction between depression risk, smoking, and coffee consumption was “marginally” significant (p=0.06), but they dismiss it as being due to chance because it was “unexpected”. Um. Wait. Nicotine is a STIMULANT. It is known to have antidepressant like effects in animal models (though the withdrawal is no fun). This is not unexpected.

2) Drinking: heavy coffee drinkers drink more. But note that they don’t say that drinking coffee puts you at risk for drinking alcohol.

3) Obesity: heavy coffee drinkers are, on average, thinner, but not more physically active. They do not conclude that coffee drinking prevents obesity.

4) Church going: heavy coffee drinkers are less likely to go to church. Less likely to go to church, less likely to develop depression…heck, forget depression, maybe coffee prevents religion now! Now THAT would be a heck of a finding.

Here’s the thing. I do believe that high coffee consumption correlates with decreased risk of depression. But a lot of other things do as well. I am not convinced that the high coffee consumption wasn’t part of a lifestyle that correlated with decreased risk of depression, maybe they have stronger support networks or less incidence of depression in the family. It could be many other things.

Image: Coffee, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from dyobmit's photostream

Caffeine hallucinations: Why "Letters to the Editor" matter in science

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 13:50:40 +0000

Letters to the Editor are an interesting feature of peer-reviewed scientific journals. The function of this section varies from journal to journal, but, in general, this is where you'll find things like critiques of research published in previous issues, and short write-ups on findings that don't yet warrant their own big, formal research paper. Neuroscience blogger Vaughan Bell found a neat example of the latter in an old 1993 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Dr. Harold W. Koenigsberg and his colleagues were in the process of studying the causes of panic and anxiety disorders, in hopes of better understanding why some people are prone to panic attacks and others aren't. Part of that research involved determining whether you could have a panic attack while sleeping. They wanted to see whether a panic attack could still happen if the patient wasn't actively thinking about the causes of the panic attack, like they might when awake. Basically, Koenigsberg was trying to figure out how much of a panic attack was attributable to chemistry changes, and how much was related to cognitive processing.

Koenigsberg and company injected sleeping patients with caffeine, to produce the physical symptoms of panic. And that's when they noticed something odd. Two of the patients reported olfactory hallucinations—they smelled things that weren't there. Here's what Koenigsberg wrote in his Letter to the Editor:

Mr. A, a 38-year-old man with no personal or family history of psychiatric disorders, received an intravenous dose of 250 mg of caffeine, delivered as a bolus over a 60-second period during an episode of stage 3-4 sleep. Fourteen minutes after receiving the caffeine, he awakened and reported an “interesting smell or taste-more like a smell.”

Ms. B, a 34-year-old woman with a generalized anxiety disorder, awakened experiencing a smell like that of “plastic or burnt coffee” 3 minutes after receiving a 250 mg bolus of caffeine during a period of stage 3-4 sleep.

Previous research by other people had found that hallucinations like this could happen, but the hypothesis had been that the hallucinations were related to seizures. Koenigsberg's patients had no history of seizures, and they hadn't shown any signs of experiencing seizures when they had their hallucinations.

So Koenigsberg offered a new hypothesis: We know caffeine can work as a taste enhancer. So, maybe, the intravenous caffeine was either causing people to pick up smells and tastes that were normally undetectable, or the caffeine was prompting sensory systems to trick themselves, finding "smells" where none actually existed.

And this is why Letters to the Editor are so nifty. Koenigsberg later published on his panic attack study, but the biochemical function of caffeine on the human sensory system wasn't something he was much interested in. Letters to the Editor allowed him to share a weird finding, which might otherwise have been shoved into a drawer, never to be heard from again.

Instead of being lost, Koenigsberg's finding on caffeine-induced hallucinations went on to influence at least four other studies, including one on migraine hallucinations published last month.

Image: Caffeine fix, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0)image from davemorris's photostream

Barista's "Starbucks Rant" song gets him fired

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 15:38:03 +0000

Chrissizle was a barista at Starbucks who wrote and recorded a ranty, funny song about his job and posted it on YouTube. It "went viral" (oh, how I hate that phrase!) and he got fired.

Welcome to starbucks
my name is Chris
I'll be your barista for the day
Can i make a drink for you miss?
I know you've had a shitty day
well so have I
I really don't want to care
but I get paid to try
Hello rich white lady,
I already know what you want
you want a skinny vanilla latte
young debutaunt

Barista fired after 'Starbucks Rant Song' goes viral

The Mean Men of coffee advertising

Rob Beschizza — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 13:31:48 +0000

Shaun Clayton compiled a collection of scenes from old coffee commercials, which often shared a theme: "men being jerks to their wives about coffee." [via Peter Serafinowicz]