Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with text Stuff from stuff
Speaker 1: dot Com. Hey there, and welcome to text Stuff. I'm
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickling and I'm Lauren boggle Bom. She's back again.
Speaker 1: Lauren has graciously agreed to join me on this episode
Speaker 1: because we're talking about a subject that I think we could.
Speaker 1: I think it's safe to say you and I are
Speaker 1: passionate about the subject, extremely passionate, passionate on a daily basis,
Speaker 1: perhaps dependent upon it. It would be a better way
Speaker 1: of raising it. Yes, we're talking about coffee, coffee machines
Speaker 1: and and that wonderful life blood that makes me not
Speaker 1: murder everyone and sometimes makes you walk right through walls.
Speaker 1: It definitely gets my stabbing levels down to an acceptable
Speaker 1: level so that I don't go around stabbing people. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We uh. This is something that a lot of listeners
Speaker 1: have been requesting. They We received a couple of different
Speaker 1: requests from listeners to cover coffee machines. So in order
Speaker 1: to do that, I thought it'd be fun to first
Speaker 1: talk about coffee itself, kind of the history of coffee
Speaker 1: and where it comes from and how it's grown and
Speaker 1: what it's like, and then we'll transition into the various
Speaker 1: ways human beings have used coffee to make a beverage
Speaker 1: that we all know and love. Most of us, I mean, well,
Speaker 1: I mean those of us that aren't wrong. Right, maybe
Speaker 1: you're a tea drinker. We don't pass judgment. I drink
Speaker 1: tea as well. Yeah, both, yeah, in fact, sometimes mixed
Speaker 1: because well it's not necessarily on purpose. I just I
Speaker 1: have a problem alright. So anyway, where does coffee come from? Well,
Speaker 1: coffee plants are very particular, right, they need specific types
Speaker 1: of soil. They need a certain level of of of
Speaker 1: richness to that soil, and needs be nice fertile ground,
Speaker 1: and they need really mild temperatures. So they don't do
Speaker 1: well in climates where you get a lot like there's
Speaker 1: a big difference between the highest of the highs and
Speaker 1: the lowest of the lows. So you're talking something in
Speaker 1: the tropic kind of area. Yeah, the equatorial area, you know,
Speaker 1: somewhere around the equator. That's where your weather does not
Speaker 1: different change that dramatically from one part of the year
Speaker 1: to the other part of the year. And there's actually
Speaker 1: a band that you could look at with the the
Speaker 1: very the the two the two borders would be the
Speaker 1: tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer, and we
Speaker 1: refer to this band with a particular little nickname. As
Speaker 1: far as coffee goes, the bean belt, bean belt, And
Speaker 1: so that sounds like a fabulous fashion accessory. It does,
Speaker 1: doesn't it. Yeah, I doubt I could rock the bean belt.
Speaker 1: I just I'm not confident enough in my look. But
Speaker 1: the only state in the United States that actually falls
Speaker 1: in that range where you could grow coffee is Hawaii,
Speaker 1: and the Big Island of Hawaii is a place where
Speaker 1: coffee has grown. There are many plantations. They're the volcanic soil,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, is great for growing coffee in general.
Speaker 1: Higher altitudes are really excellent for ground coffee. And they
Speaker 1: have a mountain or two on the Big Island. I've
Speaker 1: visited the Big Island. I have actually visited coffee farms,
Speaker 1: coffee plantations. I've never been to a coffee farm. It's
Speaker 1: so awesome. Yeah, you get to actually see how the
Speaker 1: plants are grown, how how people are harvest the coffee cherries.
Speaker 1: The one the tour I went on, they let you
Speaker 1: pick a coffee cherry and actually taste it, so you
Speaker 1: could get to experience what it was like. Oh, which
Speaker 1: is how you have a recommendation for maybe not eating
Speaker 1: a whole lot of coffee cherries. Coffee cherries, by the way,
Speaker 1: are how coffee grows, because it doesn't just grow in
Speaker 1: a little pre roasted bean on a bush. That's ridiculous.
Speaker 1: It's not a it's not in a pod. Now. It's
Speaker 1: not like like beans like green beans. It's not like
Speaker 1: that right right there. Their seeds really, and so they
Speaker 1: grow in what's called coffee cherries or coffee berries sometimes,
Speaker 1: which looks a little bit like a like a cherry
Speaker 1: or a grape. Like it's sort of olive size. Yeah,
Speaker 1: rub out that size, maybe a little for the smaller olives.
Speaker 1: Not not like those ginormous olives. Olives you defy the
Speaker 1: laws of man. Uh. These are these They do look
Speaker 1: kind of like grapes, kind of like like like a grape,
Speaker 1: and the cherry really got friendly and had little babies,
Speaker 1: and the skin is kind of tough. But then once
Speaker 1: you pierce the skin, it's all like juicy and birsty.
Speaker 1: The skin is also very bitter, so I don't recommend
Speaker 1: chewing on the skins so much. Um, And the fruit
Speaker 1: is very sweet, it's very sticky, it's got a subtle
Speaker 1: flavor to it. I think of it kind of like
Speaker 1: rose water and watermelonw Yeah, I think I want to
Speaker 1: eat that. Actually, that's got to be careful though, because
Speaker 1: those coffee beans, the seeds are really super hard and
Speaker 1: if you're just crunching, you could crack a tooth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well recommend I do know that in some places they
Speaker 1: save they save the fruit once they've used the rest
Speaker 1: of the of the bean for coffee purposes, dry it
Speaker 1: out and use it for tea. Oh. Interesting, so you
Speaker 1: can brew a tea using that. Now, once you strip
Speaker 1: that fruit away, you still have some layers on top
Speaker 1: of the bean itself, right, so skins kind of Yeah.
Speaker 1: So you have to actually go through a process to
Speaker 1: get to the point where you can get to the beans.
Speaker 1: So you harvest the coffee easy pick. These cherries, those
Speaker 1: are either dried in the sun over the course of
Speaker 1: a week to tend a something like that, or they're
Speaker 1: placed in a pulping machine to remove the fruit and
Speaker 1: then uh, those beans are dried by the sun. Usually
Speaker 1: you can do it in other ways, but the sun
Speaker 1: is the sun is kind of right there. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: ones I've seen they put them in like these big
Speaker 1: uh sieves almost, and then they rake them occasionally to
Speaker 1: make sure that they're all drying evenly. Yeah, sort of
Speaker 1: like a like if you've ever been gold panning, sort
Speaker 1: of like a very large gold panning thing, right, and hey,
Speaker 1: this stuff it's it's like just as valuable as gold
Speaker 1: in my eyes, so other black gold. Yeah, after you
Speaker 1: dry it, that's when you can get those other elder
Speaker 1: layers of the bean removed in a process that's called hulling,
Speaker 1: as in removing the holes around the beans. They are
Speaker 1: graded and sorted by size and density. And then the
Speaker 1: this coffee, which is referred to as green coffee, the
Speaker 1: beans have a kind of greenish tinged them, then is
Speaker 1: shipped to roasters. So you often don't have a coffee
Speaker 1: plantation and roaster on the same premises you would. You would.
Speaker 1: Some of the coffee plantations sell their own coffee. But
Speaker 1: it's a kind of interesting thing because they'll send the
Speaker 1: green coffee off to roasters. Roasters will send the roasted
Speaker 1: coffee back to the plantation and then the plantation can
Speaker 1: sell it well. The roasting is a very specific process
Speaker 1: in different people have very specific ideas about exactly how
Speaker 1: much a coffee bean should be roasted and depending on
Speaker 1: the type of coffee plant, and there are like six
Speaker 1: thousand species within the coffee a genius, so you've got
Speaker 1: a lot of options in there. Yeah, it's it gets
Speaker 1: very particular. So how does how does the roasting process go? All? Right?
Speaker 1: So you get like a a roaster that can rotate,
Speaker 1: So it's got a tumbling kind of kind of like
Speaker 1: a clothes dryer. It tumbles because you want all the
Speaker 1: beans to uh, to roast evenly. You don't want to
Speaker 1: end up with like a bottom layer that is roasted
Speaker 1: to one degree and the stuff above it is to
Speaker 1: a different one than you have. You don't have consistent
Speaker 1: coffee right right. Yeah. My first thought that I was like,
Speaker 1: it's like a rotisserie. And then I was like, but
Speaker 1: that would be terrible for beans because you know, you
Speaker 1: can't like spit them like you can't a chicken. And
Speaker 1: then he said and then he said like a clothes dryer,
Speaker 1: and then I just thought of like a clothes dryer
Speaker 1: full of chickens, and then I was like, this is
Speaker 1: a terrible I'm just oh, I just need to share
Speaker 1: this with someone to get this idea out of my head.
Speaker 1: It's like the ring sounds like a rejected Gary Larson
Speaker 1: farside cartoon. Like, you know, this is too horrifying even
Speaker 1: for me. Clothes dryer full of chickens. Well at any rate.
Speaker 1: So the roosters, they are put to a temperature of
Speaker 1: around five frees fahrenheit, which is about celsius to get
Speaker 1: the beans to the right temperature, and once the beans
Speaker 1: are hot enough, they undergo a process called pyrolysis. They
Speaker 1: expand kind of like popcorn. They actually pop out and
Speaker 1: get much larger than they normally are. And the longer
Speaker 1: you roast the coffee bean, the more intense the flavors become.
Speaker 1: The more intense the aroma becomes, those oils become really concentrated.
Speaker 1: You do. However, if you're the longer you roast them,
Speaker 1: you also lose more and more of the caffeine that's
Speaker 1: inside them. So so darker beans are actually less caffeinated
Speaker 1: by the lighter flavored greener beans. Yeah, so if you
Speaker 1: have a light roast coffee, you typically have more caffeine
Speaker 1: in it than a dark roast. Keep in mind that
Speaker 1: it also depends upon the species of the coffee plant. Right,
Speaker 1: Some have more caffeine than others, and depending upon the
Speaker 1: process that they're using, sometimes coffee makers will actually add
Speaker 1: caffeine back into the mix afterward, because you want to
Speaker 1: make sure that you have that kick. But yeah, some
Speaker 1: people prefer the the robust flavors of a dark coffee.
Speaker 1: They do have stronger flavors. Some people prefer the lighter
Speaker 1: flavors and the caffeine kick from the lighter coffee. Uh.
Speaker 1: And in general, lighter coffees have more caffeine. And we've
Speaker 1: been doing this for a while as a human beings
Speaker 1: have been harvesting coffee for quite some times. Yes, not
Speaker 1: just Jonathan and I. We've been spending literally hours harvesting
Speaker 1: coffee today in preparation for this podcast. By harvesting coffee,
Speaker 1: we mean breating articles and drinking it. Yeah. Legends placed
Speaker 1: the discovery of coffee a couple of thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: um supposedly when a goat hurd in what would become
Speaker 1: Ethiopia noticed that his heard got real perky when they
Speaker 1: ate the berries off of this one particular plant. The
Speaker 1: goats seemed to dance, dancing, dancing the name of a
Speaker 1: of a brand of coffee. Yeah, local, local, roaster and sellar.
Speaker 1: You're in Atlanta, right, Actually, they're they're very local. They're
Speaker 1: right there. They're a ten minute walk from our office.
Speaker 1: Good good coffee if you ever get in to Atlanta. Like, um,
Speaker 1: people have probably been eating coffee for a long time.
Speaker 1: East African tribes eased to make uh, these balls of
Speaker 1: like animal fat plus coffee berries. Um. So if you
Speaker 1: thought that putting butter in your coffee was a whole
Speaker 1: new fangled thing, then you're you're actually late to the game.
Speaker 1: Historians think it was developed into a drink somewhere around
Speaker 1: one thousand CE on the Arabian Peninsula, and it became
Speaker 1: hugely popular with Muslim populations there. They do not consume alcohol,
Speaker 1: so I assumed that this was a thing that they
Speaker 1: were kind of like, yeah, drugs are good. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is an alcohol, and yet it gives us an interesting
Speaker 1: energetic feeling. Um, and it's bread. As the religions spread
Speaker 1: throughout the next few centuries. Legend also has it that
Speaker 1: coffee growers were so protective of their crops that they
Speaker 1: didn't allow plants or even fertile seeds to leave the
Speaker 1: Arabian Peninsula for for hundreds of years until a man
Speaker 1: smuggled some seeds out of Mecca by strapping them to
Speaker 1: his chest. Um. Whether or not that is true, India
Speaker 1: definitely had some coffee crops growing by about sixteen hundred,
Speaker 1: and European travelers around that time started catching on to
Speaker 1: this whole coffee thing. The Dutch were the first to
Speaker 1: the first Europeans to start up a coffee estate that
Speaker 1: was on Java, Java Island in sixteen sixteen, and we
Speaker 1: think it arrived over in the America's possibly also through
Speaker 1: smuggling around the seventeen twenties. Brazil and Columbia are now
Speaker 1: the largest producers of coffee, followed up by Indonesia and Vietnam.
Speaker 1: I remember hearing a story at one point about uh
Speaker 1: that smuggling of coffee beans into the America's through uh
Speaker 1: being hidden in flowers. Yeah, yeah, I heard that. Um
Speaker 1: Uh Brazilian foreign dignitary uh talked real pretty too to
Speaker 1: the wife of someone over in a coffee growing estates
Speaker 1: and then managed to smuggle them back to back to
Speaker 1: Brazil where it flourished. But so smuggling big in the
Speaker 1: coffee world, as it turns out, like one of those
Speaker 1: things where this belongs to the world for freedom, for freedom.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about the history of the action of
Speaker 1: the coffee machines, the various devices we have used to
Speaker 1: make coffee. Some of these, you know, you might argue, uh,
Speaker 1: take the term machine pretty liberally, but it is interesting
Speaker 1: to note that even the most simplistic methods of making
Speaker 1: coffee have a relation to the standard coffee drip machine
Speaker 1: that a lot of people have in their homes. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: these first two are not electronic forms, but I would
Speaker 1: remind you that even a lever is a machine, although
Speaker 1: this first one I hesitate to call a machine. It's
Speaker 1: really more like a device or a prop um. The
Speaker 1: simplest way to make coffee or yeah, it's just by
Speaker 1: pouring hot water over or through some grounds. Um, I'm
Speaker 1: very fond of my drip cone personally. Uh. It's just
Speaker 1: a cone shaped thing and you put a filter in
Speaker 1: it to contain the grounds, and you place the whole
Speaker 1: contraption on top of a coffee cup and then you
Speaker 1: pour hot water through it until the cup is full
Speaker 1: of coffee, and then yeah, everything is better in the universe. Um.
Speaker 1: A little bit more complicated than that is what's known
Speaker 1: in the US as a French press and more generally
Speaker 1: around the world as a coffee press or coffee plunger
Speaker 1: or cavitiery a pistone. And this is a very simple
Speaker 1: manual machine, uh manpowered or woman powered, person powered really
Speaker 1: um consisting of you know, cylindrical chamber and a fitted
Speaker 1: filter that's attached to a rod. You steep the coffee
Speaker 1: grounds in hot water in the chamber, and when it's
Speaker 1: brew tre're liking, you just push the filter down into
Speaker 1: the chamber that the water flows up through the filter
Speaker 1: and it collects the grounds at the bottom of the chamber,
Speaker 1: which let's see pour non chewy coffee off of the
Speaker 1: top and you, uh, you gotta make that. You've gotta
Speaker 1: make both the pressing uh very smooth and slow and
Speaker 1: the pouring you need to make nice and smooth and
Speaker 1: slow so that you make sure you're not stirring up
Speaker 1: a lot of sediment. You can get sediment from French press.
Speaker 1: Coffee definitely usually tends to end up in the cut
Speaker 1: no matter what. The first time I ever used a
Speaker 1: French press was at a restaurant in Las Vegas with
Speaker 1: lots of people all around me, and I just felt
Speaker 1: like I've got to do this right, or everyone will
Speaker 1: judge me. And I know that what happens in Vegas
Speaker 1: stays in Vegas, but I'm not even comfortable with that,
Speaker 1: to tell you the truth I want to make. And yes,
Speaker 1: you are just pushing the grounds further and further down
Speaker 1: to the bottom while the water is allowed to go
Speaker 1: through the filter or the brewed coffee. At that point,
Speaker 1: it's night in water. It's brewed coffee is able to
Speaker 1: pass through the filter so that you can pour it
Speaker 1: into your cup. And a lot of people will like
Speaker 1: this method because they think it brews a particularly smooth
Speaker 1: cup of coffee. Yeah, and unlike unlike coffee that eases
Speaker 1: paper filters and it's processing even like with my drip cone. Uh,
Speaker 1: you're allowing all of the oils and the coffee to
Speaker 1: make their way into your cup. Oil is kind of
Speaker 1: where the flavor is residing. So if the paper is
Speaker 1: absorbing some of the oil, you're losing a little bit
Speaker 1: of something and getting a tiny little bit of paper
Speaker 1: fiber in there. And and some people are just like,
Speaker 1: that's just not acceptable, unacceptable, purest form of coffee oil
Speaker 1: to go into my system as possible, I do, I
Speaker 1: do prefer French press to all other forms of coffee
Speaker 1: now might be a coffee snob. The idea of fixing
Speaker 1: a screen like straight to a pot in order to
Speaker 1: avoid getting grounds in your cup probably goes back a ways,
Speaker 1: but the first patent on the on the actual plunger
Speaker 1: device was granted in France in nineteen nine, hence the
Speaker 1: term French press. Now, if we go back further to
Speaker 1: the early eighteen hundreds, that's when we get the first
Speaker 1: inventions of the percolators. Now, we may be familiar with
Speaker 1: a percolator that if you've ever seen a coffee pot's
Speaker 1: got a little like knob type protrusion on the very
Speaker 1: top that's clear. Yeah, it looks sort of like a
Speaker 1: sort of like do you remember the board game Sorry
Speaker 1: from when you were a kid that papomatic bubble? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I always when I was a kid, I thought that
Speaker 1: my grandmother's percolator coffee cup would probably had a popomatic bubble,
Speaker 1: and she was like, don't touch that, it's hot. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: And in fact it would be hot. And the reason
Speaker 1: why it's clear is so that you can see when
Speaker 1: the coffee has been has finished percolating, in case you
Speaker 1: could not hear it finishing. So this is a really
Speaker 1: simple machine as well. You've got a chamber at the
Speaker 1: bottom of the pot. This is the one that's you know,
Speaker 1: closest to the source of heat. This is where the
Speaker 1: water goes and a tube leeds up from the us
Speaker 1: chamber to the top of the pot. Uh. You put
Speaker 1: the right amount of water in and coffee grounds go
Speaker 1: into another chamber. That's it's at the very top of
Speaker 1: the pot. So you've got a filter at the base
Speaker 1: of the coffee grounds chamber. So here's the deal. You've
Speaker 1: got the whole coffee pot on a heat source. The
Speaker 1: heat source heats the water to boiling. That boiling water
Speaker 1: starts to push water up the tube. It forces water
Speaker 1: up that tube because there's nowhere else for it to go.
Speaker 1: So the water goes up the tube where it bubbles
Speaker 1: over the top. That's where you see on the top
Speaker 1: of the percolator little water bubbling over. When it bubbles
Speaker 1: over the top, it goes down into the coffee grounds
Speaker 1: and so the coffee grounds and the water get having
Speaker 1: a little party up there. It absorbs some of those
Speaker 1: coffee oils. UH. The now coffee or very weakly brewed
Speaker 1: coffee at this point starts to sit down, eventually going
Speaker 1: down through the filter and back into the chamber below.
Speaker 1: It continues this process as the cooler water is sinking
Speaker 1: closer to the heat source, getting a heated up boiling
Speaker 1: going up through that tube. The process continues in a
Speaker 1: cycle until you're getting to a point where all the
Speaker 1: water inside the percolator is near boiling temperature. Now you
Speaker 1: don't want it to actually boil boil, because they say
Speaker 1: that boiled coffee is spoiled coffee. It's not gonna taste good.
Speaker 1: But you want, like like any other food, you can
Speaker 1: totally burn coffee. Oh yeah, and you know it when
Speaker 1: you've had it, you're just like a favor of failure.
Speaker 1: It is it is, and it's you know, you're like,
Speaker 1: I'm still gonna drink it, but I'm not happy. So
Speaker 1: this this continues until that percolating sound stops. That's a
Speaker 1: signal that the water has reached this temperature of near boiling,
Speaker 1: and you remove it from the heat and then you're
Speaker 1: able to remove the grounds and pour cups of coffee
Speaker 1: and uh and a lot of people really still prefer
Speaker 1: percolator coffee, whether it's one some percolators have a heating element.
Speaker 1: It actually in the coffee thing, so you just plug
Speaker 1: it in that sort of like an electric kettle. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then others are meant to go directly onto a
Speaker 1: heating element, whether it's an electric stove, gas stove, maybe
Speaker 1: even a fire if you're a cowboy, because the cowboys
Speaker 1: made coffee, or a camper yeah, or a camper um um.
Speaker 1: So that again popular but very simple yeahs And but
Speaker 1: actually well, I mean most most coffee makers are very simple.
Speaker 1: I hadn't thought about it very much until we started
Speaker 1: doing this research. The next one is a vacuum drip, yeah,
Speaker 1: which looks like it's something super cool and hip story
Speaker 1: and chemistry related. Oh yeah yeah. When the first time
Speaker 1: that I saw one was in a relatively fancy restaurant
Speaker 1: down in St. Petersburg, I believe, actually and Florida or Russia, Florida,
Speaker 1: just just checking and and and it looks it looked
Speaker 1: like this crazy like like fifties era space age kind
Speaker 1: of thing, or possibly like something from like from like
Speaker 1: Gaslight Sci Fi kind of which which is true because
Speaker 1: that's about when it dates from it even it dates
Speaker 1: before Gaslight Sci Fi because it comes from the eighteen thirties,
Speaker 1: but it's one of those that we've seen a resurgence
Speaker 1: in recently as people have gone on the quest for
Speaker 1: the perfect cup of coffee. And this is another one
Speaker 1: that is based on a very similar principle as to
Speaker 1: the percolator UH in several ways. So if you looked
Speaker 1: at one of these, they tend to look something like
Speaker 1: kind of like an hour glass of shape. The bottom
Speaker 1: chamber is one that holds the water. It's connected via
Speaker 1: a tube that has a filter in it to an
Speaker 1: upper chamber. The upper chamber is open to the atmosphere,
Speaker 1: is not closed exactly, it's not it's not sealed like
Speaker 1: an hour glasses. You put the coffee grounds in that.
Speaker 1: Now the filter keeps the coffee grounds from going down
Speaker 1: into the lower chamber UH. And you would then turn
Speaker 1: on the heat allow the water in the bottom chamber
Speaker 1: to start to boil. That would make water vapor, that
Speaker 1: would force it creates an increase in water and air
Speaker 1: pressure weather because the water vapor is taking up more
Speaker 1: space than the water was. That's forcing water up that
Speaker 1: tube through the filter to mingle with the coffee grounds.
Speaker 1: With these vacuum drip sets, you are supposed to stir
Speaker 1: the coffee grounds and water together a little bit so
Speaker 1: that you get a good amount of coverage and you
Speaker 1: get the coffee grounds sufficiently wet so that those oils
Speaker 1: seep into the water. When it cools down, the water
Speaker 1: vapor in the bottom chamber begins to condense. That creates
Speaker 1: a vacuum which starts to pull the coffee back down
Speaker 1: the tube through the filter, so you don't get any grounds,
Speaker 1: and it fills up that lower chamber not with water
Speaker 1: but now with brood coffee. So that's why it's called
Speaker 1: a vacuum drip. It's because that water vapor wentz Can
Speaker 1: condensing creates the vacuum pulling the coffee back down. It
Speaker 1: looks like magic. It looks like fancy coffee science magic
Speaker 1: while that's going on, and it definitely looks like you know,
Speaker 1: you're like, I have had a mad scientist brew me
Speaker 1: a cup of coffee, and uh, it's very pretty. Like
Speaker 1: a lot of these are very very The design just
Speaker 1: makes it look really appealing. There's a very strong aesthetic
Speaker 1: appeal to these, certainly more than you know, an average
Speaker 1: coffee maker, right. A lot of those coffee makers are
Speaker 1: very functional they're not necessarily pretty. You can not pretty ones,
Speaker 1: but right, right, but most of them are pretty uh utilitarian,
Speaker 1: not pretty pretty not pretty. Mine mine looks fine, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't look space age. Um. Mine actually has a
Speaker 1: coffee grinder, permanent filter and uh and you know, all
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff mixed into to it. So it
Speaker 1: grinds my coffee just as I need it brewed, which
Speaker 1: is nice, yes, yes, also very important to fear a
Speaker 1: coffee snob. Yeah, so that you have less surface area
Speaker 1: to get stale while you're you know exactly, yeah, so
Speaker 1: that you get that that really fresh tape. The next
Speaker 1: one we want to talk about is the mocha pot,
Speaker 1: which is going to sound very similar to the other
Speaker 1: ones we've just mentioned, but moca pot coffees sort of
Speaker 1: the kind of coffee brew with. This exists in a
Speaker 1: weird world between the espresso and the coffee. So espresso
Speaker 1: will talk about later, but it has its own particular
Speaker 1: uh traits whereas they're they're slightly different from from coffee,
Speaker 1: and this is kind of bringing the gap. And it's
Speaker 1: very popular in Europe, particularly in countries like Italy and France.
Speaker 1: My my my roommate has one of these that has
Speaker 1: passed down to her from her Italian grandmother's makes perfect sense.
Speaker 1: And these are really cool for like portable coffee makers.
Speaker 1: They're very they tend to be very compact, and they
Speaker 1: work on any heating surface. You can again for camping
Speaker 1: or cowboying and whatever you're doing, you can just kind
Speaker 1: of bring it with you exactly. And it's very similar
Speaker 1: again to the percolators. The vacuum drips has a similar principle.
Speaker 1: So you've got again two chambers, the lower chambers where
Speaker 1: the water goes uh, and then there's kind of it
Speaker 1: looks almost like a funnel. There's a coffee grounds cone
Speaker 1: that fits into the lower chamber, all right, So you
Speaker 1: fill the lower chamber with water up to the right level,
Speaker 1: which would be below where the cone uh stops where
Speaker 1: the coffee grounds would start. Because you don't want to
Speaker 1: have the water so high that the coffee grounds are
Speaker 1: already getting wet. Uh. There is a tube that leads
Speaker 1: down into the chamber from the coffee grounds cone. There's
Speaker 1: a filter there so the coffee grounds don't again go
Speaker 1: into the lower chamber. And then there's another tube that
Speaker 1: leads up from the base of the kettle part like
Speaker 1: the pot part, the part that will hold the coffee uh,
Speaker 1: and they screw together. You put them on this heating element.
Speaker 1: The heating element heats the water to boiling. Water is
Speaker 1: forced up through the tube of the coffee grounds cone.
Speaker 1: It then ends up mingling with the coffee grounds, thus
Speaker 1: creating brood coffee. Uh. It continues to do so because
Speaker 1: you keep the heat on. The water just continues to
Speaker 1: flow up through this tube into the coffee grounds. So
Speaker 1: the water in the coffee grounds level can't go down
Speaker 1: because the the expanding water vapor from below is preventing it.
Speaker 1: You can only go up, So it goes up through
Speaker 1: another filter and up through it the tube in the
Speaker 1: center of the pot and spills over that and that's
Speaker 1: where it ends up forming the coffee inside the pot section.
Speaker 1: And again you have to pay really close attention to
Speaker 1: this because if you let it go on too long,
Speaker 1: then it's just gonna start sputtering because all that's happening
Speaker 1: is water vapor is being forced up through the tube.
Speaker 1: There's no more there's not enough water for it to
Speaker 1: be an actual stream, you know. You remove it from
Speaker 1: the heat. You then can pour out either you can
Speaker 1: pour out extremely concentrated cups of coffee. It's really more
Speaker 1: like espresso. At that point, you would you would generally
Speaker 1: either dilute it with hot water or hot milk of
Speaker 1: some kind. Yeah, exactly that. That tends to be the
Speaker 1: way to drink it. You can also drink it in
Speaker 1: the very tiny cups, kind of similar to espresso. I've
Speaker 1: seen that happen too, but yeah, no, I prefer to
Speaker 1: do it that way because then you get superpower. Yeah.
Speaker 1: My superpower is that I can no longer detect individual
Speaker 1: heart rate and you want like I can't is there's
Speaker 1: no more thumping. It's just a thrumb. Oh. I love it.
Speaker 1: I love it when you could just feel every single
Speaker 1: blood cell in your body is moves through your veins.
Speaker 1: It's beautiful. Start to name them. Uh yeah. In that case,
Speaker 1: I I go beyond space and time and I like
Speaker 1: to try and keep my feet on the ground, so
Speaker 1: I don't I dilute it if I drink it this style. Um,
Speaker 1: but it is is a very common way of making
Speaker 1: coffee in different areas of Europe, and I guess there
Speaker 1: are a few folks in America who make it that
Speaker 1: way too, Although we tend in America to to depend
Speaker 1: upon the automatic drip coffee machine. And this is the
Speaker 1: machine that people wanted to know. How the heck does
Speaker 1: that work? Yes, these electric devices that you buy for
Speaker 1: for very low amounts of money really and you just
Speaker 1: plug it in and it makes everything okay. It's kind
Speaker 1: of interesting because it's very similar to the principles we've
Speaker 1: already covered. In fact, I was surprised, you know, before
Speaker 1: I thought about this. I suppose if I had left,
Speaker 1: you know, really critically thought about it, it would have
Speaker 1: occurred to me. But I had just assumed there was
Speaker 1: some sort of water pump somewhere in the typical coffee machine.
Speaker 1: But that's not the case, al right. It's all using
Speaker 1: the same kind of air pressure and physics that these
Speaker 1: previous simpler versions, non electronic versions, have been using exactly.
Speaker 1: So really the electronic part in this case is the
Speaker 1: heating element that's contained within the coffee maker. That's really
Speaker 1: the big UH invention is that the heating element is
Speaker 1: not an external one. It's part of the machine. So
Speaker 1: your basic element. Basically, parts of a coffee machine include
Speaker 1: the reservoir that's where you pour the water into the
Speaker 1: What Zervar has a drain at the base of it. Uh,
Speaker 1: that drain has a one way water valve which allows
Speaker 1: water to pass through the drain but not come back up,
Speaker 1: which will be important in a moment. Yes, then you
Speaker 1: have a tube that connects that hole, that that reservoir
Speaker 1: that's connected to the valve on one side and to
Speaker 1: essentially a shower head it's what they tend to call
Speaker 1: it on the other side, because because it's sort of
Speaker 1: like a sprinkler, it's a eventually going to drip water
Speaker 1: out over your coffee right grounds exactly. So the this
Speaker 1: tube is made usually of an aluminium because aluminum is
Speaker 1: very very good at conducting heat, very good thermal conductor.
Speaker 1: And you want yes, you do. And so, uh, the
Speaker 1: tube is where that that water just will pass straight
Speaker 1: through the still water at this point it hasn't touched
Speaker 1: coffee grounds yet. And Uh, then you have the heating element,
Speaker 1: and the heating element uses resistive heating to elevate the
Speaker 1: waters temperature rapidly. And you've talked about resistive heating and
Speaker 1: previous episodes of text stuff. Sure, but for a quick reminder, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so when you have electricity passing through a conductive material,
Speaker 1: you lose some of that energy, some of that electricity.
Speaker 1: You don't get a one to one. So let's say
Speaker 1: you have a one hundred electricity units. I'm making this
Speaker 1: super simple one hundred electricity units that are going in
Speaker 1: from one side, and then you've got a little detector
Speaker 1: at the other side, and you see that there are
Speaker 1: only eighty electricity units coming out the other side, and
Speaker 1: you realize that the other twenty electricity units have been
Speaker 1: lost in the form of heat the actual conductor's temperature
Speaker 1: has increased. So that is incredibly simple, I realized. But
Speaker 1: just to illustrate the point, that's the basis behind resistive heating,
Speaker 1: as is the way electrical heating components work. Electricity passes
Speaker 1: through the conductive material, it heats up the conductive material,
Speaker 1: and usually that's waste, but you can make it work
Speaker 1: for you. UM resistance is dependent upon a couple of things.
Speaker 1: The material itself, so like you know whether it's copper
Speaker 1: or whatever, whatever conductive material you're using, And it's also
Speaker 1: dependent upon how much of that material you have, how
Speaker 1: big a diameter of wire you have, the gauge of
Speaker 1: that wire. In other words, UM, and the thicker the wire,
Speaker 1: the lower the resistance. So using that logic, if you
Speaker 1: use a very thin wire of a conductive material and
Speaker 1: you make a really tight coil of it and it's long,
Speaker 1: then you've got a lot of surface area there. You
Speaker 1: can create a lot of heat. The resistance of that
Speaker 1: wire is very high, so in a relatively small and
Speaker 1: you if you were to do that and then put
Speaker 1: that so that the the aluminium tube which typically has
Speaker 1: at least one bend in it inside your coffee maker
Speaker 1: to to give you area. Yeah, you want you want
Speaker 1: that pathway the water goes through to be long enough
Speaker 1: so that you can heat heat has a chance to
Speaker 1: heat adequately. So you you you have this kind of
Speaker 1: lining the tube. And now we get to what happens
Speaker 1: when you actually uh put water into the reservoir. So
Speaker 1: here's how the coffee making process happens. In one of
Speaker 1: these automatic drips, you pour the water into the reservoir.
Speaker 1: That water starts to move through that one way valve
Speaker 1: into the tube, fills up the tube. You turn on
Speaker 1: the switch and we turn the switch. The heating element
Speaker 1: is provided electrical current and it gets hot, so the
Speaker 1: tube starts to heat up. That heats up the water
Speaker 1: inside of it. There are no other moving parts here.
Speaker 1: All that's happening is the water gets heated to the
Speaker 1: point where it's boiling, and that boiling does the same
Speaker 1: thing it did in those other implementations we talked about
Speaker 1: with making coffee. It starts to push the water up
Speaker 1: the tube. It can't go back the way it came
Speaker 1: because that one way valve blocks the way, right, So
Speaker 1: it's sorry, guys, can't go this way, you gotta go
Speaker 1: the other way. Well, so, yeah, so the steam pushes
Speaker 1: it into that little shower head thing down onto your
Speaker 1: coffee where it drips through the coffee grounds and into
Speaker 1: a waiting craft. Yep, so you've got the filter that
Speaker 1: obviously keeps the coffee grounds from going into the caraft
Speaker 1: because no one wants that. Hopefully. I've had a few
Speaker 1: disastrous where you've you've forgotten to put in a filter
Speaker 1: or yeah, the one I have. Mine has a gold
Speaker 1: mesh filter, so you have to wash the filter after
Speaker 1: ever you use. Yeah, but but you don't have to
Speaker 1: buy filters, which is nice. Um, But anyway, you uh
Speaker 1: that that's where you get the coffee. The coffee ends
Speaker 1: up the brood. Coffee is up in the craft. Now
Speaker 1: you're not able to control how long the water stays
Speaker 1: with the coffee grounds, how much of the coffee grounds
Speaker 1: are actually covered in water, because I mean, it's just
Speaker 1: it's just being dripped on. So there are some limitations, certainly,
Speaker 1: and different machines control that for you to certain extents,
Speaker 1: but but most of them are pretty basic. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so the bright side is no moving parts, so it's
Speaker 1: really pretty a simple machine. If your coffee maker has broken,
Speaker 1: it's because the heating element isn't working, that's the most
Speaker 1: or that the one way valve is clogged up. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if if your coffee machine does stop functioning, first of all,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, yeah, I know, we're here for you. We
Speaker 1: we feel your pain. In fact, our coffee machine this
Speaker 1: morning at work, which is not an automatic drip coffee machine,
Speaker 1: was not working and it was a crisis people, which
Speaker 1: was only solved by an epic Journeys coffee shop that's
Speaker 1: about a about a five minute walk away. Yeah. Uh
Speaker 1: but but yeah, if if this happens to your coffee machine, um,
Speaker 1: and it is an automatic drip, you can you can
Speaker 1: first check the one way valve to see if it's
Speaker 1: either stuck or clogged usually just like poking a toothpick
Speaker 1: or something like that in there. We'll we'll help you
Speaker 1: see what's going on. Um. Or you can try running
Speaker 1: vinegar through the machine to clean out any calcium deposits
Speaker 1: that might have accumulated in the tubes because electricity plus
Speaker 1: aluminum plus water plus yeah, calcium happens. So afterwards, just
Speaker 1: run two batches of water through the machine to rinse
Speaker 1: out all the rest of the vinegar. Because you do
Speaker 1: not want vinegary coffee, or maybe you do, but if
Speaker 1: you do, you know, more power to you. But I
Speaker 1: will decline because I got enough frustration in my life.
Speaker 1: Uh So let's look at some of the special coffee
Speaker 1: makers that are out there, because there are a few,
Speaker 1: and I thought it would be kind of interesting to
Speaker 1: look at how some of them are different. Like the
Speaker 1: Clover coffee machine. This is one. Clover was a company
Speaker 1: that was purchased by another little company called Starbucks. So
Speaker 1: some Starbucks uh locations have Clover coffee machines and you
Speaker 1: can get a Clover brewed cup of coffee that's different
Speaker 1: from their normal cups of coffee. How how is it different?
Speaker 1: Jonathan taste better in my opinion, I've had a Clover
Speaker 1: cup of coffee. There's actually actually the Starbucks across the
Speaker 1: street from our office, how one, that's one of the
Speaker 1: locations that has one, So if you ever go across
Speaker 1: the street, then you can get one of these. Um,
Speaker 1: it takes a little longer to brew, but it's kind
Speaker 1: of worth it. I think I've been completely ignorant of
Speaker 1: clever coffee machines until we did this podcast and we
Speaker 1: have an article on it at Health which I didn't
Speaker 1: even know. I was just I was doing a search
Speaker 1: on how stuff works for coffee, just to see what
Speaker 1: all the different links we had, and when this one
Speaker 1: popped up, like, really, we've got one on clover coffee, okay,
Speaker 1: and I read it. Oh, this is kind of interesting.
Speaker 1: So it's it does have some different elements to it
Speaker 1: than your average automatic drip coffee machines do, and in fact,
Speaker 1: it has a lot in common with the French press method.
Speaker 1: So first off, it has and I love this term
Speaker 1: a quote proportional integral derivative controller into quote, which is
Speaker 1: a fancy way of saying it's got a system to
Speaker 1: really monitor the temperature of the water and make sure
Speaker 1: the temperature you want you can actually in some of
Speaker 1: these sets the specific temperatures. So if it tells you
Speaker 1: that your coffee beans should be brewed at a specific temperature,
Speaker 1: you can set that and it will keep the water
Speaker 1: as close to that temperature as possible. That's that's pretty awesome. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's pretty exciting. Then it also has a way of
Speaker 1: letting you determine how long the water and coffee grounds
Speaker 1: can party time excellent together because you want to make
Speaker 1: sure you have a nice thoroughly brewed cup of coffee,
Speaker 1: not overbrewed, but not underbrewed. So you want to get
Speaker 1: the ideal amount of those those coffee oils in the water.
Speaker 1: And also it has a brewing chamber where you are
Speaker 1: supposed to stir it because because coffee needs love, so
Speaker 1: you stir the coffee grounds a little bit in the water.
Speaker 1: Once the water go once the water is heated up
Speaker 1: and goes into the brewing chamber, that's when you get
Speaker 1: a little bit of stir to make sure it's it's
Speaker 1: properly mixed. Once it's done, then, uh, there's a piston
Speaker 1: inside that brewing chamber, and the pistons usual resting position
Speaker 1: is at the bottom of the chamber. The coffee grounds
Speaker 1: are on top of it, water comes in it commingles.
Speaker 1: The bottom of the piston has a mesh kind of filter.
Speaker 1: So then when you are done brewing the coffee, the
Speaker 1: piston rises up through the brewing chamber, lifting up all
Speaker 1: the coffee grounds, leaving the brewed coffee behind until it
Speaker 1: reaches the very top, and then you see this little
Speaker 1: cake of coffee grounds come out of the hole. But
Speaker 1: it's not done yet. The drain opens and it creates
Speaker 1: a vacuum, and the piston goes down being pulled by
Speaker 1: that vacuum. The coffee drains out and then is dispensed
Speaker 1: into your cup. At the very end, the piston comes
Speaker 1: back to the top so that you can get a
Speaker 1: little it looks like a little like windows scraper, and
Speaker 1: you pull the grounds across and there's a in the
Speaker 1: clover machines, there's a a little hole where the waiste
Speaker 1: coffee grounds go. You just pull them over into the waist,
Speaker 1: bask it essentially, and then it's ready for its next
Speaker 1: cup and you can drink your delicious cup of clear coffee.
Speaker 1: So that's that's your clover. But we have other ones
Speaker 1: we want to talk about. We've been talking about coffee,
Speaker 1: but what about what about this here espresso? I just
Speaker 1: got a shiver right in the right in the base
Speaker 1: of my neck. Okay, espresso espresso. Um, it's not a
Speaker 1: different kind of of bean. Well, I mean, I mean
Speaker 1: specific kinds of coffee. Beans are generally considered best use
Speaker 1: for espresso. They're roasted longer than beans for coffee, and
Speaker 1: they are ground very very very very fine, more more
Speaker 1: like powdered sugar than than coffee grounds. Right, So you
Speaker 1: do not ever want to put like if you had
Speaker 1: ground espresso, you would not want to put in a
Speaker 1: coffee maker. No, that would probably ree havoc on the
Speaker 1: fine little machine parts. It's just gonna it's just gonna
Speaker 1: go right through the filter. I'm gonna end up with
Speaker 1: a cloudy, nasty cup of grossness. Yes, And and espe
Speaker 1: so actually refers to a pressing. Um, it's it's from
Speaker 1: the Italian word for for press, and it's so it's
Speaker 1: made by by packing these very fine grounds very tightly
Speaker 1: and forcing a small amount of water through them, just
Speaker 1: one point five ounces. If you're being traditional about it,
Speaker 1: and most people are so we're talking. That's when you
Speaker 1: see the tamping right where risks will tamp down. So
Speaker 1: it's nice and tightly packed, right right, And uh, it's
Speaker 1: so densely packed in fact, that the we edges of
Speaker 1: each particle of powder start interlocking with each other, which
Speaker 1: makes it really difficult for the water to to get
Speaker 1: through them. Like like to thirty seconds is the ideal
Speaker 1: amount of time for one point five ounces of water
Speaker 1: to make its way through a pole of espresso. Wow,
Speaker 1: so you're using a pressure to push this water through,
Speaker 1: I imagine, not just gravity, right, definitely, Um, And an
Speaker 1: espresso machine can can actually be as simple as many
Speaker 1: of the devices we were talking about earlier. Just get
Speaker 1: like a heatable water reservoir placed beneath a disc of grounds,
Speaker 1: again using a filter to make sure that the that
Speaker 1: the grounds are stay in place and don't drip down
Speaker 1: into the water. Um. And then a single way for
Speaker 1: the water to get out of this heating system, which
Speaker 1: is a pipe at the top of the grounds container.
Speaker 1: When you boil the water in the reservoir, the heat
Speaker 1: of the system will increase the pressure. The water will
Speaker 1: be forced up through the grounds and then out through
Speaker 1: the pipe, which you'll ideally want to curve around into
Speaker 1: a little bit of a spigot, unless you want to
Speaker 1: boiling espresso fountain, which sounds festive but painful. Yes, well
Speaker 1: and not quite boiling. Um. Well, okay, in that case,
Speaker 1: it would be boiling. And that is why most people
Speaker 1: do not use this method, because the ideal temperature for
Speaker 1: espresso is below boiling uh somewhere around agrees fahrenheit. In fact,
Speaker 1: uh So most espresso machines use a pump in order
Speaker 1: to not of heat the water. So instead of it
Speaker 1: using the boiling method we've talked about, there's actually a
Speaker 1: pump mechanism right right. They otherwise work a whole lot
Speaker 1: like a regular coffee machine. Um. What happens here is
Speaker 1: that this this pump will draw water from the reservoir
Speaker 1: into a chamber containing a heating element, and when the
Speaker 1: water is heated to the correct temperature, the pump will
Speaker 1: pressurize the chamber to about fifteen atmospheres, which is two
Speaker 1: twenty pounds per square inch, and that will force the
Speaker 1: water down into your little packed, filter bound disc of
Speaker 1: grounds that's the removable part from an espresso machine. Uh,
Speaker 1: a little handle on it. Yeah and um. Then after
Speaker 1: a few seconds it will start being forced down out
Speaker 1: through a spout at the bottom of that disko into
Speaker 1: your espresso cup. You know. I actually at one time
Speaker 1: I demonstrated a handheld espresso machine. Oh that's right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So it's a handle that looked like it had a
Speaker 1: globe at the end of it, and the globe is
Speaker 1: where you would put the the espresso grounds. You tamp
Speaker 1: it down and put them in this one section of
Speaker 1: the globe. UH had a filter built into it so
Speaker 1: it wouldn't allow espresso grounds to go through, and you
Speaker 1: would pour water into it. Had a heating element that
Speaker 1: would heat it up very very hot, very very quickly,
Speaker 1: and it used pressurized gas, in this case nitrous oxide
Speaker 1: nitrous ox side cancers that would plug in through the handle.
Speaker 1: You'd screw the handle in shut very important, as it
Speaker 1: turns out, and you don't want to shoot a nitrous
Speaker 1: ox side canister across the building. Um. And then when
Speaker 1: you pull the trigger, it would release the nitrous ox
Speaker 1: side which would create the pressure to force the hot
Speaker 1: water through the grounds and thus brew your the amount
Speaker 1: of espresso. I discovered that if you are super sleepy
Speaker 1: at three am, because you are going to go live
Speaker 1: on television in and in two hours. It is the
Speaker 1: wrong time for you to decide to unscrew the end
Speaker 1: of the handle so that you can show how easy
Speaker 1: it is to insert a nitrous oxide canister when fact
Speaker 1: there's not a fully depleted nitrous oxide caster already in
Speaker 1: the device. I dosed myself with laughing gas completely by accident,
Speaker 1: nearly froze my face off in the process. Three in
Speaker 1: the morning, and meanwhile there's a little little canstor nitros
Speaker 1: ox sides spinning in the corner of the room. My
Speaker 1: dogs are wondering what happened. That was a memorable morning
Speaker 1: for me. Uh. Now we also have there's also other
Speaker 1: things we could talk about. We can talk about Curig
Speaker 1: style pod coffee makers. We didn't really go into detail
Speaker 1: on that. It's using, uh kind of just the hot
Speaker 1: water through concentrated coffee method. Sure. I actually do think
Speaker 1: that that could probably make its own episodes, especially with
Speaker 1: all of the copyright issues that are going on right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that would probably be. It really is its own episode.
Speaker 1: So we're not going to cover it now because frankly,
Speaker 1: it's just too much. But I love that you have
Speaker 1: the question in our notes, and I decided to go
Speaker 1: ahead and answer it about. What are coffee cross dolls? Yeah?
Speaker 1: What's up with those? Like Folger's instant coffee? Right? Right?
Speaker 1: Are those little packets that Starbucks sells? Yeah, the via via? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I think it right. I never know how you're supposed
Speaker 1: to pronounce the Italian words that Starbucks has copyrighted. Sometimes,
Speaker 1: why are all of your why are all the names
Speaker 1: of your of your sizes? Why do they all mean
Speaker 1: big um? At any rate? Instant coffee? So this is
Speaker 1: coffee concentrate. Really, it's coffee that was already brewed once
Speaker 1: and then essentially dehydrated through freeze drying. Dehydrated coffee. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you hydrated liquid? What? Yeah? So you brew the coffee, right,
Speaker 1: you brew it super concentrated coffee like way stronger than
Speaker 1: any human being would ever want to drink. Okay, so
Speaker 1: not like not like the coffee that I like to drink,
Speaker 1: like Turkish coffee. More than that, Okay, strong more than that.
Speaker 1: You don't want to drink it that way, trust me,
Speaker 1: it would. It would turn your eyes inside out. You
Speaker 1: don't want it. Uh So when it's rehydrated, it has
Speaker 1: it becomes a beverage resembling coffee. Yeah, if you believe
Speaker 1: the folders commercials it's indistinguishable from a fine cup of coffee,
Speaker 1: and perhaps that's true. I have become a coffee snob.
Speaker 1: It was invented in eighteen ninety in New Zealand. So
Speaker 1: the dehydration process is freeze drying. The fundamental principle here
Speaker 1: is called sublimation, which is the shift from a solid
Speaker 1: to a gas, skipping the liquid stage. So if you're
Speaker 1: going from solid to gas, you're already thinking, how is
Speaker 1: concentrate coffee either of these things? And the reason first,
Speaker 1: you gotta freeze it. You freeze it very very quickly. Uh.
Speaker 1: If you don't freeze it very quickly, then the process
Speaker 1: does not work very well. And the frozen granules of
Speaker 1: coffee are placed on a flat drying surface, which then
Speaker 1: goes into a vacuum chamber. The vacuum chambers warmed and
Speaker 1: the water within those granules, The frozen water expands quickly
Speaker 1: into gas like like a skill. It's the liquid base
Speaker 1: because the vacuum creates a difference in pressure. So so
Speaker 1: it goes straight from from frozen to oh, I'm everywhere
Speaker 1: water vapor. Yeah. And so then you have condensers that
Speaker 1: remove the water from the chamber, and all that's left
Speaker 1: is this concentrated coffee granule, and that is what ends
Speaker 1: up being the concentrate coffee that you can add to
Speaker 1: hot water and thus turn into instant coffee. So you
Speaker 1: can also turn it into a pretty good stage blood.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's an excellent color coloring for
Speaker 1: for fake blood if you ever need to make some
Speaker 1: that that in a little bit of food dye, and
Speaker 1: depending on whether you want a very viscous blood or
Speaker 1: something a little bit more liquidy, you can add some
Speaker 1: like corn starch or corn syrup or something that familiar
Speaker 1: with the corn syrup. I'm way too familiar with the
Speaker 1: corn starrup, but yeah, it adds that kind of like
Speaker 1: good rust color that the blood needs so that you
Speaker 1: don't have the candy red right right, right, Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you get the more of the rob zombie style and
Speaker 1: less of the nineteen seventies Italian horror style. Yes, got you. Well.
Speaker 1: Another thing I wanted to mention was an interesting use
Speaker 1: for coffee grounds. Now, this is an idea that came
Speaker 1: out of a Green Gadget seminar in two thousand nine,
Speaker 1: So this was kind of a concept that's never been
Speaker 1: actually implemented into a product. But I always thought it
Speaker 1: was interesting, and we do have an article on this
Speaker 1: stuff works too. It's funny because it doesn't really exists
Speaker 1: beyond the idea stage as far as I can tell.
Speaker 1: But it's the really coffee printer r I t I
Speaker 1: coffee printer. Coffee printer. Yeah, it doesn't print coffee for
Speaker 1: you to drink. It uses coffee grounds. Like like, you've
Speaker 1: already brewed your coffee, so you're already happy, Lauren. It's okay,
Speaker 1: you're already in your house. Okay, you've got the coffee.
Speaker 1: But now you've got these coffee grounds, right, What are
Speaker 1: you gonna do with them? Because coffee grounds are acidic,
Speaker 1: so you can't just you know, you can use them
Speaker 1: in compost, but they are acidic, so you have to
Speaker 1: be careful what kind of plants you feed them too,
Speaker 1: because some plants are not gonna do well with acidic soils. Um,
Speaker 1: So what do you do with your coffee grounds once
Speaker 1: you're done with them? Besides just toss them away or
Speaker 1: or maybe compost them. Well, the coffee printer, maybe, as
Speaker 1: for you, you would end up using the coffee grounds.
Speaker 1: You put them into a little canister that would fit
Speaker 1: into the printer. It would actually be um still uh
Speaker 1: external to the printer, so it's not like not like
Speaker 1: one of those things where you have to lift up
Speaker 1: a lid and get access to it. It would actually
Speaker 1: be poking up out of the top. You had some
Speaker 1: water to it, and essentially the water and coffee grounds
Speaker 1: combine so that you get some of those oils and
Speaker 1: you're staining the paper coffee stains and it also, yeah,
Speaker 1: I've done that before, and of course I've used coffee
Speaker 1: to make kind of the antiquated looking paper. You know that.
Speaker 1: That's one of the treatments you can use very useful parchment. Yes,
Speaker 1: if you were ever in a Renaissance festival, giant air
Speaker 1: quotes and you have to write letters to people as
Speaker 1: your character at the Renaissance festival. It's part of the rehearsal.
Speaker 1: Just yeah, I had to. I can't tell you how
Speaker 1: many love and hate letters I had to write for
Speaker 1: the Georgia Renaissance Festival as part of the rehearsal process.
Speaker 1: I would always treat mine this way so that way
Speaker 1: it would look like an old letter. Presentation was important,
Speaker 1: of course at any rate, So with the printer the
Speaker 1: neat design here. In order to make this really green,
Speaker 1: they wanted to not just make the ink green, not
Speaker 1: literally green, but you know, economically or environmentally conscious, right,
Speaker 1: They decided to remove the useful feature that a lot
Speaker 1: of printers have where it automatically moves the cartridge across
Speaker 1: the paper as it prints. You have to manually grab
Speaker 1: onto the cartridge and move it backwards and forwards, so
Speaker 1: it's going left and right across the page, like like
Speaker 1: a manual loom, manual shuttle for a loom, rather than
Speaker 1: I don't know how many of you actually have any
Speaker 1: idea of what a manual loom looks like. That might
Speaker 1: be a very specific reference locas arts game loom. It's
Speaker 1: a great game at any rate. Uh So, yeah, you
Speaker 1: would manually move this left and right across the page.
Speaker 1: Presumably there would be some sort of automatic system to
Speaker 1: feed the page through the printer, and also there would
Speaker 1: have to be some automatic ink jet system to actually
Speaker 1: have the ink print on the paper itself. So I
Speaker 1: don't know how that would have been reconciled, Like, how
Speaker 1: what was the solution to that? Because obviously the speed
Speaker 1: at which I move the cartridge left and right might
Speaker 1: be different from the speed anyone else does, so you've
Speaker 1: got to figure all that into your design. But it
Speaker 1: was a really interesting concept. Again, it's not a real
Speaker 1: product you can go out and get, but you know,
Speaker 1: just like, yeah, like if coffee stains things, why not
Speaker 1: do it on purpose and make use of it and
Speaker 1: then you don't have to go out and buy toner.
Speaker 1: You would just use your old coffee grounds. Just kind
Speaker 1: of a neat idea. Plus, you know, if people were
Speaker 1: really interested they could they might not be complaining that
Speaker 1: they didn't get a handwritten letter because their letters smell
Speaker 1: like coffee and it's hand printed, so that actually counts
Speaker 1: for mark. Like, I put a lot of effort into
Speaker 1: printing this one sheet of paper. I had to move
Speaker 1: that cartridge back left and right like two thousand times.
Speaker 1: Uh So, yeah, that was you know, this was a
Speaker 1: fun little topic to go into. And maybe we will
Speaker 1: revisit the sort of curis pod style coffee machines because
Speaker 1: there's a lot of controversy around that. There is there is, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would I would love to come back and talk
Speaker 1: about that. Shout out to Paul on Twitter for suggesting
Speaker 1: me for this episode. I think I think Jonathan you
Speaker 1: were talking about like, oh, I want to maybe this
Speaker 1: coffee episode, like who could I possibly get to co
Speaker 1: host it? And Paul, who follows both of us, was like,
Speaker 1: I think Lauren talks about coffee like every day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, it was a perfect choice, perfect
Speaker 1: choice for co host. So Paul, thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Anyone out there who wants to get in touch with me,
Speaker 1: whether it's about an upcoming episode idea, or maybe there's
Speaker 1: a particular co host you want to hear about a
Speaker 1: particular topic, you know, let me know, or maybe there's
Speaker 1: an interview subject anything like that. You gotta let me know.
Speaker 1: I'm not psychic. Send me a message email addresses tech
Speaker 1: Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me
Speaker 1: a line on Twitter, on Facebook, on tumbler, all three those.
Speaker 1: I use the handle tech Stuff hs W and hey kids,
Speaker 1: if you if you miss me and Jonathan talking to
Speaker 1: each other all the time, we still do that. Yeah
Speaker 1: into microphones even us. Yeah. Yeah, we are joined by
Speaker 1: our colleague Joe McCormick over on the podcast Forward Thinking.
Speaker 1: If you do not already listen to that, then you
Speaker 1: can figure out all all about it at FW thinking
Speaker 1: dot com. Yeah, it's a great show. We talk about
Speaker 1: the vision of the future. It's it's a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: We talk all about all sorts of stuff. We've even
Speaker 1: tackled a few science fiction films over on that one
Speaker 1: and and that's been a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Also a lot of technology goes goes over in that
Speaker 1: in that show, but but some non technological things as well.
Speaker 1: So if you're if you're interested in general science, it's
Speaker 1: a good it's a good fit too. You can also
Speaker 1: catch Lauren as what the hosts of What the Stuff,
Speaker 1: as well as Brain Stuff, exactly what I was about
Speaker 1: to say. You gotta go check those out. They are great.
Speaker 1: We have, of course, several of our other colleagues are
Speaker 1: as hosts on that show, including you check. Occasionally they
Speaker 1: let me be in front of the camera and I
Speaker 1: get to talk funny things and smart things to folks.
Speaker 1: Then that's great. So yeah, check all that out. It's fantastic,
Speaker 1: And remember to get in touch with me and we
Speaker 1: will talk to you again really soon for more on
Speaker 1: this and thousands of other topics. Because at house stock
Speaker 1: works dot com,