Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech. And just the other
Speaker 1: day I did a long episode about the history of
Speaker 1: lawns and lawn mowers, and I got to dive into
Speaker 1: some medieval history along the way to set up, you know,
Speaker 1: why we even have lawns in the first place. And
Speaker 1: today I thought I would do something similar and that
Speaker 1: I thought we would explore the technology around coffee. And
Speaker 1: you might be thinking, hey, Jonathan, it sounds like you're
Speaker 1: just making episodes out of stuff that you can see
Speaker 1: from your chair right there in your home office. And
Speaker 1: to you, I reply, s, don't you worry a little
Speaker 1: hit about that. It's none of your concern, So let's
Speaker 1: talk about coffee now. I also know that episodes like
Speaker 1: this one and My Lawnmower one are going into a
Speaker 1: lot of history and culture type stuff, not strictly the technology.
Speaker 1: But I always feel like an understanding of technology, a
Speaker 1: real understanding of it, requires that, you know, we also
Speaker 1: explore the greater context, Like we could just talk about
Speaker 1: how the technology works at all and how someone came
Speaker 1: up with an idea and maybe someone else improved on
Speaker 1: that idea. But I think that has limited value unless
Speaker 1: you explore why were people thinking about this in the
Speaker 1: first place, and what the world was like before and
Speaker 1: then after that technology. Also, I've recorded more than episodes
Speaker 1: of tech stuff, so changing things up keeps it fresh
Speaker 1: from me, and then I don't burn out. But hey,
Speaker 1: you folks are my listeners. If you like how these
Speaker 1: episodes play out with a deeper dive into the context
Speaker 1: around tech, let me know. Now. If you hate them,
Speaker 1: you can also let me know, but do it nicely,
Speaker 1: because yeah, it's just me doing all the researching and
Speaker 1: writing and recording of these shows. Now. Coffee is one
Speaker 1: of those subjects that I find particularly fascinating because there
Speaker 1: are countless people obsessed with it, and yet details about
Speaker 1: its origin and evolution in society are somewhat muddled. It's
Speaker 1: amazing that we've got this huge industry around coffee, but
Speaker 1: we don't have a lot of historical records to refer
Speaker 1: to when it comes time to documenting everything about it.
Speaker 1: Maybe people were just too jittery to write anything down,
Speaker 1: So in the absence of facts, people will fill up
Speaker 1: the gap with speculation. That's just a general rule of thumb.
Speaker 1: You didn't think this was gonna be an episode about
Speaker 1: critical thinking, but bam, right out of the gate, I'm
Speaker 1: hitting you with it. Now, if you google history of
Speaker 1: coffee or origins of coffee, you're gonna find results, like
Speaker 1: a lot of them. I mean like million of them.
Speaker 1: I know because I did it. And if you spend
Speaker 1: enough time skimming through a few of these different results,
Speaker 1: you're probably going to find several very different explanations about
Speaker 1: the history of coffee. Some might start as early as
Speaker 1: the sixth century of the Common Era, others might flip
Speaker 1: ahead of millennia or so. So this tells us that
Speaker 1: we should probably not put too much stock into any
Speaker 1: one narrative about coffee. It maybe that none of these
Speaker 1: accounts are correct, or maybe they all are, in some
Speaker 1: way or another at least partly correct. So we shall
Speaker 1: proceed with caution. First, let's talk about coffee the plant
Speaker 1: to understand what it is. Now, maybe you've never seen
Speaker 1: one in person. By the way, if you ever find
Speaker 1: yourself on the Big Island of Hawaii, you can go
Speaker 1: to the Kona region and tour one or more coffee plantations.
Speaker 1: I've done the tour of Greenwell Farms and it was
Speaker 1: super nifty, And no, I don't have any connection to
Speaker 1: that farm or that brand of coffee. I just liked
Speaker 1: the people that I talked to there, and I found
Speaker 1: the tour really fascinating, and the various animals roaming around
Speaker 1: the farm were super cool as well. Coffee plants don't
Speaker 1: get particularly huge. They typically fall somewhere in the range
Speaker 1: from shrub to medium sized tree. Cultivators typically trim the
Speaker 1: branches back to keep them manageable, especially if you're cultivating
Speaker 1: them in rows. You want those rows to be nice
Speaker 1: and neat, and it allows you to fit more plants
Speaker 1: per area of land. They have glossy green leaves and
Speaker 1: these plants sprout small white flowers in the springtime, followed
Speaker 1: by berries or the coffee cherry. And these are about
Speaker 1: half an inch in length or about one point three centimeters,
Speaker 1: And these are the coffee cherries. Inside each cherry are
Speaker 1: two green seeds. These are the actual coffee beans, which
Speaker 1: aren't really beans at all. Their seeds. Inside each cherry
Speaker 1: are two green seeds, and these are the coffee beans,
Speaker 1: and they're not really beans at all. They are seeds
Speaker 1: and they only become brown after you roast them, and
Speaker 1: that comes much, much, much later. The fruit of the
Speaker 1: coffee cherry is sweet. You can actually chomp on these
Speaker 1: if you want, but there's not a lot of pulp
Speaker 1: to these fruits. A coffee cherry is mostly skin and
Speaker 1: the two seeds, and then you've got a little bit
Speaker 1: of fruity pulp called mucilage on the exterior of the seeds.
Speaker 1: The seeds are super hard, so you don't really chew
Speaker 1: on the seeds. It would really hurt your teeth. And
Speaker 1: it takes a lot of work to eat the tiny
Speaker 1: amount of fruit that's on a coffee cherries, more work
Speaker 1: than what it's worth, which is why you don't go
Speaker 1: to the grocery store and load up on coffee cherries
Speaker 1: as a sort of pick me up fruit snack. But
Speaker 1: what's the history of humans cultivating coffee for its caffeinated kick.
Speaker 1: That was a lot of alliteration that I did not
Speaker 1: initially intend. Well, there's one tale that is pretty widespread
Speaker 1: to the point that I think we can really consider
Speaker 1: it folklore. Now this doesn't necessarily mean it's not true.
Speaker 1: It just means that, you know, it's a story that's
Speaker 1: been widely passed on through oral tradition, giving lots of
Speaker 1: opportunities for that story to change in little ways. I
Speaker 1: think it's probably a little fanciful, but again I don't
Speaker 1: know for sure. But the story goes that there was
Speaker 1: a shepherd in Ethiopia who was tending to a trip
Speaker 1: of goats. And yes, I did just google what to
Speaker 1: call a group of goats a trip? I guess. I
Speaker 1: guess the word heard would have been fine, but I
Speaker 1: wanted to get, you know, more specific. And besides, a
Speaker 1: trip of goats seems fitting, as this shepherd's goats were
Speaker 1: nibbling on some little shrub plants and then they were
Speaker 1: tripping all over the place. Man, those goats were tripping,
Speaker 1: or rather they were jumping, skipping and leaping, one might
Speaker 1: almost say dancing. And the shepherd, someone who clearly had
Speaker 1: a lot of time on their hands, decided, what the heck,
Speaker 1: I'm going to see what this is about. And so
Speaker 1: the shepherd then took some of the berries growing on
Speaker 1: these plants and showed on them, and then felt a
Speaker 1: surge of energy. So if you ever wondered whose job
Speaker 1: it was to test the various types of fruits and
Speaker 1: mushrooms and everything else to make sure that it was
Speaker 1: safe to eat. I'm guessing was folks like our shepherd
Speaker 1: in this story. Here. Also funny side note, the coffee
Speaker 1: shop I go to all the time has a name
Speaker 1: that references this folk tale. The coffee shop is called
Speaker 1: Dancing Goats. Now when this story happened, if it happened
Speaker 1: at all, is also a matter of debate, but generally
Speaker 1: we're looking at around mid ninth century of the Common Era,
Speaker 1: or around eight d fifty a d if you prefer.
Speaker 1: But as I say, there's not really any evidence that
Speaker 1: it definitively happened. And heck, I'm not sure anyone would
Speaker 1: even think to record that kind of event. I mean,
Speaker 1: dear Diary, I saw my goats eat some berries and
Speaker 1: then they went totally bonkers. So I ate some berries,
Speaker 1: and I too went bonkers. Tomorrow I opened a Starbucks.
Speaker 1: Like that just didn't happen. So there are some facts
Speaker 1: that at least make the story or some variant of
Speaker 1: it possibly true, And the big one is that the
Speaker 1: coffee plant grows naturally in Ethiopia in a region called Kafa,
Speaker 1: So did coffee get its name from kafa, or did
Speaker 1: kafa get its name from coffee? Heck, if I know,
Speaker 1: there are other words that sound a lot like coffee
Speaker 1: that are directly associated with coffee. So this is one
Speaker 1: of those that I think I will leave to the
Speaker 1: linguistic experts. Now. It's possible that some people had discovered
Speaker 1: the properties of this odd little fruit long before the
Speaker 1: ninth century. But the first written account about coffee that
Speaker 1: I could find evidence of came from a philosopher named
Speaker 1: Rozis from Persia who lived right around the time that
Speaker 1: the Shepherd's story might have happened. Rozis wrote of a
Speaker 1: medicine used by the peoples of Ethiopia. It was a
Speaker 1: drink made from the fruit of the coffee plant, but
Speaker 1: from the description it didn't sound like coffee as in
Speaker 1: the drink that we enjoy these days. Yemen is a
Speaker 1: possible origin point for coffee, the drink as we know it.
Speaker 1: Sufi monks and Yemen brought coffee cherries from Ethiopia, and
Speaker 1: then they cultivated the plants, and Yemen it grew just fine.
Speaker 1: And Yemen as well. The monks made a sort of
Speaker 1: tea from the coffee plants. Leaves to help them stay
Speaker 1: awake longer and get more prey and done. Now, this
Speaker 1: would have been around the fourteen hundreds, and it's possible
Speaker 1: that these monks gradually developed the process of roasting and
Speaker 1: grinding coffee beans to make their stay awake juice. In
Speaker 1: the fifteen hundreds, the Turks came a colon. The Ottoman
Speaker 1: Empire was an expansion mode, and while it never extended
Speaker 1: all the way down to Ethiopia, it did get quite
Speaker 1: the foothold in the Arabian Peninsula, which is where the
Speaker 1: Turks first encountered coffee, and they really liked it like
Speaker 1: a lot, and they called it covey, which in Turkish
Speaker 1: meant the wine of Arabia. The drink made from roasted
Speaker 1: coffee beans soon found its way throughout the Ottoman Empire,
Speaker 1: which was enormous and spanned parts of Europe and North
Speaker 1: Africa at this point, and growing coffee outside of places
Speaker 1: like Yemen and Ethiopia proved to be challenging. In part,
Speaker 1: that was because the plants thrived in very warm, like
Speaker 1: tropical style climates and temperate Europe was just a bad match.
Speaker 1: It was too cold. But the merchants selling coffee also
Speaker 1: saw a threat to their trade if people were able
Speaker 1: to grow the coffee plants in any old place, and
Speaker 1: so they would frequently boil or otherwise alter the beans
Speaker 1: before selling them, so that those beans would be infertile.
Speaker 1: If you were to plant them, nothing would grow from them,
Speaker 1: and then they would ship those off to be sold
Speaker 1: in places like Europe. It wouldn't be until the seventeen
Speaker 1: hundreds before someone, that being the Dutch, was able to
Speaker 1: get hold of viable coffee beans and find a place
Speaker 1: to grow them outside of the general areas of Yemen
Speaker 1: in Ethiopia. But we'll get back to that. By the
Speaker 1: mid sixteenth century, coffee shops were opening up in Constantinople.
Speaker 1: Now you can't go back to Constantinople, so if you
Speaker 1: have a dating Constantinople, she'll be waiting in his stan bull.
Speaker 1: I have no idea if it was common for a
Speaker 1: coffee house to open up right across the street from
Speaker 1: another coffee house, or if that's just something we do
Speaker 1: here now. Over in Western Europe, it said that some
Speaker 1: high ranking Catholic priests resisted the spread of coffee, declaring
Speaker 1: it to be a devil's brew. I mean it kept
Speaker 1: you awake, It gave you energy. It clearly was unnatural.
Speaker 1: But the Pope apparently like the stuff and said, Noah,
Speaker 1: this is fine. It's fine. And so coffee spread throughout
Speaker 1: the Christian world as well over in England, where they
Speaker 1: had already had a little tiff with the Catholic Church,
Speaker 1: it was now the Anglican Church in control. Over in England,
Speaker 1: they got their first coffee shop by sixteen fifty. That
Speaker 1: was just a century after the earliest ones we know about,
Speaker 1: opening up in Constantinople, which really surprised me because frequently,
Speaker 1: when it comes to trends in the Middle Ages and Renaissance,
Speaker 1: England typically is a latecomer because it was, you know, separate.
Speaker 1: It was not part of the mainland of Europe. Still
Speaker 1: isn't as far as I know. I haven't looked at
Speaker 1: a map recently. But in this case, the Brits got
Speaker 1: their coffee before the French started opening up their own
Speaker 1: coffee shops. Coffee even made its way over to the
Speaker 1: colonies in North America, with a coffee shop opening up
Speaker 1: in what would become the city of Boston in sixteen
Speaker 1: seventy six. Okay, so the Dutch I mentioned that they
Speaker 1: got some viable coffee beans essentially smuggled them out of Arabia,
Speaker 1: but they had to find a good place to grow coffee,
Speaker 1: and that turned out to be Indonesia, specifically the colony
Speaker 1: of Java, which is why we sometimes referred to coffee
Speaker 1: as Java. The Dutch secured their coffee beans through trade
Speaker 1: with a port city in Yemen, and that port city's
Speaker 1: name was Mocha. That's how we got Mocha Java. Starting
Speaker 1: in the early eighteenth century, from their colonialism, would spread
Speaker 1: coffee to other parts of the world, such as Sumatra
Speaker 1: that's an Indonesian island west of Java, Central America, South America,
Speaker 1: the Caribbean, and Hawaii. And before you can throw some
Speaker 1: coffee scenes or beans into a grinder and prep your
Speaker 1: morning cup of joe, there are a lot of stuffs
Speaker 1: that have to take place between growing it and brewing it. First,
Speaker 1: someone's got to harvest those cherries from the coffee plants.
Speaker 1: And in fact, there is a whole element to this
Speaker 1: story that I'm not going to dive into, but it
Speaker 1: does involve some pretty terrible conditions for workers in various
Speaker 1: parts of the world. There's a lot of exploitation going
Speaker 1: on whenever you're talking about mass farming in places like
Speaker 1: Central America or South America, or Indonesia or Africa, you've
Speaker 1: got a lot of opportunities for companies to do things
Speaker 1: that are not necessarily the best for the employees. But
Speaker 1: that's a matter for another episode. On smaller farms, harvesting
Speaker 1: might be done by hand, possibly with some hand tools,
Speaker 1: but on the big farms, heavy machinery is frequently used.
Speaker 1: While some coffee farms use pickers to harvest cherries by hand,
Speaker 1: like just with their hands alone, others rely on some
Speaker 1: of those simple hand tools. I was talking about one
Speaker 1: tool I've seen for harvesting coffee really surprised me. I
Speaker 1: hadn't really seen anything like it before. Or kind of
Speaker 1: looks like a pair of tongs, and that there are
Speaker 1: two rods that extend out from a plastic handle, and
Speaker 1: the handle actually has motors in it that vibrate and
Speaker 1: rotate those fiberglass rods. So while you're operating this harvesting device,
Speaker 1: those rods are spinning and vibrating very quickly. To harvest
Speaker 1: the coffee cherries, first, you put a tarp down to
Speaker 1: catch all the cherries that are going to fall, which
Speaker 1: is pretty much the same thing you would be doing
Speaker 1: if you were harvesting everything just using your hands alone.
Speaker 1: Then you would position the rods on either side of
Speaker 1: a branch that happens step berries on it. You'd squeeze
Speaker 1: the handle so that the two rods come together and
Speaker 1: and touch the branch on either side, thus transmitting vibrations
Speaker 1: to the branch, and then you move the tongs down
Speaker 1: along the length of the branch to shake the berries free.
Speaker 1: It's still a lot of work because you have to
Speaker 1: move from branch to branch, but it's more efficient than
Speaker 1: doing it all with just your fingers. Now, this is
Speaker 1: a fairly simple device with electric motors in the handle
Speaker 1: that draw power from a battery pack, so I'm not
Speaker 1: going to go into deep detail. There's not a whole
Speaker 1: lot of of advanced tech there. It's just the idea
Speaker 1: of creative vibrating motor that transmits vibrations to a rod.
Speaker 1: Those rods transmit the vibrations to a branch you knock
Speaker 1: the cherries loose. Another tool I've seen for this kind
Speaker 1: of harvesting looks almost like a weed whacker or a
Speaker 1: weed eater, except instead of having a rotating blade or
Speaker 1: a rotating wire. At the end of the device, you
Speaker 1: actually have what looks like almost like a fiberglass rake
Speaker 1: um or a fork. In fact, it does look like
Speaker 1: an enormous gas powered fork, and the motor when you
Speaker 1: turn it on, makes the tines of that fork vibrate.
Speaker 1: So again, you would just use this device to grip
Speaker 1: several branches of a coffee planet. Once you give some
Speaker 1: gas to the motor, it causes the times to shake,
Speaker 1: and it shakes the cherries free from the coffee plant,
Speaker 1: and presumably you catch those on a tarp. But for
Speaker 1: really big farms, there are some massive machines that farmers
Speaker 1: used to harvest coffee. When we come back, i'll explain more,
Speaker 1: but first let's take a quick coffee break, all right.
Speaker 1: So for smaller coffee farms, or maybe ones that are
Speaker 1: on like really uneven terrain, you might not be able
Speaker 1: to use big machines. They might just not be able
Speaker 1: to maneuver through those. But for coffee plantations that are
Speaker 1: really huge, particularly ones that have coffee plants and neat
Speaker 1: rows and fairly level ground, you get a lot of options.
Speaker 1: One harvester I've seen is a big device that's actually
Speaker 1: stationary when it's an operation, and it looks kind of
Speaker 1: like a big metal wagon with an archimedean screw inside
Speaker 1: of it and a shoot like protrusion at one end,
Speaker 1: which is where the coffee cherries will come shooting out
Speaker 1: and into another container. So you would tow this big
Speaker 1: thing to the end of like a pair of rows
Speaker 1: of coffee plants that stretch pretty far back, and between
Speaker 1: the rows you lay down a tarp. This tarp will
Speaker 1: become a sort of conveyor belt for the harvester, and
Speaker 1: workers would go down the rows of coffee plants and
Speaker 1: use pruning shears to trim back branches that have berries
Speaker 1: on them. All of these branches with berries on them
Speaker 1: fall down to the tarp below, and once that's done,
Speaker 1: you feed the tarp into essentially a roller in the harvester,
Speaker 1: which will start to pull the tarp into the machine.
Speaker 1: Uh And they typically also has some sort of hinged
Speaker 1: metal frame that you can use a sort of a ramp,
Speaker 1: so that way the tarp is going up at a
Speaker 1: at a gentler angle. It's not going up so steep
Speaker 1: that everything falls off the tarp. So the machine starts
Speaker 1: pulling the tarp toward it and everything on the tarp
Speaker 1: gets pulled along with it and dumped into a chamber.
Speaker 1: And in that chamber there is that Archimedean screw at
Speaker 1: the bottom. And if you don't know what that is,
Speaker 1: is a cylindrical drum with a helical blade. It's the
Speaker 1: type of thing that Archimedes used to draw water from
Speaker 1: areas of low elevation to high elevation, and in this case,
Speaker 1: it's used to transport the coffee cherries up toward another
Speaker 1: set of devices attached to this machine. So the branches
Speaker 1: and berries and leaves and all go into this chamber
Speaker 1: with the turning our comedian screw. The rotational motion separates
Speaker 1: the cherries from the branches, and the cherries effectively roll
Speaker 1: up the screw because of that rotation. This is a
Speaker 1: little hard to explain an audio, so I recommend you
Speaker 1: check out the videos of watching an archimedian screw in action.
Speaker 1: You'll see how it all works. And the cherries and
Speaker 1: maybe some bits of leaves and twigs hit a shaking
Speaker 1: grid at the top of that archimedian screw. This shaking
Speaker 1: grid acts like a filter. It allows the cherries to
Speaker 1: pass through the filter. Everything else doesn't or at least
Speaker 1: most of everything else doesn't. And then the cherries ride
Speaker 1: a second conveyor belt that has you know, these little
Speaker 1: ridges to keep the cherries from rolling back down, And
Speaker 1: this belt carries the cherries up a shoot and then
Speaker 1: they come out the other end and fall into whatever
Speaker 1: containment vessel you have to collect all those coffee cherries. Uh,
Speaker 1: you could end up with something that looks like essentially
Speaker 1: a dumpster full of coffee cherries, and the branches and
Speaker 1: leaves they get left behind are are chopped out quite
Speaker 1: a bit. They eventually exit the machine through an exhaust,
Speaker 1: kind of like the way a lawnmower has one of
Speaker 1: those little side exhaust ports where cut grass flies out. Now,
Speaker 1: this sort of device can harvest a lot of cherries,
Speaker 1: but it does require a ton of manual pruning work
Speaker 1: at the top end of it. There are some other
Speaker 1: harvesters that take the cherries right off the plants without
Speaker 1: needing to cut the branches onto a tarp first, and
Speaker 1: they look pretty funky. Now, there are a lot of
Speaker 1: variations on this next type of harvester, but they do
Speaker 1: share a few things in common. And the easiest way
Speaker 1: I can think of to describe this is imagine a
Speaker 1: mechanical automated car wash. You know, you drive your car
Speaker 1: into the bay of this car wash, and then once
Speaker 1: the car washes operating, these big machines will rotate giant
Speaker 1: brushes that come up against your car and scrub all
Speaker 1: that road grime off your vehicle and then you drive out. Well,
Speaker 1: imagine that you've got a car wash, but the car
Speaker 1: wash itself is on wheels, So instead of the cars
Speaker 1: driving into a stationary bay, you could have a line
Speaker 1: of cars that are you know, bumper to bumper in
Speaker 1: a line, and you have this wheeled car wash go
Speaker 1: down the line of parked cars, and the car wash
Speaker 1: is the thing that moves. Well, that's kind of what
Speaker 1: these harvester things are. Acceptance to have a car wash. Obviously,
Speaker 1: they are harvesting coffee cherries off of plants. So you've
Speaker 1: got this big machine that has a space where a
Speaker 1: tree can pass through the middle of this machine. The
Speaker 1: machine is on wheels, so it can move because you know,
Speaker 1: these are coffee plants. They're not ents from Middle Earth,
Speaker 1: so they don't walk around on their own no matter
Speaker 1: how much caffeine is in them. Some of these machines
Speaker 1: are things that you have to tow behind a tractor,
Speaker 1: But some of them have a tractor like system built
Speaker 1: into the actual machine. So some of them have their
Speaker 1: own engine and motor that allows you to drive the harvester,
Speaker 1: whereas others are a separate piece of machinery that hooks
Speaker 1: onto the back of a tractor. I've seen both versions,
Speaker 1: but either way, a driver manipulates this machine, so it
Speaker 1: moves down a line of coffee plants in order to
Speaker 1: harvest the cherries. So how is that harvesting actually working well?
Speaker 1: On the inside where the trees are passing through, You've
Speaker 1: got poles with fiberglass rods on either side of where
Speaker 1: the coffee plants passed through. So it kind of looks
Speaker 1: like one of those round brushes where you've got the
Speaker 1: bristles on all sides of the round brush. It looks
Speaker 1: like a pair of those, except not quite as thick,
Speaker 1: and you've got a bunch of fiberglass rods instead of bristles,
Speaker 1: and instead of big rotating brushes from a car wash,
Speaker 1: you've got these things and they do rotate, and the
Speaker 1: fiberglass rods vibrate as they're rotating, and it's this motion
Speaker 1: that shakes loose the coffee cherries as the plants pass
Speaker 1: through the middle of the machine. At the bottom of
Speaker 1: this are some hinged panels that can allow a tree
Speaker 1: trunk to pass through in one direction, but the panels
Speaker 1: locked from being able to go in the opposite direction.
Speaker 1: So they're hinged in a way where uh they swing
Speaker 1: open to allow a tree trunk to pass through, but
Speaker 1: when they close, they can't go back the other way.
Speaker 1: So once you head down a row of coffee plants,
Speaker 1: you're kind of committed. The hinged panels catch stuff that's
Speaker 1: falling down from the coffee plants that gets shaken loose,
Speaker 1: and all that material, including cherries, toigs, leaves, bugs, moves
Speaker 1: towards a pair of conveyor belt, one on either side
Speaker 1: of the inner part of the machine. These conveyor belts
Speaker 1: move everything up to either a containment chamber or out
Speaker 1: of to a shoot where they get put into a
Speaker 1: separate trailer that's being hauled behind a different tractor, perhaps
Speaker 1: one row over. I've seen both um, but some of
Speaker 1: these things are kind of an all in one machine
Speaker 1: where they can do all the driving, the harvesting and
Speaker 1: collecting of coffee cherries by themselves. And don't need any
Speaker 1: additional equipment or other people operating that equipment. Some of
Speaker 1: them are used in concert with other heavy duty machinery.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of videos online if you want
Speaker 1: to see these coffee harvesters in action. It might be
Speaker 1: a lot more helpful rather than trying to imagine my
Speaker 1: poorly constructed word picture. Uh. The the machines are pretty impressive,
Speaker 1: and they're actually based off older harvesters that have been
Speaker 1: used for stuff like blueberry farms. Now, before I did
Speaker 1: this podcast, I had never seen anything like this. Being
Speaker 1: the city boy I am, and also I mean I
Speaker 1: have actually done some very very minor work on a farm.
Speaker 1: Uh it's barely worth mentioning. But it was a much
Speaker 1: smaller operation, not something that would have this big equipment.
Speaker 1: So I've never seen anything like this. It was really
Speaker 1: cool to learn about it. One of the videos I
Speaker 1: watched for this episode had a coffee farmer named James
Speaker 1: Chemo Falconer, and he talked about the efficiency of these
Speaker 1: types of harvesting machines. Now, according to Falconer, a skilled
Speaker 1: coffee picker would be able to harvest around two hundred
Speaker 1: pounds of coffee cherries in a day. One of these
Speaker 1: harvesters could actually harvest forty thousand pounds of cherries in
Speaker 1: around six hours, so it is phenomenally efficient compared to
Speaker 1: manual labor. Now keep in mind we are still talking
Speaker 1: about coffee cherries here Again. According to Falconer, there's about
Speaker 1: a five to one ratio in weight of cherries to
Speaker 1: weight of green coffee beans for natural coffee. Some varieties
Speaker 1: of coffee might have cherries with slightly more or less pulp.
Speaker 1: That would change the ratio a bit. But if you
Speaker 1: harvest forty thousand pounds of coffee cherries, that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: you've got forty pounds of coffee beans. It's like a
Speaker 1: fifth of that. Now, the harvested cherries have to be
Speaker 1: washed to remove dirt, stems and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: There's typically an early sorting process to help separate out
Speaker 1: unsuitable coffee cherries from the good stuff. One way that
Speaker 1: you can do that is dumping all the cherries into
Speaker 1: giant vats of water. Cherries that float to the top
Speaker 1: aren't ripe. They can be skimmed off and they can
Speaker 1: be removed and then punished. I'm kidding, they're not punished,
Speaker 1: but they are turned into fertilizer, typically so that you
Speaker 1: can use those to help fertilize the ground for future
Speaker 1: coffee plants. Now, what happens next is dependent upon the
Speaker 1: post harvest process for that particular coffee farm or plantation.
Speaker 1: Dry regions might use natural processed coffee, which involves leaving
Speaker 1: the seeds inside the coffee cherry and allowing the whole
Speaker 1: thing to dry out, which takes about four weeks and
Speaker 1: it requires lots of supervision to make sure that mold
Speaker 1: doesn't form on those coffee cherries. And after drying, workers
Speaker 1: put cherries into a huling machine. Uh. There are a
Speaker 1: lot of different versions of this. One of them is
Speaker 1: just essentially a big vibrating tray. You put the coffee
Speaker 1: cherries into this vibrating tray. It often has a rough bottom,
Speaker 1: and the vigorous shaking of that tray using an electric
Speaker 1: motor to to shake this thing ends up rubbing and
Speaker 1: shaking the cherry so that the dried skin and dried fruit,
Speaker 1: and the parchment on the seeds itself all gets rubbed off,
Speaker 1: which really means that those those seeds, those coffee beans. Now,
Speaker 1: the green coffee beans just need to be polished before
Speaker 1: they're sent off to roasters because you've already done all
Speaker 1: the work of removing everything else that's around the bean.
Speaker 1: But another climates, different post harvesting methods work better. So
Speaker 1: you've got stuff like your honey processed coffee or your
Speaker 1: wet hull process, which is mostly used in Indonesia, and
Speaker 1: you've got your washed coffee processing. Now there are several
Speaker 1: things that differentiate these processes, and even plantations that use
Speaker 1: the same general process will have their own way of
Speaker 1: executing that process. So there's no I can't give you
Speaker 1: a universal here's how it works. I can give you
Speaker 1: some generalities with each. So with honey processing, the cherries
Speaker 1: are skinned right away after harvest, but the sticky coating
Speaker 1: on the seeds that mucilage. That mucilage is allowed to
Speaker 1: stay on the seeds while they go to areas to
Speaker 1: be dried out. The washed process involves pulping the seeds
Speaker 1: not long after harvest. You allow the seeds to ferment
Speaker 1: a bit like overnight, and then you wash the musilage
Speaker 1: off before you allow the coffee to dry, and that
Speaker 1: coffee will dry faster because it doesn't have that insulation
Speaker 1: around it. But that also means that it's not in
Speaker 1: contact with the fruit for as long, and that will
Speaker 1: change the flavor profile. In the case of natural processing,
Speaker 1: honey processing, and washed processing, the goal is to get
Speaker 1: the moisture level of the seeds down to around eleven
Speaker 1: before you move on to hulling the seeds, to get
Speaker 1: that thin layer of parchment off the coffee seeds before
Speaker 1: you can send them off to roasters. Now, the wet
Speaker 1: hull process of Indonesia is a little bit different because
Speaker 1: of the high humidity levels in Indonesia, it would be
Speaker 1: really hard to dry seeds down to eleven water content
Speaker 1: on their own, even with the washed process method, So
Speaker 1: instead they pulp the cherries so that you get the
Speaker 1: seeds the coffee beans, and then they dry those coffee
Speaker 1: beans until the water content is around thirty percent or
Speaker 1: so remember the other ones are, and then they feed
Speaker 1: those to a hauling machine to remove the parchment layer
Speaker 1: around those seeds at that point, whereupon they dry more efficiently.
Speaker 1: In the human climate, the other processes I mentioned leave
Speaker 1: the parchment on the seeds until after the drying process
Speaker 1: is done. The parchment helps protect the seeds against stuff
Speaker 1: like disease and mold, but in the really humid climates,
Speaker 1: Even that thin layer of parchment slows down the drying process,
Speaker 1: so in order to get the seeds dried and to
Speaker 1: market while they're still good, they have to remove the parchment.
Speaker 1: In places like Indonesia, pulping and hauling machines can be
Speaker 1: vibrating trays like the one I mentioned for natural processing,
Speaker 1: or they can involve feeding the cherries or seeds. In
Speaker 1: the case of if you're just removing the parchment into
Speaker 1: a feeding hopper, and at the bottom of the feeding
Speaker 1: hopper is typically a rotating drum that's got little nubby
Speaker 1: protrusions on it, and as the drum rotates, this agitation
Speaker 1: UH squeezes seeds out of the cherries, and it can
Speaker 1: also remove parchment from the seeds if you've calibrated the
Speaker 1: machine to do so. But it's that rotational force that
Speaker 1: is UH kind of separating the cherries out from the
Speaker 1: seeds infect It kind of squeezes them out and the
Speaker 1: chair the seeds go one way, and the cherries, the
Speaker 1: pulp and the skin go the other way. So you
Speaker 1: will get one shoot where green coffee beans will slide down,
Speaker 1: and then on the back you'll just have this mass
Speaker 1: of pulp shot out the back of the the machine,
Speaker 1: which again is used often for fertilizer. The holed coffee
Speaker 1: then has to be sorted by size, and a typical
Speaker 1: sizing machine has a series of meshed trays stacked one
Speaker 1: on top of the other in a vibrating device, and
Speaker 1: the holes in the mesh decrease in size as you
Speaker 1: go down the stack vertically, so larger seeds will be
Speaker 1: caught by one of the upper trays because the seeds
Speaker 1: will be too large to pass any further down in
Speaker 1: the link of of meshes. Uh, the smaller seeds will
Speaker 1: eventually collect in the bottom trays because they'll pass through
Speaker 1: the larger holes on the upper ones. Then the coffee
Speaker 1: can be graded based on coffee bean size. The best
Speaker 1: coffee beans, by the way, are not necessarily the biggest ones,
Speaker 1: nor are they the smallest. It's typically the just right
Speaker 1: the goldilocks zone. Those seeds also have to be examined
Speaker 1: to make sure they are the right quality. They have
Speaker 1: to be looked at to make sure they're the good color.
Speaker 1: This can be done by I but when you're looking
Speaker 1: at really big operations, that's not practical. So we've got
Speaker 1: some high tech to do this too. There are advanced
Speaker 1: machines that use l e ed s and high resolution
Speaker 1: cameras and imaging software to examine seed color and consistency,
Speaker 1: and that makes it possible to sort large quantities of
Speaker 1: seeds and remove any that don't meet specifications. So I
Speaker 1: always think of the Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factory
Speaker 1: scene with the golden eggs. You've got these machines that
Speaker 1: are looking at seed by seed very very very fast,
Speaker 1: and if the color and the consistency matches the specifications
Speaker 1: that the machines software has set to, then the beans
Speaker 1: are allowed to continue on their path. If not, they
Speaker 1: get the boot. They are the proverbial bad eggs in
Speaker 1: this case. Other machines sort the beans by density using
Speaker 1: vibration and air. So, in other words, you've got a
Speaker 1: big stack of beans, you put them in this machine.
Speaker 1: The machine shakes the beans, that uses some air to
Speaker 1: blow against the beans. The heavier beans will be closer
Speaker 1: to the bottom of this machine. They'll be heavy enough
Speaker 1: and dense enough to make their way to the bottom.
Speaker 1: The very light beans will be more towards the top
Speaker 1: of the machine because they'll be blown by the air
Speaker 1: and they will be pushed up from all the heavier beans. Now,
Speaker 1: you want to do this because sometimes those lighter beans
Speaker 1: are actually representative of beans that have been you know,
Speaker 1: munched on by insects and stuff. Those are not the best.
Speaker 1: So it's another way of sorting beans out very quickly
Speaker 1: for quality control. Now, what I think is really cool
Speaker 1: about a lot of these devices is apart from the
Speaker 1: one that tends to use like high resolution cameras to
Speaker 1: look at bean color. Now, what I like about a
Speaker 1: lot of these devices is that a lot of them
Speaker 1: use a pretty simple mechanical approach to help sort out
Speaker 1: all these beans. I just think it's a neat and
Speaker 1: pretty elegant way of doing things. All this takes place
Speaker 1: before roasting. The coffee roasters take incoming green coffee beans and,
Speaker 1: depending on the flavor qualities of the bean, which in
Speaker 1: turn are determined by stuff like where in the world
Speaker 1: it was grown, what sort of post harvest processing to
Speaker 1: go through that kind of thing, the roasters then take that,
Speaker 1: they take that flavor and they determine what sort of
Speaker 1: roast they should follow for those particular beans. The beans
Speaker 1: are put into roasting machines, which look a lot like
Speaker 1: clothes dryers. A lot of these, especially for the larger roasters,
Speaker 1: are gas power. They actually use natural gas for a
Speaker 1: heating element. So a typical roaster has a hopper feeder
Speaker 1: at the top that's where you pour the green coffee
Speaker 1: beans in. These flow into a barrel that is inside
Speaker 1: the roaster. The barrel can rotate, and the barrel has
Speaker 1: burners on the outside of it, so inside the machine,
Speaker 1: but outside the container of the barrel are these burners.
Speaker 1: They heat up the air and the barrel itself, and
Speaker 1: that allows these beans to get a lot of heat
Speaker 1: directed at them in a very short amount of time.
Speaker 1: And you use a combination of temperature and time in
Speaker 1: order to roast the coffee beans. They're constantly being circulated
Speaker 1: so that each bean is getting evenly heated. And typically
Speaker 1: there's a way to remove beans from the middle of
Speaker 1: this process while it's still going, so you can check
Speaker 1: on progress. Uh. There's frequently something that's called like a
Speaker 1: sample spoon. This is a little container that actually can
Speaker 1: extend into the barrel as it's an operation, but there's
Speaker 1: a handle on the outside of the machine that you
Speaker 1: can grab. You can pull the sample spoon out, check
Speaker 1: the beans that are in the process of roasting and
Speaker 1: reinsert the sample spoon to put them back into the barrel,
Speaker 1: and you know, use that to check to make sure
Speaker 1: that you're not going too far with your roasting process.
Speaker 1: After roasting, the roasters will essentially open a flap to
Speaker 1: the barrel to let the roasted beans pour out of
Speaker 1: the barrel into a cooling tray. Then the roasters will
Speaker 1: either stir the beans or typically a lot of these
Speaker 1: cooling trays have a mechanical stir that will just do
Speaker 1: rotations through the beans and mix them up. That allows
Speaker 1: the beans to cool and stop the roasting process from
Speaker 1: going on much longer after they've already emerged from the roaster. Now,
Speaker 1: the length of time spending those chambers, along with what
Speaker 1: temperature you set it to, that determines the level of
Speaker 1: the roast, and the flavors can change in that time
Speaker 1: as well. So a light roast coffee uses beans that
Speaker 1: have been in a roaster for much less time than
Speaker 1: a dark roast coffee, and light roasts tend to be
Speaker 1: a little more floral. Dark roasts tend to have more
Speaker 1: chocolate e or caramel flavors, but also roasting the longer
Speaker 1: eu roast. The more you typically reduce the amount of
Speaker 1: caffeine that's in the the coffee bean, the caffeine gets
Speaker 1: kind of roasted out gradually. There's still some there, but
Speaker 1: less so. While an espresso has a very strong flavor,
Speaker 1: it can actually have much less caffeine per volume than
Speaker 1: a simple light roast coffee. Though this is also dependent
Speaker 1: upon the type of bean that was used at the
Speaker 1: very beginning of the process, so it gets a little
Speaker 1: more complicated than that. There are some great videos on
Speaker 1: YouTube of master coffee roasters describing the process they use,
Speaker 1: which frequently needs to have some flexibility built into them.
Speaker 1: Figuring out the perfect temperature and the perfect timing to
Speaker 1: get the kind of roast you want is kind of
Speaker 1: a matter of science and art. It's fascinating stuff. Now,
Speaker 1: when we come back, I'll talk about the evolution of
Speaker 1: the coffee maker. One thing I did not cover in
Speaker 1: the previous section is how companies make decaffeinated coffee and
Speaker 1: coffee beans half caffeine in them. How do you decaffeinated Well,
Speaker 1: there's a couple of different methods, but generally the process
Speaker 1: involves leaching the caffeine out of the green coffee beans.
Speaker 1: Using some form of chemicals or an activated charcoal filter
Speaker 1: to bind with the caffeine, and then continuing to soak
Speaker 1: green coffee beans so that some of that delicious flavored
Speaker 1: juice goes back into the bean. In fact, in many
Speaker 1: of these processes, the first batch of green coffee beans
Speaker 1: is either a loss. You just throw them out after
Speaker 1: you've soaked them in hot water, or you have to
Speaker 1: set them aside because it's not just the caffeine that
Speaker 1: leeches out. There's also a lot of those oils that
Speaker 1: make up the aromatics and flavor of the coffee bean.
Speaker 1: So if you wanted to decaffeine eate a batch of coffee,
Speaker 1: you would put your first group of green coffee beans
Speaker 1: in a vat of hot water, and then the water
Speaker 1: becomes saturated with caffeine and these oils. Then you would
Speaker 1: use chemicals or a charcoal filter to bind with that
Speaker 1: caffeine and remove the caffeine from the mixture, and then
Speaker 1: you could remove the green beans from that mixture, and
Speaker 1: then you add more green coffee beans, the ones that
Speaker 1: haven't been processed yet into the vat. Now the hot
Speaker 1: water is already saturated with the oils from the first
Speaker 1: batch of coffee beans. So the second batch of green
Speaker 1: coffee beans keeps the flavors and aromatics for the most part,
Speaker 1: but the caffeine still leaches out. Then you use that
Speaker 1: same chemical process to bind with the caffeine molecules and
Speaker 1: remove the caffeine from the mixture. And at the very
Speaker 1: end of this process, after you've done batch after batch
Speaker 1: after batch of the green coffee beans, maybe then you
Speaker 1: go ahead and you add back that first batch of
Speaker 1: coffee beans to stew in the juices. As it were,
Speaker 1: These are the coffee beans that were sapped of not
Speaker 1: just their caffeine but all their coffee goodness, and you
Speaker 1: let them sort of reabsorb those chemicals minus the caffeine. Obviously,
Speaker 1: now it's a little more complicated than that, and as
Speaker 1: I mentioned, there are a few different approaches to this,
Speaker 1: but I still need to talk about coffee machines, so
Speaker 1: let's move on. Gosh darn it. So to brew coffee,
Speaker 1: you grind up the beans to create more surface area
Speaker 1: for the beans to make contact with hot water. That
Speaker 1: allows more oils to transfer to that hot water, and
Speaker 1: thus the drink we call coffee is made. And there
Speaker 1: are many different sizes of grinds of coffee, ranging from
Speaker 1: course to extra fine, and they're they're good for different
Speaker 1: types of coffee preparations. For example, a very coarse grind
Speaker 1: is recommended for cold brew coffee or French press coffee,
Speaker 1: a meat grind is good for your standard automatic drip
Speaker 1: coffee machines, and an extra fine grind is really good
Speaker 1: for Turkish coffee pots. Typically, you want to filter out
Speaker 1: the coffee grounds from the water so that the stuff
Speaker 1: you've brewed doesn't have coffee grounds in it, unless you're
Speaker 1: making Turkish coffee. So you might pour boiling hot water
Speaker 1: over coffee grounds that are in some sort of filter.
Speaker 1: That's the classic pour over coffee, or, as is the
Speaker 1: case with most coffee machines, you have a filter or
Speaker 1: perforated surface that keeps the grounds from passing through and
Speaker 1: the coffee can move on into a caraft or pot
Speaker 1: or pitcher, while the coffee drink is able to you know,
Speaker 1: flow freely and everything. One of the earliest modern applications
Speaker 1: for coffee making is the humble percolator. Joseph Henrie Marie Lawrence,
Speaker 1: a metal worker in Paris, invented such a device in
Speaker 1: eighteen nineteen. The ideas atty simple. You've got a pot
Speaker 1: complete with a spout. You know, it doesn't look that
Speaker 1: different from a kettle. UM. This sits on top of
Speaker 1: a source of heat, like an open flame or an
Speaker 1: electric stovetop. You fill the bottom part of this pot
Speaker 1: with water. You've got a vertical tube that extends up
Speaker 1: from the bottom of the pot to the top. Sometimes
Speaker 1: this is actually a separate piece that you insert into
Speaker 1: the pot after you've already filled it with water. UM.
Speaker 1: That means that the water in the tube is at
Speaker 1: the same level as the water level of the pot.
Speaker 1: And at the top end of this tube is a
Speaker 1: perforated basket of some sort. That's where you put the
Speaker 1: dry coffee grounds, and the water is in that chamber underneath.
Speaker 1: As the water boils when you put it on this
Speaker 1: heat source, some of the bubbles forming begin to push
Speaker 1: water up that tube. So the hot water travels all
Speaker 1: the way up the tube out the other end, and
Speaker 1: it typically hits like a spreader plate or a drip
Speaker 1: plate of some sort that distributes this hot water, so
Speaker 1: it drips down onto the coffee grounds. UH. This hot
Speaker 1: water then seeps up the oils and caffeine as it
Speaker 1: does this and drips down through the perforations back into
Speaker 1: the water chamber below, and the whole process continues. Uh Percolation,
Speaker 1: by the way, refers to filtering a liquid through some
Speaker 1: sort of porous material, and that actually means that most
Speaker 1: but not all coffee makers are actually percolators. But never
Speaker 1: mind that in America we just call the little bubbling
Speaker 1: stuff we see percolation. That's not really true, it's not accurate,
Speaker 1: but it's what we call it. So the boiling water
Speaker 1: brewis the coffee, and eventually all that boiling water in
Speaker 1: the bottom of the pot is really brewed coffee as
Speaker 1: this process continues in the coffee recirculation also means that
Speaker 1: you typically end up with a pretty darn strong cup
Speaker 1: of coffee at the end, and that's because the coffee
Speaker 1: and the fresh water mixed together and the concentration of
Speaker 1: coffee increases the longer that the percolator is percle eating.
Speaker 1: The stovetop or open flame versions also have a drawback.
Speaker 1: They typically are pretty bad about burning coffee as well,
Speaker 1: so it's a good efficient way to make a potentially
Speaker 1: terrible cup of coffee. Much later. Other inventors came up
Speaker 1: with electric percolators, some of which designated a very small
Speaker 1: area of the bottom of the pot as a heat source,
Speaker 1: so that the area directly under where the tube is
Speaker 1: would become hot enough to cause bubbles to push water
Speaker 1: up the tube, just like in the stovetop version, but
Speaker 1: the rest of the water in the pot wouldn't be
Speaker 1: directly on a heat source, so cold water from the
Speaker 1: most of the pot would end up circulating in to
Speaker 1: replace the hot water that's going up the tube, and
Speaker 1: you wouldn't be as likely to burn your coffee. However,
Speaker 1: like other percolators, this is another method where the fresh
Speaker 1: water and coffee mixed together and the coffee recirculates to
Speaker 1: the system, so you still get a pretty strong cup
Speaker 1: of coffee. Not necessarily a good one, but a very
Speaker 1: strong one. In the nineties seventies, Samuel Glazer and Vincent
Speaker 1: Moroda got an idea. They thought of a way to
Speaker 1: create an automatic drip coffee maker, which was a kind
Speaker 1: of a way to create a pour over coffee without
Speaker 1: actually having to manually pour water over coffee grounds sitting
Speaker 1: in a filter over a craft. With the original Mr Coffee,
Speaker 1: you would put a filter in the coffee grounds basket.
Speaker 1: You would fill that filter with coffee grounds, and then
Speaker 1: you would fill a chamber at the top of the
Speaker 1: machine with water, and you would put your coffee craft
Speaker 1: under the filter spout and you would turn on your
Speaker 1: coffee maker, and gravity did most of the work. Really.
Speaker 1: It would pull the water downward through this coffee maker.
Speaker 1: The water would pass over heating elements that raised the
Speaker 1: temperature of the water dramatically before that water would then
Speaker 1: drip down over the coffee grounds in the filter, and
Speaker 1: then the water would go through the filter, carrying those
Speaker 1: oils nearromatics and caffeine into the graft. Later versions of
Speaker 1: the coffee maker changed up this design. They used a
Speaker 1: water reservoir that requires thermodynamics to move water up a
Speaker 1: tube to pass it over the coffee grounds, but it
Speaker 1: no longer used a gravity fed system. So a typical
Speaker 1: coffee maker would have a little hole in the bottom
Speaker 1: of the water reservoir that you fill up with cold water.
Speaker 1: So cold water goes from the reservoir down this hole
Speaker 1: into an aluminum tube and it passes through a valve
Speaker 1: that allows water to travel only in that direction. It
Speaker 1: can't go backward, So in the aluminum tube, the cold
Speaker 1: water passes near heating elements. These are coils of wire
Speaker 1: that heat up when you pass electricity through them because
Speaker 1: of electrical resistance, and that transfers heat to that cold water.
Speaker 1: The heated water inside the aluminium tube begins to boil,
Speaker 1: so bubbles are forming, and because you have that valve
Speaker 1: that is blocking the bubbles from going back up to
Speaker 1: the reservoir, they can only travel forward up the tube,
Speaker 1: pushing water up as it goes up, and this hot
Speaker 1: water comes out of the top of the tube and
Speaker 1: then filters out to hit the coffee grounds, which then
Speaker 1: percolates right same same sort of thing as the percolator,
Speaker 1: except in this case you've got the supply of fresh
Speaker 1: water separate from your finished coffee, because the hot water
Speaker 1: comes up, hits those coffee grounds, filters down through, carrying
Speaker 1: those oils and caffeine and everything, and then drips into
Speaker 1: the empty caraft underneath the filter, so you don't have
Speaker 1: to worry about the coffee mixing with fresh water and
Speaker 1: then recirculating through the system. And this was said to
Speaker 1: create a much more consistent cup of coffee, so you
Speaker 1: didn't end up with this burnt coffee taste or super
Speaker 1: strong taste. Glazer and Moroda did call their device Mr Coffee.
Speaker 1: It represented a huge change in how Americans would make
Speaker 1: their breakfast beverage, and it was one of those inventions
Speaker 1: that made coffee far more convenient and cut back on
Speaker 1: the problems of burnt coffee in general. Though, the heating
Speaker 1: plate on most drip coffee makers can also burn coffee
Speaker 1: if you leave it turned on with the craft on
Speaker 1: top of it. So after you finished brewing coffee with
Speaker 1: an automatic drip coffee maker, I recommend you turn off
Speaker 1: the coffee maker. I know that means that the heating
Speaker 1: plate is going to be off and that the coffee
Speaker 1: will gradually go cold. But one only brew as much
Speaker 1: coffee as you actually need, and to drink it not
Speaker 1: long after you brew it, because that's when it's best.
Speaker 1: Otherwise you're just you're just making things worse for yourself, honestly. Now,
Speaker 1: there's a lot more we could talk about. Right There
Speaker 1: are the curig machines and their pods and the danger
Speaker 1: that that presents to the environment if you don't have
Speaker 1: compostable pods. There are French press machines which actually use infusion,
Speaker 1: not percolation for coffee. There are espresso machines which use
Speaker 1: pressurized hot water pushed through a coffee puck a puck
Speaker 1: of coffee grounds. There are all these other things that
Speaker 1: we could talk about, but we're running along, so I'll
Speaker 1: do a look at some of the materials see if
Speaker 1: there's enough to justify a second episode, and if so,
Speaker 1: we'll follow this up with another coffee themed episode of
Speaker 1: tech Stuff, and if not, maybe I'll pair it with
Speaker 1: something else. Maybe we'll do sort of you know, breakfast tech,
Speaker 1: and we'll include some of the coffee stuff I didn't
Speaker 1: talk about and some other technologies. In the meantime, If
Speaker 1: you guys have suggestions for things I should tackle on
Speaker 1: tech Stuff, whether it's a specific technology, a trend in tech,
Speaker 1: maybe it's a company that you want me to talk about,
Speaker 1: whatever it might be, let me know on Twitter. The
Speaker 1: handle to use is tech stuff H s W and
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is
Speaker 1: an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Three