Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from My Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host
Speaker 1: job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio and how the tech are you? It's time for
Speaker 1: a classic episode of tech Stuff. This episode originally published March.
Speaker 1: It is one of the topics nearest and dearest to
Speaker 1: my heart, how coffee machines work? Enjoy. This is something
Speaker 1: that a lot of listeners have been requesting. They We
Speaker 1: received a couple of different requests from listeners to cover
Speaker 1: coffee machines. So in order to do that, I thought
Speaker 1: it'd be fun to first talk about coffee itself, kind
Speaker 1: of the history of coffee and where it comes from
Speaker 1: and how it's grown and what it's like, and then
Speaker 1: we'll transition into the various ways human beings have used
Speaker 1: coffee to make a beverage that we all know and love.
Speaker 1: Most of us, I mean, well, I mean those of
Speaker 1: us that aren't wrong. Right. Maybe you're a tea drinker.
Speaker 1: We don't pass judgment. I drink tea as well, yeah, both, yeah,
Speaker 1: and in fact sometimes mixed because well it's not necessarily
Speaker 1: on purpose. I just I have a problem, alright, So anyway,
Speaker 1: where does coffee come from. Well, coffee plants are very particular, right,
Speaker 1: they need specific types of soil. They need a certain
Speaker 1: level of of of richness to that soil. It needs
Speaker 1: to be nice fertile ground, and they need really mild temperatures.
Speaker 1: So they don't do well in climates where you get
Speaker 1: a lot like there's a big difference between the highest
Speaker 1: of the highs and the lowest of the lows. So
Speaker 1: you're talking something in the tropic kind of area. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the equatorial area, you know, somewhere around the equator. That's
Speaker 1: where your weather does not different change that dramatically from
Speaker 1: one part of the year to the other part of
Speaker 1: the year. And there's actually a band that you could
Speaker 1: look at with the the very the the two the
Speaker 1: two borders would be the Tropic of Capricorn in the
Speaker 1: Tropic of Cancer. And we refer to this band with
Speaker 1: a particular little nickname as far as coffee goes, the
Speaker 1: bean belt bean Belt. And so that sounds like a
Speaker 1: fabulous fashion accessory, it does, doesn't it. Yeah, I doubt
Speaker 1: I could rock the bean Belt. I just I'm not
Speaker 1: confident enough in my look. But the only state in
Speaker 1: the United states that actually falls in that range where
Speaker 1: you could grow coffee is Hawaii, and the Big Island
Speaker 1: of Hawaii is a place where coffee has grown. There
Speaker 1: are many plantations there. The volcanic soil, as it turns out,
Speaker 1: is great for growing coffee in general. Higher altitudes are
Speaker 1: really excellent for growing coffee. And they have a mountain
Speaker 1: or two on the Big Island. I've I've visited the
Speaker 1: Big Island. I have actually visited coffee farms, coffee plantations.
Speaker 1: I've never been to a coffee farm. It's so awesome.
Speaker 1: You know, you get to actually see how the plants
Speaker 1: 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: rap out that size, maybe a little for the smaller olives.
Speaker 1: Not not like those ginormous olives. Nonster olives. You defy
Speaker 1: the laws of man. Uh, these are these They do
Speaker 1: look kind of like grapes, kind of like like like
Speaker 1: a grape, and the cherry really got friendly and had
Speaker 1: little babies and the skin is kind of tough, but
Speaker 1: then once you pierce the skin, it's all like juicy
Speaker 1: and birsty. The skin is also very bitter, so I
Speaker 1: don't recommend chewing on the skins so much. Um. And
Speaker 1: the fruit is very sweet, it's very sticky. It's gonna
Speaker 1: subtle flavor to it. I think of it kind of
Speaker 1: like rose water and watermelon. Yeah, I think I want
Speaker 1: to eat that. Actually, that's got to be careful though,
Speaker 1: because those coffee beans, the seeds are really super hard
Speaker 1: and if you're just crunching, you could crack a tooth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we recommend. I do know that in some places they save,
Speaker 1: They save the fruit once they've used the rest of
Speaker 1: the of the bean for coffee purposes, dry it out
Speaker 1: and use it for tea. Oh interesting, so you can
Speaker 1: brew a tea using that. Now, once you strip that
Speaker 1: fruit away, you still have some layers on top of
Speaker 1: the bean itself, right, so skins kind of. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: you have to actually go through a process to get
Speaker 1: to the point where you can get to the beans.
Speaker 1: So you harvest the coffee. So you pick these cherries.
Speaker 1: Those are either dried in the sun over the course
Speaker 1: of a week to ten days something like that, or
Speaker 1: they're placed in a pulping machine to remove the fruit
Speaker 1: and then uh, those beans are dried by the sun.
Speaker 1: Usually you can do it in other ways, but the
Speaker 1: sun is right there. Yeah, the ones I've seen that
Speaker 1: they put them in like these big uh sieves almost,
Speaker 1: and then they rake them occasionally to make sure that
Speaker 1: they're all drying evenly. Yeah, sort of like a like
Speaker 1: if you've ever been gold panning, sort of like a
Speaker 1: very large gold panning thing, right, and hey, this stuff
Speaker 1: it's it's like just as valuable as gold in my eyes,
Speaker 1: so other black gold. Yeah, after you dry it, that's
Speaker 1: when you can get those other elder layers of the
Speaker 1: being removed in a process that's called hulling, as in
Speaker 1: removing the holes around the beans. They are graded and
Speaker 1: sorted by size and density, and then the this coffee,
Speaker 1: which is referred to as green coffee, the beans have
Speaker 1: a kind of greenish tinged them, then is shipped to roasters.
Speaker 1: So you often don't have a coffee plantation and roaster
Speaker 1: on the same premises you would. You would some of
Speaker 1: the coffee plantations sell their own coffee, but it's a
Speaker 1: kind of interesting thing because they'll send the green coffee
Speaker 1: off to roasters. Roasters will send the roasted coffee back
Speaker 1: to the plantation, and then the plantation can sell it well.
Speaker 1: The roasting is a very specific process and different people
Speaker 1: have very specific ideas about exactly how much a coffee
Speaker 1: bean should be roasted, and depending on the type of
Speaker 1: coffee plant and there are like six thousand species within
Speaker 1: the coffee a genius, so you've got a lot of
Speaker 1: options in there. Yeah, it's it gets very particular. So
Speaker 1: 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 coffee,
Speaker 1: 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 chicken. And then
Speaker 1: he said and then he said, like a clothes dryer,
Speaker 1: and then I just thought of like a clothes dryer
Speaker 1: foot full of chickens. And then I was like, this
Speaker 1: is a terrible I'm just oh, I just need to
Speaker 1: share this with someone to get this idea out of
Speaker 1: my head. It's like the ring sounds like a rejected
Speaker 1: Gary Larson far side cartoon, Like, you know, this is
Speaker 1: too horrifying even for me. Close dryer full of chickens,
Speaker 1: well at any rate. So the roosters, they are put
Speaker 1: to a temperature of around five degrees fahrenheit, which is
Speaker 1: about eight celsius to get the beans to the right
Speaker 1: temperature and Once the beans are hot enough, they undergo
Speaker 1: a process called pyrolysis. They expand kind of like popcorn.
Speaker 1: They actually pop out and get much larger than they
Speaker 1: normally are. And the longer you roast the coffee bean,
Speaker 1: the more intense the flavors become, the more intensive aroma becomes,
Speaker 1: those oils become really concentrated. You do. However, if you're
Speaker 1: the longer you roast them, you also lose more and
Speaker 1: more of the caffeine that's inside them. So so darker
Speaker 1: beans are actually less caffeinated by the lighter flavored greener beans. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so if you have a light roast coffee, you typically
Speaker 1: have more caffeine in it than a dark roast. Keep
Speaker 1: in mind that it also depends upon the species of
Speaker 1: the coffee planet, right, Some have more caffeine than others,
Speaker 1: and depending upon the process that they're using, sometimes coffee
Speaker 1: makers will actually add caffeine back into the mix afterward,
Speaker 1: because you want to make sure that you have that kick.
Speaker 1: But yeah, some people prefer the the robust flavors of
Speaker 1: a dark coffee. They do have stronger flavors. Some people
Speaker 1: prefer the lighter flavors and the caffeine kick from the
Speaker 1: lighter coffee. Uh, and in general, lighter coffees have more caffeine.
Speaker 1: And we've been doing this or a while as human
Speaker 1: beings have been harvesting coffee for quite some times. Yes,
Speaker 1: not just Jonathan and I. We've been spending literally hours
Speaker 1: harvesting 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. Um.
Speaker 1: Supposedly when a goat hurd in what would become Ethiopia
Speaker 1: noticed that his herd got real perky when they ate
Speaker 1: the berries off of this one particular plant. The goats
Speaker 1: seemed to dance, dancing, dancing the name of a of
Speaker 1: a brand of coffee. Yeah, local, local roaster and seller
Speaker 1: here 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 into Atlanta. Like, um,
Speaker 1: people have probably been eating coffee for a long time.
Speaker 1: East African tribes used 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. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is an alcohol, and yet it gives us an
Speaker 1: interesting energetic feeling. Um. And it spread as the religion
Speaker 1: spread throughout the next few centuries. Legend also has it
Speaker 1: that coffee growers were so protective of their crops that
Speaker 1: they didn't allow plants or even fertile seeds to leave
Speaker 1: the Arabian Peninsula for for hundreds of years until a
Speaker 1: man smuggled some seeds out of Mecca by strapping them
Speaker 1: to his chest. Interesting um, whether or not that is true.
Speaker 1: India 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 smuggling.
Speaker 1: Around the seventeen twenties. Brazil and Columbia are now the
Speaker 1: 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 of coffee beans into the America's through
Speaker 1: uh being hidden in flowers. Yeah, yeah, I heard that.
Speaker 1: Um Uh Brazilian foreign dignitary uh talked real pretty too
Speaker 1: to the wife of someone over in a coffee growing
Speaker 1: estate and then 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 free. Up,
Speaker 1: We're gonna take a quick coffee break from this episode
Speaker 1: to grab ourselves a cup of Joe. Suggest you do
Speaker 1: the same, and we'll be right back. So let's talk
Speaker 1: about the history of the action of the coffee machines,
Speaker 1: the various devices we have used to make coffee. Some
Speaker 1: of these, you know, you might argue, UH take the
Speaker 1: term machine pretty liberally, but it is interesting to note
Speaker 1: that even the most simplistic methods of making coffee have
Speaker 1: a relation to the standard coffee drip machine that a
Speaker 1: 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. That's true,
Speaker 1: although the first one I hesitate to call a machine.
Speaker 1: It's really more like a device or a prop Um.
Speaker 1: The simplest way to make coffee or yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: by pouring hot water over or through some grounds. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm very fond of my drip cone personally. 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 cavitieri, a piston. And this is a very simple
Speaker 1: manual machine, uh, manpowered or woman powered, person powered really, um,
Speaker 1: consisting of you know, cylindrical chamber and a fitted filter
Speaker 1: that's attached to a rod. You steep the coffee grounds
Speaker 1: in hot water in the chamber, and when it's brewed
Speaker 1: to your liking, you just push the filtered down own
Speaker 1: into the chamber. That the water flows up through the
Speaker 1: filter and it collects the grounds at the bottom of
Speaker 1: the chamber. Which let's see, pour non chewy coffee off
Speaker 1: of the top and you, uh, you gotta make that.
Speaker 1: You've got to make both the pressing uh very smooth
Speaker 1: and slow and the pouring you need to make nice
Speaker 1: and smooth and slow so that you make sure you're
Speaker 1: not stirring up a lot of sediment. You can get
Speaker 1: sediment from French press. Coffee definitely usually tends to end
Speaker 1: up in the cup no matter what. The first time
Speaker 1: I ever used a French press was at a restaurant
Speaker 1: in Las Vegas with lots of people all around me,
Speaker 1: and I just felt like, I've got to do this
Speaker 1: right or everyone will judge me. And I know that
Speaker 1: what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but I'm not
Speaker 1: even comfortable with that. To tell you the truth, I
Speaker 1: want to make sure and um, yeah, so you are
Speaker 1: just pushing the grounds further and further down to the bottom,
Speaker 1: while the water is allowed to go through the filter
Speaker 1: or the brood. Coffee at that point's night and water.
Speaker 1: It's brewed coffee is able to pass through the filter
Speaker 1: so that you can pour it into your cup. And
Speaker 1: a lot of people like this method because they think
Speaker 1: it brews a particularly smooth cup of coffee. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: unlike unlike coffee that eases paper filters and it's processing
Speaker 1: even like with my drip cone. Uh, you're allowing all
Speaker 1: of the oils and the coffee to make their way
Speaker 1: into your cup. Oil is kind of where the flavor
Speaker 1: is residing. So if the paper is absorbing some of
Speaker 1: the oil, you're losing a little bit of something and
Speaker 1: getting a tiny little bit of paper fiber in there.
Speaker 1: And and some people are just like, that's just not acceptable, unacceptable,
Speaker 1: purest form of coffee oil to go into my system
Speaker 1: as possible. I do. I do prefer French press to
Speaker 1: all other forms of coffee. That might be a coffee snob.
Speaker 1: The idea of fixing a screen like straight to a
Speaker 1: pot in order to avoid getting grounds in your cup
Speaker 1: probably goes back aways. But the first patent on the on.
Speaker 1: The actual plunger device was granted in France in nineteen nine,
Speaker 1: hence the term French press. Now, if we go back
Speaker 1: further to the early eighteen hundreds, that's when we get
Speaker 1: the first inventions of the percolators. Now we may be
Speaker 1: familiar with a percolator that if you've ever seen a
Speaker 1: coffee pot's got a little like knob type protrusion on
Speaker 1: the very top that's clear. Yeah, it looks sort of
Speaker 1: like a sort of like do you remember the board games, sorry,
Speaker 1: from when you were a kid that popmatic 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
Speaker 1: bubble and she was like, don't touch that, it's hot.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, And in fact it would be hot. And
Speaker 1: the reason why it's clear is so that you can
Speaker 1: see when the coffee has been has finished percolating, in
Speaker 1: case you could not hear it finishing. So this is
Speaker 1: a really simple machine as well. You've got a chamber
Speaker 1: at the bottom of the pot. This is the one
Speaker 1: that's you know, closest to the source of heat. This
Speaker 1: is where the water goes, and a tube leeds up
Speaker 1: from this chamber to the top of the pot. You
Speaker 1: put the right amount of water in and coffee grounds
Speaker 1: go into another chamber. That's it's at the very top
Speaker 1: of the pot. So you've got a filter at the
Speaker 1: base of the coffee grounds chamber. So here's the deal.
Speaker 1: You've got the whole coffee pot on a heat source.
Speaker 1: The heat source heats the water to boiling. That boiling
Speaker 1: water starts to push water up the tube. It forces
Speaker 1: water up that tube because there's nowhere else for it
Speaker 1: to go. So the water goes up the tube where
Speaker 1: it bubbles over the top. That's where you see on
Speaker 1: the top of the percolator a little water bubbling over.
Speaker 1: When it bubbles over the top, it goes down into
Speaker 1: the coffee grounds, and so the coffee grounds and the
Speaker 1: water get having a little party up there. It absorbs
Speaker 1: some of those coffee oils. Uh the now coffee or
Speaker 1: very weakly brewed coffee at this point starts to seep down,
Speaker 1: eventually going down through the filter and back into the
Speaker 1: chamber below. It continues this process as the cooler water
Speaker 1: is sinking closer to the heat source, getting a heated
Speaker 1: up boiling going up through that tube. The process continues
Speaker 1: in a cycle until you're getting to a point where
Speaker 1: all the water inside the percolator is near boiling temperature.
Speaker 1: Now you don't want it to actually boil boil, because
Speaker 1: they say that boiled coffee is spoiled coffee's not gonna
Speaker 1: taste good. But you want, like like any other food,
Speaker 1: you can totally burn coffee. Oh yeah, and you know
Speaker 1: it when you've had it, you're just like, it's a
Speaker 1: flavor of failure. It is, it is, and it's you know,
Speaker 1: you're like, I'm still gonna drink it, but I'm not happy.
Speaker 1: So this this continues until that percolating sound stops. That's
Speaker 1: a signal that the water has reached this temperature of
Speaker 1: near boiling, and you remove it from the heat, and
Speaker 1: then you're able to remove the grounds and pour cups
Speaker 1: of coffee and uh and a lot of people really
Speaker 1: still prefer percolator coffee, whether it's one some percolators have
Speaker 1: a heating element actually in the coffee thing, so you
Speaker 1: just plug it in and an electric kettle, yeah, and
Speaker 1: then others are meant to go directly onto a heating element,
Speaker 1: whether it's an electric stove, gas, though maybe even a
Speaker 1: fire if you're a cowboy, because is that 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 actually, well,
Speaker 1: I mean most most coffeemakers are very simple. I hadn't
Speaker 1: thought about it very much until we started doing this research.
Speaker 1: And the next one is a vacuum drip, yeah, which
Speaker 1: looks like it's something super cool and hip history and
Speaker 1: chemistry related. Oh yeah, yeah. When the first time that
Speaker 1: I saw one was in a relatively fancy restaurant down
Speaker 1: in St. Petersburg, I believe, actually and Florida or Russia, Florida,
Speaker 1: just just checking and and and it looked 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: gas Light sci fi kind of which which is true
Speaker 1: because that's about when it dates from it even it
Speaker 1: dates before flight sci Fi because it comes from the
Speaker 1: eighteen thirties. But it's one of those that we've seen
Speaker 1: a resurgence in recently as people have you know, gone
Speaker 1: on the quest for the perfect cup of coffee. And
Speaker 1: this is another one that is based on a very
Speaker 1: similar principle as to the percolator uh in several ways.
Speaker 1: So if you looked at one of these, they tend
Speaker 1: to look something like kind of like an hourglass shape.
Speaker 1: The bottom chamber is one that holds the water. It's
Speaker 1: connected via a tube that has a filter in it
Speaker 1: to an upper chamber. The upper chamber is open to
Speaker 1: the atmosphere. Is not closed, Yeah, exactly, it's not. It's
Speaker 1: not sealed like an hour glasses. You put the coffee
Speaker 1: grounds in that. Now the filter keeps the coffee grounds
Speaker 1: from going down into the lower chamber. UH. And you
Speaker 1: would then turn on the heat allow the water in
Speaker 1: the bottom chamber to start to boil. That would make
Speaker 1: water vapor that would force it creates an increase of
Speaker 1: water and air pressure weather because the water vapors taking
Speaker 1: up more space than the water was. That's forcing water
Speaker 1: up that tube through the filter to mingle with the
Speaker 1: coffee grounds. With these vacuum drip sets, you are supposed
Speaker 1: to stir the coffee grounds and water together a little
Speaker 1: bit so that you get a good amount of coverage
Speaker 1: and you get the coffee grounds sufficiently wet so that
Speaker 1: those oils seep into the water when it cools down,
Speaker 1: the water vapor in the bottom chamber begins to condense.
Speaker 1: That creates a vacuum which starts to pull the coffee
Speaker 1: back down the tube through the filter so you don't
Speaker 1: get any grounds, and it fills up that lower chamber
Speaker 1: not with water but now with brood coffee. So that's
Speaker 1: why it's called a vacuum drip. It's because that water
Speaker 1: vapor wentzn condensing creates the vacuum pulling the coffee back down.
Speaker 1: It looks like magic. It looks like fancy coffee science
Speaker 1: magic while that's going on, and it definitely looks like
Speaker 1: you know, you're like I have had a mad scientist
Speaker 1: brew me a cup of coffee, and uh, it's very pretty.
Speaker 1: Like a lot of these are very very The design
Speaker 1: just makes it look really appealing. There's a very strong
Speaker 1: aesthetic appeal to these, certainly more than you know, an
Speaker 1: average coffee maker. Right, A lot of those coffee makers
Speaker 1: are very functional. They're not necessarily pretty. You can come
Speaker 1: pretty ones, but right, right, but most of them are
Speaker 1: pretty uh utilitarian, not pretty pretty, not pretty. Mine mine
Speaker 1: looks fine, but it doesn't look space age. Um mine
Speaker 1: actually has a coffee grinder permanent filter and uh and
Speaker 1: you know, all that kind of stuff mixed into to it,
Speaker 1: so it grinds my coffee just as I need it brewed,
Speaker 1: which is nice, yes, yes, also very important to fear
Speaker 1: a coffee snob. Yeah, so that you have less surface
Speaker 1: area to get stale while you're you know exactly, yeah,
Speaker 1: so as you get that that really fresh taste. The
Speaker 1: next 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 that are 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 for camping or cowboying,
Speaker 1: whatever you're doing, you can just kind of bring it
Speaker 1: with you exactly. And it's very similar again to the percolators.
Speaker 1: The vacuum drips has a similar principle. So you've got
Speaker 1: again two chambers, the lower chambers where the water goes uh,
Speaker 1: and then there's kind of it looks almost like a funnel.
Speaker 1: There's a coffee grounds cone that fits into the lower chamber.
Speaker 1: All right, So you've fill the lower chamber with water
Speaker 1: up to the right level, which would be below where
Speaker 1: the cone uh stops where the coffee grounds would start.
Speaker 1: Because you don't want to have the water so high
Speaker 1: that the coffee grounds are already getting wet. Uh. There
Speaker 1: is a tube that leads down into the chamber from
Speaker 1: the coffee grounds cone. There's a filter there so the
Speaker 1: coffee grounds don't again go into the lower chamber. And
Speaker 1: then there's another tube that leads up from the base
Speaker 1: of the kettle part like the pot part, the part
Speaker 1: that will hold the coffee uh, and they screw together
Speaker 1: you put them on this heating element. The heating element
Speaker 1: heats the water to boiling. Water is forced up through
Speaker 1: the tube of the coffee grounds cone. It then ends
Speaker 1: up mingling with the coffee grounds, thus creating brood coffee. Uh.
Speaker 1: It continues to do so because you keep the heat on,
Speaker 1: the water just continues to flow up through this tube
Speaker 1: into the coffee grounds. So the water in the coffee
Speaker 1: grounds level can't go down because the the expanding water
Speaker 1: vapor from below is preventing it. You can only go up.
Speaker 1: So it goes up through another filter and up through
Speaker 1: it the tube in the center of the pot and
Speaker 1: spills over that, and that's where it ends up forming
Speaker 1: the coffee inside the pot section. And again you have
Speaker 1: to pay a really close attention to this because if
Speaker 1: you let it go on too long, then it's just
Speaker 1: gonna start sputtering because all that's happening is water vapor
Speaker 1: is being forced up through the tube. There's no more
Speaker 1: there's not enough water for it to be an actual stream.
Speaker 1: You remove it from the heat. You then can pour
Speaker 1: out either you can pour out extremely concentrated cups of coffee.
Speaker 1: It's really more like espresso. At that point, you would
Speaker 1: you would generally either dilute it with hot water or
Speaker 1: hot milk of some kind. Yeah, exactly that that tends
Speaker 1: to be the way to drink it. You can also
Speaker 1: drink it in the very tiny cups, kind of similar
Speaker 1: to espresso. I've seen that happen too, but yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I prefer to do it that way because then you
Speaker 1: get superpower. Yeah. My superpower is that I can no
Speaker 1: longer detect individual heart rate. And you want like I
Speaker 1: can't is there's no more thumping. It's just a thrumb.
Speaker 1: Oh oh, I love it. I love it when you
Speaker 1: could just feel every single blood cell in your body
Speaker 1: is moves through your veins. It's beautiful, start to name them.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, in that case, I I go beyond space
Speaker 1: and time and I like to try and keep my
Speaker 1: feet on the ground, so I don't I dilute it
Speaker 1: if I drink it this style. Um, but it is
Speaker 1: is a very common way of making coffee in different
Speaker 1: areas of Europe, and I guess there are a few
Speaker 1: folks in America who make it that way too, although
Speaker 1: we tend in America to to depend upon the automatic
Speaker 1: drip coffee machine. And this is the machine that people
Speaker 1: wanted to know, how the heck does that work? Yes,
Speaker 1: these electric devices that you buy for for very low
Speaker 1: amounts of money, really and you just plug it in,
Speaker 1: and it makes everything okay. It's kind of interesting because
Speaker 1: it's very similar to the principles we've already covered. In fact,
Speaker 1: I was surprised, you know, before I thought about this.
Speaker 1: I suppose if I had left, you know, really critically
Speaker 1: thought about it, it it would have occurred to me. But
Speaker 1: I had just assumed there was some sort of water
Speaker 1: pump somewhere in the typical coffee machine. But that's not
Speaker 1: the case, all right. It's all using the same kind
Speaker 1: of air pressure and physics that these previous simpler versions,
Speaker 1: non electronic versions have been using exactly. So really the
Speaker 1: electronic part in this case is the heating element that's
Speaker 1: contained within the coffee maker. That's really the big UH
Speaker 1: invention is that the heating element is not an external one.
Speaker 1: It's part of the machine. So your basic element. Basically
Speaker 1: parts of a coffee machine include the reservoir that's where
Speaker 1: you pour the water into. The reservoir has a drain
Speaker 1: at the base of it. UH. That drain has a
Speaker 1: one way water valve which allows water to pass through
Speaker 1: the drain but not come back up, which will be
Speaker 1: important in a moment. Yes, Then you have a tube
Speaker 1: that connects that hole that that reservoir that's connected to
Speaker 1: the valve on one side and to essentially a shower
Speaker 1: head it's what they tend to call it on the
Speaker 1: other side, because because it's sort of like a sprinkler,
Speaker 1: it's a eventually going to drip water out over your
Speaker 1: coffee right grounds exactly. So this tube is made usually
Speaker 1: of an aluminium because aluminum is very very good at
Speaker 1: conducting heat, very good thermal conductor. And you want that
Speaker 1: good and yes you do. And so, uh, the tube
Speaker 1: is where that that water just will pass straight through
Speaker 1: the still water at this point it hasn't touched coffee
Speaker 1: grounds yet. And then you have the heating element, and
Speaker 1: the heating element uses resistive heating to elevate the water's
Speaker 1: temperature rapidly. And we've talked about resistive heating and previous
Speaker 1: 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 electricity units that are going in from
Speaker 1: one side and then you've got a little detector at
Speaker 1: the other side, and you see that there are only
Speaker 1: eighty electricity units coming out the other side, and you
Speaker 1: realize that the other twenty electricity units have been lost
Speaker 1: in the form of heat. The actual conductor's temperature has increased.
Speaker 1: So that is incredibly simple, I realized. But just to
Speaker 1: illustrate the point, that's the basis behind resistive heating, as
Speaker 1: is the way electrical heating components work. Electricity passes through
Speaker 1: the conductive material, it heats up the conductive material, and
Speaker 1: usually that's waste, but you can make it work for you.
Speaker 1: UM resistance is dependent upon a couple of things. The
Speaker 1: material itself, so like you know whether it's copper or whatever,
Speaker 1: whatever conductive material you're using, and it's also dependent upon
Speaker 1: how much of that material you have, how big a
Speaker 1: diameter of wire you have gauge of that wire. In
Speaker 1: other words, UM and the thicker the wire, the lower
Speaker 1: the resistance. So using that logic, if you use a
Speaker 1: very thin wire of a conductive material and you make
Speaker 1: a really tight coil of it and it's long, then
Speaker 1: you've got a lot of surface area there. You can
Speaker 1: create a lot of heat. The resistance of that wire
Speaker 1: is very high, so in a relatively small element. And
Speaker 1: if you were to do that and then put that
Speaker 1: so that the the aluminium tube which typically has at
Speaker 1: least one bend in it inside your coffee maker to
Speaker 1: to give you more surface area. Yeah, you want you
Speaker 1: want that pathway the water goes through to be long
Speaker 1: enough so that you can heat it has a chance
Speaker 1: to heat adequately. So you you you have this kind
Speaker 1: of lining the tube. And now we get to what
Speaker 1: happens when you actually uh put water into the reservoir.
Speaker 1: So here's how the coffee making process happens. In one
Speaker 1: of 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. So yeah, so the steam pushes it
Speaker 1: into that little shower head thing down onto your coffee
Speaker 1: where it drips through the coffee grounds and into a
Speaker 1: waiting craft. Yep, so you've got the the filter that
Speaker 1: obviously keeps the coffee grounds from ing into the craft
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 journey to Dancing Goods
Speaker 1: coffee shop that's about a about a five minute walk away.
Speaker 1: Yeah uh but yeah, if if this happens to your
Speaker 1: coffee machine, UM, and it is an automatic drip, you
Speaker 1: can you can first check the one way valve to
Speaker 1: see if it's either stuck or clogged. Usually just like
Speaker 1: poking a toothpick or something like that in there. We'll
Speaker 1: we'll help you see what's going on. Um. Or you
Speaker 1: can try running vinegar through the machine to clean out
Speaker 1: any calcium deposits that might have accumulated in the tubes
Speaker 1: because electricity plus aluminum plus water plus yeah, calcium happens.
Speaker 1: So afterwards, just run two batches of water through the
Speaker 1: machine to rinse out all the rest of the vinegar.
Speaker 1: Because you do not want vinegary coffee, or maybe you do,
Speaker 1: but if you do, you know, more power to you.
Speaker 1: But I will decline cup from you because I got
Speaker 1: enough frustration in my life. Okay, I'm so canfidated right now.
Speaker 1: This is Jonathan from the future. We're gonna take another
Speaker 1: quick break so I can kind of calm down and
Speaker 1: we'll finish this episode about coffee machines. Okay, all right,
Speaker 1: just one more espresso. So let's look at some of
Speaker 1: the special coffee makers that are out there, because there
Speaker 1: are a few, and I thought it would be kind
Speaker 1: of interesting to look at how some of them are different,
Speaker 1: Like the Clover coffee machine. This is one. Clover was
Speaker 1: a company that was purchased by another little company called Starbucks.
Speaker 1: So some Starbucks UH locations have Clover coffee machines and
Speaker 1: you can get a Clover brewed cup of coffee that's
Speaker 1: different from their normal cups of coff How how is
Speaker 1: it different? Jonathan tastes better in my opinion, I've had
Speaker 1: a Clover cup of coffee. There's actually actually the Starbucks
Speaker 1: across the street from our office has one. That's one
Speaker 1: of the locations that has one, So if you ever
Speaker 1: go across 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're supposed
Speaker 1: to stir it because because coffee needs love, so you
Speaker 1: 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 give
Speaker 1: it a little bit of stir to make sure it's
Speaker 1: it's properly mixed. Once it's done, then, uh, there's a
Speaker 1: piston inside that brewing chamber, and the pistons usual resting
Speaker 1: position is at the bottom of the chamber. The coffee
Speaker 1: grounds are on top of it. Water comes in it,
Speaker 1: commingles uh. The bottom of the piston has a mesh
Speaker 1: kind of filter. So then when you are done brewing
Speaker 1: the coffee, the piston rises up through the brewing chamber,
Speaker 1: lifting up all the coffee grounds, leaving the brewed coffee
Speaker 1: behind until it reaches the very top, and then you
Speaker 1: see this little cake of coffee grounds come out of
Speaker 1: the hole. But it's not done yet. The drain opens
Speaker 1: and it creates a vacuum and the piston goes down
Speaker 1: being pulled by that vacuum. The coffee drains out and
Speaker 1: then is dispensed into your cup. At the very end,
Speaker 1: the piston comes back to the top so that you
Speaker 1: can get a little it looks like a little like
Speaker 1: window scraper, and you pull the grounds across, and there's
Speaker 1: in the clover machines, there's a a little hole where
Speaker 1: the waste coffee grounds go, so you just pull them
Speaker 1: over into the waste basket essentially, and then it's ready
Speaker 1: for its next cup and you can drink your delicious
Speaker 1: cup of clear coffee. So that's that's your clover. But
Speaker 1: we have other ones we want to talk about. We've
Speaker 1: been talking about coffee, but what about what about this
Speaker 1: here espresso? I just got a shiver right in the
Speaker 1: right in the base of my neck. Okay, espresso, Espresso?
Speaker 1: U is it is not a different kind of of bean. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean specific kinds of coffee. Beans are
Speaker 1: generally considered best use for espresso. They're roasted longer than
Speaker 1: beans for coffee, and they are ground very very very
Speaker 1: very fine, more more like powdered sugar than than coffee grounds. Right,
Speaker 1: So you do not ever want to put like if
Speaker 1: you had ground espresso, you would not want to put
Speaker 1: in a coffee maker. No, that would probably reek havoc
Speaker 1: on the fine little machine parts. It's just gonna it's
Speaker 1: just gonna go right through the filter. I'm gonna end
Speaker 1: up with a cloudy, nasty cup of grossness. Yes, And
Speaker 1: an espresso actually refers to a pressing um. It's it's
Speaker 1: from the Italian word for for press, and it's so
Speaker 1: it's made by by packing these very fine grounds very
Speaker 1: tightly and forcing a small amount of water through them,
Speaker 1: just 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 get through them.
Speaker 1: Like like to thirty seconds is the ideal amount of
Speaker 1: time for one point five ounces of water to make
Speaker 1: its way through a pole of espresso. Wow, so you're
Speaker 1: using a pressure to push this water through, I imagine,
Speaker 1: not just gravity right, definitely, Um, an espresso machine can
Speaker 1: can actually be as simple as many of the devices
Speaker 1: we were talking about earlier. Just like a like a
Speaker 1: heatable water reservoir placed beneath a disc of grounds, again
Speaker 1: using a filter to make sure that the the grounds
Speaker 1: are stay in place and don't drip down into the water. Um.
Speaker 1: And then a single way for the water to get
Speaker 1: out of this heating system, which is a pipe at
Speaker 1: the top of the grounds container. When you boil the
Speaker 1: water in the reservoir, the heat of the system will
Speaker 1: increase the pressure. The water will be forced up through
Speaker 1: the grounds and then out through the pipe, which you'll
Speaker 1: ideally want to curve around into a little bit of
Speaker 1: a spigot, unless you want to boiling espresso fountain, which
Speaker 1: sounds festive but painful, yes, well and not quite boiling. Um, well, okay,
Speaker 1: in that case, it would be boiling. And that is
Speaker 1: why most people do not use this method, because the
Speaker 1: ideal temperature for espresso is below boiling uh somewhere around
Speaker 1: a D nine two degrees fahrenheit in fact, uh So
Speaker 1: most espresso machines use a pump in order to not
Speaker 1: overheat the water. So instead of it using the boiling
Speaker 1: method we've talked about, there's actually a pump mechanism right right.
Speaker 1: They otherwise work a whole lot like a regular coffee machine. Um.
Speaker 1: What happens here is that this this pump will draw
Speaker 1: water from the reservoir into a chamber containing a heating element,
Speaker 1: and when the water is heated to the correct temperature,
Speaker 1: the pump will pressurize the chamber to about fifteen atmospheres,
Speaker 1: which is two twenty pounds per square inch, and that
Speaker 1: will force the water down into your little packed, filter
Speaker 1: bound disc of grounds. That's the removable part from an
Speaker 1: espresso machine. Uh, a little handle on it. Yeah, and UM.
Speaker 1: Then after a few seconds, it will start being forced
Speaker 1: down out through a spout at the bottom of that
Speaker 1: disk into your 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 in two hours. It is the wrong
Speaker 1: time for you to decide to unscrew the end of
Speaker 1: the handle so that you can show how easy it
Speaker 1: is to insert a nitrous ox side canst, when in
Speaker 1: fact there's not a fully depleted nitros ox side caster
Speaker 1: already in the device. I dosed myself with laughing gas
Speaker 1: completely by accident, nearly froze my face off in the process,
Speaker 1: three in the morning, and meanwhile there's a little little
Speaker 1: canstor nitrous ox side spinning in the corner of the room.
Speaker 1: My dogs are wondering what happened. That was a memorable
Speaker 1: morning for me. Uh. Now we also have there's also
Speaker 1: other things we could talk about. We could talk about
Speaker 1: Curig style pod coffee makers. We didn't really go into
Speaker 1: detail on that. It's using, uh kind of just the
Speaker 1: hot water through concentrated coffee method. Sure, I actually do
Speaker 1: think that could probably make its own episode, 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 crystals? Yeah?
Speaker 1: What's up with those? Like Folger's instant coffee? Right? Right?
Speaker 1: Are those little um packets that Starbucks sells? Yeah? The
Speaker 1: via via? Yeah? I think you're right. I never know
Speaker 1: how you're supposed to pronounce the Italian words that Starbucks
Speaker 1: has copyrighted. Sometimes, why are all of your why are
Speaker 1: all the names of your of your sizes? Why do
Speaker 1: they all mean big um at any rate? Instant coffee?
Speaker 1: So this is coffee concentrate. Really, it's coffee that was
Speaker 1: already brewed once and then essentially dehydrated through freeze drying.
Speaker 1: Dehydrated coffee. Yeah, you hydrated liquid? What? Yeah? So you
Speaker 1: brew the coffee, right you? You brew it super concentrated
Speaker 1: coffee like way stronger than any human being would ever
Speaker 1: want to drink. Okay, so not like not like the
Speaker 1: coffee that I like to drink, like Kish coffee. More
Speaker 1: than that. You don't want to drink it that way,
Speaker 1: trust me, it would. It would turn your eyes inside out.
Speaker 1: You don't want it. Uh So when it's rehydrated, it
Speaker 1: has it becomes a beverage resembling coffee. Yeah, if you
Speaker 1: believe the folders commercials, it's indistinguishable from a fine cup
Speaker 1: of coffee. And and perhaps that's true, I have become
Speaker 1: a coffee snob. It was invented in e nine in
Speaker 1: New Zealand. So the dehydration process is freeze drying. The
Speaker 1: fundamental principle here is called sublimation, which is the shift
Speaker 1: from a solid to a gas, skipping the liquid stage.
Speaker 1: So if you're going from solid to gas, you're already
Speaker 1: thinking how is concentrate coffee either of these things? And
Speaker 1: the reason first, you got to freeze it. You freeze
Speaker 1: it very very quickly. Uh. If you don't freeze it
Speaker 1: very quickly, then the process does not work very well.
Speaker 1: And the frozen granules of coffee are placed on a
Speaker 1: flat drying surface, which then goes into a vacuum chamber.
Speaker 1: The vacuum chamber is warmed and the water within those granules,
Speaker 1: the frozen water expands quickly into gas like like, it
Speaker 1: skips the liquid base because the vacuum creates a difference
Speaker 1: in pressure. So so it goes straight from from frozen
Speaker 1: to oh I'm everywhere water vapor. Yeah. And so then
Speaker 1: you have condensers that remove the water from the chamber,
Speaker 1: and all that's left is this concentrated coffee granule, and
Speaker 1: that is what ends up being the concentrate coffee that
Speaker 1: you can add to hot water and thus turn into
Speaker 1: instant coffee. So you can also turn it into a
Speaker 1: pretty good stage blood. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's an
Speaker 1: excellent color coloring for for fake blood if you ever
Speaker 1: need to make some that in a little bit of
Speaker 1: food dye, and depending on whether you want a very
Speaker 1: viscous blood or something a little bit more liquid, you
Speaker 1: can add some like corn starch or corn syrup or
Speaker 1: something that familiar with the corn syrup. I'm way too
Speaker 1: familiar with the corn sharp, but yeah, it adds that
Speaker 1: kind of like good rust color that the blood needs
Speaker 1: so that you don't have the handy red right right,
Speaker 1: right right, yeah, So you get the more of the
Speaker 1: rob zombie style and less of the nineteen seventies Italian
Speaker 1: horror style. Gotcha. Well, one other thing I wanted to
Speaker 1: mention was an interesting use for coffee grounds. Now, this
Speaker 1: is an idea that came out of a Green Gadget
Speaker 1: seminar in two thousand nine, So this was kind of
Speaker 1: a concept that's never been actually implemented into a product,
Speaker 1: but I always thought it was interesting, and we do
Speaker 1: have an article on this stuff works too. It's funny
Speaker 1: because it doesn't really exists beyond the idea stage as
Speaker 1: far as I can tell. But it's the really coffee
Speaker 1: printer r I t I coffee printer. Coffee printer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it doesn't print coffee for you to drink. It uses
Speaker 1: coffee grounds. Like like, you've already brewed your coffee, so
Speaker 1: you're already happy, Lauren. It's okay, you're already in your house. Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: you've got your coffee. But now you've got these coffee grounds, right,
Speaker 1: what are you gonna do with them? Because coffee grounds
Speaker 1: are acidic, so you can't just you know, you can
Speaker 1: use them in compost, but they are acidic, yes, so
Speaker 1: you have to be careful what kind of plants you
Speaker 1: feed them too, because some plants are not gonna do
Speaker 1: well with this at ex soils um. So what do
Speaker 1: you do with your coffee grounds once you're done with them?
Speaker 1: Besides just toss them away or or maybe compost them. Well,
Speaker 1: the coffee printer may be a solution for you. You
Speaker 1: would end up using the coffee grounds. You put them
Speaker 1: into a little canister that would fit into the printer.
Speaker 1: It would actually be um still uh, external to the printer,
Speaker 1: so it's not like not like one of those things
Speaker 1: where you have to lift up a lid and get
Speaker 1: access to it. It It would actually be poking up out
Speaker 1: of the top. You add some water to it, and
Speaker 1: essentially the water and coffee grounds combine so that you
Speaker 1: get some of those oils and you're staining the paper
Speaker 1: coffee stains and it also, yeah, I've done that before,
Speaker 1: and of course I've used coffee to make kind of
Speaker 1: the antiquated looking paper. You know that. That's one of
Speaker 1: the treatments you can use very useful parchment. Yes, if
Speaker 1: you were ever in a Renaissance festival, giant air quotes
Speaker 1: and you have to write letters to people as your
Speaker 1: character at the Renaissance festival. It's part of the rehearsal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I had to. I can't tell you how many love
Speaker 1: and hate letters I had to write for the Georgia
Speaker 1: Renaissance Festival as part of the rehearsal process. I would
Speaker 1: always treat mine this way so that way it would
Speaker 1: look like an old letter. Presentation was important of course,
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, like this arts game loom.
Speaker 1: It's a great game at any rate. Uh So, yeah,
Speaker 1: you would manually move of this left and right across
Speaker 1: the page. Presumably there would be some sort of automatic
Speaker 1: system to feed the page through the printer, and also
Speaker 1: there would have to be some automatic ink jet system
Speaker 1: to actually have the ink print on the paper itself.
Speaker 1: So I don't know how that would have been reconciled,
Speaker 1: Like how what was the solution to that? Because obviously
Speaker 1: the speed at which I move the cartridge left and
Speaker 1: right might be different from the speed anyone else does,
Speaker 1: so you've got to figure all that into your design.
Speaker 1: But it was a really interesting concept. Again, it's not
Speaker 1: a real product you can go out and get, but
Speaker 1: you know, just like, yeah, like if if coffee stains things,
Speaker 1: why not do it on purpose and make use of it,
Speaker 1: and 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 print it, so that actually
Speaker 1: counts for more. Like I put a lot of effort
Speaker 1: into printing this one sheet of paper. I had to
Speaker 1: move 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: I hope you enjoyed that classic episode how coffee machines
Speaker 1: work from back in. If you have suggestions for topics
Speaker 1: I should cover on future episodes of tech Stuff, please
Speaker 1: reach out to me. The handle we is on Twitter
Speaker 1: is tex Stuff H s W and I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you again reallyasen y. Text Stuff is an I Heart
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