coffee in Camberwell – Bean Thinking

soya latte ginger beer — Soya latte and a ginger beer at Spike and Earl.

A few months ago, news came that the coffee roasting company Old Spike had opened a new café, Spike and Earl, down in Camberwell. Operating on similar principles to Old Spike, Spike and Earl aims to serve excellent coffee (and food and cocktails) with a social conscience. By employing those who have previously been homeless, Spike and Earl offers an employment (and training) route for people who may not easily otherwise have the opportunity. So although Camberwell is a bit of a trek, I was looking forward to trying this new place. As it was a late afternoon in November and the menu suggested that the dairy alternatives were only soya or oat, I decided to try a soya latte. (For any reader with a nut allergy, the current fashion of using almond milk means that you should always ask first if your cappuccino contains nuts). The baristas were friendly and confident in assuring me that they do not use almond milk (no danger of nut-cross contamination) but that their brownies did contain nuts (so I sadly had to pass on the brownie opportunity). My partner in these café reviews opted for a ginger beer.

There were a series of high tables with stools on the left hand side of the café. Presumably many people can therefore be accommodated when it gets crowded. However, at the time of our visit, it was fairly empty and we made our way to the rear of the café. Behind us, and behind closed glass doors, was a coffee roaster that we later discovered was part of the Old Spike roasting expansion. It’s always a nice touch to see coffee roasting happening as you drink but perhaps we needed to arrive earlier for that.

Bricks with holes Spike and Earl — Holes in bricks at Spike and Earl. Just a foot-hold or a suggestion for a great piece of engineering?

Drinks arrived together with complementary water and the soya latte was very smooth. Almost caramel like in the sweetness and very drinkable. It makes a pleasant change to have a latte once in a while. Light was playing tricks around the room as the sun was setting and the inside lights were becoming more prominent. But the striking thing about Spike and Earl was that the bricks used to support the tables and line the walls all had holes in them. On the wall running along the side of the café, (windows were on the other side), pot plants were placed in the holes giving the impression of the beginnings of a green wall. The holes in the bricks supporting the table meanwhile made an excellent footstool and were complemented by holes in the stools. A latte of course is largely made up of holes, or at least bubbles. The foam structure consisting mostly of air. How is it that some structures can be made better owing to what they don’t contain rather than what they do?

For example, if you imagine the difference between a latte and a cappuccino (but made out of metal rather than milk) that can be the difference between a successful tooth implant and a failure. We know from our coffees that bubble size can have a significant structural effect. But how about more fundamental properties, can the holes in bricks change things such as the way sound propagates?

Interior wall at Spike and Earl — More bricks with holes at Spike and Earl, this time with some plants escaping from them. The start of a green wall?

You may have heard about how different structures can be engineered to make materials “invisible” to certain frequencies of light. Imaginatively named “invisibility cloaks” are made by designing materials with patterns on them that change the path of an incident light beam. Because the effect on the light beam is due to the structure in the material rather than purely from the material itself, these materials have become known as ‘meta-materials’. When you remember that microwaves are a form of light, it is perhaps easy to see some of the applications of this research and one reason that it has attracted a lot of funding.

However there is an acoustic type of metamaterial that is far more similar to the bricks in Spike and Earl and that may find applications in medical imaging (ultrasound). Earlier in 2017, a team from the universities of Sussex and Bristol published a study about acoustic metamaterial ‘bricks’. Each brick had a differently shaped hole through the centre of it which delayed the incident sound wave by a specific phase interval (you can say it ‘slowed’ the wave). In order to work efficiently, the brick had to be of a height equal to the wavelength that the researchers were interested in and a width equal to half that wavelength. As they were investigating ultrasound, the bricks were therefore about 4.3mm square and 8.66 mm high.

By assembling the bricks together, the researchers found that they could steer a focussed beam of sound or even change the shape of the sound beam. This would have applications as diverse as targeting cancer cells with ultrasound to levitating a polystyrene bead. You can read more about their research here (or, if you have access to Nature Communications, their paper can be downloaded here).

soya latte Spike and Earl — Layering at the end of my soya latte. What would you think about?

Just for fun, assuming that the bricks supporting the table at Spike and Earl could be similarly turned into acoustic metamaterials, we could calculate the musical note that they would best work with. Estimating the brick at about 15cm square and remembering that is approximately half the wavelength (λ/2) and using the speed of sound in air to be 330 m/s, we can calculate the frequency to be:

f = c/λ

f = 330/0.3 = 1100 Hz

Which is the musical note C#6 (with an explanation of nomenclature here).

As I finished my soya latte, strata of milk lined the cup. Reminiscent of the Earth’s layers or perhaps, metaphorically, our strata of understanding, there is certainly plenty more to ponder at this interesting new(ish) addition to the London café scene. So next time you are in Spike and Earl, do let me know what you end up thinking about, you never know where these thought trains may take you.

Spike and Earl is at 31 Peckham Road, SE1 8UB

Keeping it local at Lumberjack, Camberwell

Lumberjack coffee Camberwell — Lumberjack Camberwell with the (not quite) inukshuk in the window

I came across Lumberjack last week while spending an afternoon in Camberwell looking for interesting cafes to “cafe-physics” review. I was actually on my way to a cafe further along the road when a couple of wooden structures in the window attracted my attention. Thinking that they were “Inukshuk” we decided to go in and try this new cafe. It turned out to be a good choice because, even though the structures were not in fact inuksuik, they had brought us into this lovely little cafe. We arrived shortly before closing but I still had time to enjoy a very good long black (with beans from Old Spike Roastery). Complementary water was brought over to the table. It would have been great if we had arrived just that bit earlier so that we could have had more time to properly appreciate this friendly cafe. The interior is bright and smartly decorated with wooden tables and shelving as well as plenty of seats at the back. The wooden furniture is explained by the fact that the cafe is the trading arm for London Reclaimed, a charity that provides employment and carpentry training to 16-25 year olds from SE London while making bespoke furniture from reclaimed timber. The cafe too aims to provide training and support to encourage 16-25 year olds into work and a future career. In terms of the ‘physics’ bit of this review, the interior of the cafe certainly has plenty to observe, from the pendulum like light fittings to the detail of the wood. But as this cafe is metaphorically, and in some ways literally, built on/with wood and as Lumberjack boasts on its website that “almost everything you’ll find in store, from the coffee to the furniture, are sourced as locally and homemade as possible” it is only appropriate that this cafe-physics review should focus on wood, trees and a tree very specific and local to London; the London Plane tree.

Long Black coffee in a red cup — A Long Black at Lumberjack with the grain of the wood showing underneath

With their characteristic mottled bark, London Plane trees are a recognisable sight along many a London street. The bark absorbs pollutants from the street before bits of bark fall off, taking the pollution with them and leaving the tree with its mottled appearance. Their root structure and resistance to pruning or pollarding helps to ensure that (mostly) they can survive happily in the crowded confines of London pavements. They are indeed very much a tree that seems almost specially adapted to London. Yet the connection between the London Plane and London goes deeper than that. The first ever record of a London Plane tree was in the seventeenth century, just up the road from Lumberjack, in the Vauxhall Gardens of John Tradescant the Younger. The London Plane is in fact a hybrid tree, thought to be a cross between the American sycamore (first recorded in London in 1548) and the Oriental Plane (first recorded in London in the C17th). Both these trees were found in Tradescant’s gardens and it is possible that the hybrid tree, the now ubiquitous London Plane, was actually first grown in Vauxhall.

Even though London is full of Plane Trees, it is not very common to find plane wood furniture. Rather than the grain visible in the tables at Lumberjack, Plane wood shows a “lacy” structure that gives furniture made with plane a distinctive pattern. Although unsuitable for outdoor furniture, plane-wood can be used to make indoor furniture and indeed some London based cabinet makers have even documented obtaining usable timber from recently felled London Planes.

Tomb of the Tradescants — The Tradescant Tomb at St Mary’s, Lambeth

And it is this that takes us to the physics part of the cafe-physics review. Perhaps it is the areas (and the parks) that I walk through, but it seems to me that there has been a fair amount of tree felling in London over the last six months or so. Part of the reason for this must be to ensure that the trees in our parks and that line our streets are safe and not going to fall down in high winds. Many trees that fall down in high winds do so because they get uprooted. However it is also possible, in very high winds for the whole tree to snap. Indeed, when researchers mapped the wind speeds through a forested area of Southern France during a storm in January 2009 they found that when the wind speed exceeded ~40 m/s (90 miles per hour), more than 50% of the trees broke in the wind, irrespective of whether these trees were softwood (pine) or hardwood (oak). A very recent paper by a Paris-based group (published last week in the journal Physical Review E) confirmed that irrespective of the species of tree or the tree height, the trunks of trees were liable to snap at a critical wind speed. The team combined experiment and theory to establish that the critical wind speed scaled with the tree’s diameter and height. However, because trees generally treble their diameter as they double their height, the effect of the diameter change was (almost) cancelled by the height difference between trees. Surprisingly, this critical wind speed did not depend on the elasticity of the tree, so there is no difference between a softwood such as pine and a hardwood like oak or plane. The researchers calculated the critical wind speed needed to break a tree to be 56 m/s, very close to the 40 m/s observed in that January storm.

Lumberjack can be found at 70 Camberwell Church St, SE5 8QZ

If you have a cafe that you think needs a cafe physics review, please let me know. Comments always welcome, please click the box below.