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Ringing in the New Decade

Happy New Year!

Nicaragua, direct trade, Amoret, Java beans,
Sometime this week I’ll brew this with a V60 and adapt an ‘examen’ to help me review 2019. I was thrilled to be able to meet the farmers, Dania and Desiree, at Amoret coffee earlier this year. One of the things I’m sure will feature in my ‘gratitude’ examen.

Each New Year is an opportunity to look back at the previous year, anticipate the future year and perhaps make resolutions to improve our lives, or even of those of people around us. Maybe this is even more true this year which is not just the start of a year, but of a decade.

This year I have been lucky to meet, or to continue friendship with, many people who have taught me all sorts of things about life, physics and coffee. There have also been some great finds of some fantastic cafes, trying to make a difference to their local community while serving excellent coffee.

And yet, as the year or the decade turns and we resolve to get fitter, pay more attention to sustainability or whatever seems important to us right now, we will inevitably take our existing selves into the new day and our resolutions will meet the reality of who we are: a bell rings at certain frequencies owing to the resonances of the vibration on the surface of the bell. The resonances of the bell depend on its exact shape and size, it is not easy to change the sound of the bell unless you change its temperature or even the interior to a different gas or muffle. (You can see images of how a violin vibrates at resonance here). The surface of a coffee resonates similarly, if we put it on a vibrating surface with a frequency that matches the fundamental vibrations of the surface. Nonetheless, thinking about these resonances can take us in surprising directions. The mathematics that describes them was developed by Friedrich Bessel (1784-1846) but, Bessel was not thinking about resonances when he formulated what is now known as Bessel functions. And it is possible, his life may have taken a very different direction were it not what happened from 1799.

Resonating coffee.

In the new year of January 1799, when he was just 14, Bessel was apprenticed to an imports and exports company with the hope that he would become an accountant. And maybe we would have heard no more about him had he not got interested in the problem of longitude and solving the navigational issues of the time, important for the company for which he was working. This issue got him thinking about astronomy and he caught the attention of the authorities of an observatory who gave him a job there and encouraged his observations and interest. But it was while thinking about “many body problems” or how multiple massive objects interact with each other via gravity that he came up with the mathematical description that we now know as Bessel functions. It is these Bessel functions that also describe the resonances on a bell and in a coffee cup.

Sun, heat, nuclear fusion
What links coffee to the Sun? So many things! But for the purpose of this post, we can find clues as to the interior of stars by watching the way they vibrate, analogously to a bell. What would Bessel think? Image © NSO/AURA/NSF

What does this leave us with in our thoughts for 2020? That what we are interested by may lead us to discoveries in various tangential and scarcely believable connections? That what we plan for our lives may not be how they have to end up? That it benefits us to stop for 5, 10 minutes, even half an hour and just contemplate our world in our coffee? (ok, that last one did not come from Bessel). Where-ever your paths lead and your interests lie, happy new year! May the 2020s be a decade where we can all slow down, notice, contemplate and appreciate the beauty of this strangely connected world which is our home.

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Home experiments Observations slow

Something brewing in my V60

kettle, V60, spout, pourover, v60 preparation
The new V60 “power kettle”

It was my birthday a short while ago and someone who knows me well got me a perfect present: a kettle specially adapted for making pour-over V60 style coffees. Until this point I had been struggling with a normal kettle with it’s large spout but now, I can dream that I pour like a barista. Of course, it is important to try out your birthday present as soon as you receive it. And then try it again, and again, just to make sure that it does really make a difference to your coffee. So it is fair to say, that recently I have been enjoying some very good coffees prepared with a variety of lovely beans from Roasting House and my new V60/V60 kettle combination.

Spending the time to prepare a good coffee seems to make it even more enjoyable (though it turns out that whether you agree with this partly depends on why you are drinking coffee). Grinding the beans, rinsing the filter, warming the pot, the whole process taken slowly adds to the experience. But then, while watching the coffee drip through the filter one day, I saw a coffee drop dance over the surface of the coffee. Then another one, and another, a whole load of dancing droplets (video below). Perhaps some readers of Bean Thinking may remember a few months back a similar story of bouncing droplets on soapy water. In that case, fairly large drops of water (up to about 1cm wide) were made to ‘float’ on the surface of a dish of water that had been placed on a loudspeaker.

Sadly, for that initial experiment the coffee had been made undrinkable by adding soap to it. The soap had the effect of increasing the surface viscosity of the droplets which meant that the drop could bounce back from the vibrating water surface before it recombined with the liquid. Adding soap to the coffee meant that these liquid drops could ‘float’ (they actually bounce) on the water for many minutes or even longer (for more of the physics behind this click here).

science in a V60
A still from the video above showing three drops of coffee on the surface.

On the face of it, there are some similarities between the drops dancing on the coffee in my V60 and these bouncing droplets. As each drop falls from the filter, it creates a vibration on the surface of the coffee. The vibration wave is then reflected back at the edges of the V60 and when the next drop falls from the filter it is ‘bounced’ back up by the vibration of the coffee.

But there are also significant differences. Firstly, as mentioned, there was no soap added to this coffee (I was brewing it to drink it!). This means that the viscosity of the drops should be similar to that of ordinary water. Although water drops can be made to bounce, the reduced viscosity means that this is less likely. Secondly, the water is hot. This acts to reduce the viscosity still further (think of honey on hot toast). Perhaps other effects (such as an evaporation flux or similar) could be having an effect, but it is noticeable that although the drops “live” long enough to be caught on camera, they are not very stable. Could it be that the vibrations caused by the droplets hitting the coffee are indeed enough to bounce the incoming droplets back up but that, unlike the soapy-water, these “anti-bubbles” do not survive for very long? Or is something deeper at play? I admit that I do not know. So, over to you out there. If you are taking time to make coffee in a V60, why not keep an eye out for these bouncing droplets and then do some experiments with them. Do you think that the bounce vibration is enough to sustain the bouncing droplet – does the speed of pour make a difference? Is it associated with the heat of the coffee? I’d be interested to hear what you think.

(The original soapy-coffee bouncing droplet video).

If you see anything interesting or odd in your coffee, why not let me know, either here in the comments section below, e-mail, or over on Twitter or on Facebook.