Category: slow

Categories
Coffee review General slow Tea

Data overload at The Gentlemen Baristas

coffee Borough
The Gentlemen Baristas in Borough.

Borough is always such a great place to wander. Walking around the backstreets with their bits of hidden history. The other day, we had visited the market, wandered down Redcross Way past the old Crossbones graveyard and hit upon The Gentlemen Baristas on Union Street. It is difficult not to have heard about these Gentlemen and my visit there was long overdue and so, we wandered in to try this famous venue.

The shop front advertised itself as a “Coffee House”. A very accurate description and a nod to the Coffee Houses of the past. As it was shortly after lunchtime, it was very crowded with a diverse bunch of people and felt a little cramped at the counter. Nonetheless, the queue was quick and friendly baristas soon took our order allowing us to retire inside to try to find a table (no chance) or a stool next to a bar (successful). Around us, people were either chatting over their coffees or working on laptops.

While waiting for my long black (intriguingly described on their website as a “well mannered coffee”), I noted the various posters describing different types of screw head or parts of the human skeleton. Enough detail to be a phone distraction but surely there was more physics waiting to be seen in this convivial back room of a coffee house? A blackboard at the end of the bar, offered details of the wifi as well as a quote (slightly adapted) from PG Wodehouse about the benefits to friendship of a shared taste in coffee. On a shelf opposite the blackboard were a number of books including a thick book detailing coffee trading in years gone by. From the fact that the books were stacked horizontally, it would appear that they are not consulted often.

shelf books hats Borough
The lighting made photography difficult but you can see the books (and the hats) on this shelf at The Gentlemen Baristas

Sitting between this juxtaposition of wifi information and old books, caused me to pause. I have heard it said that we “know” more now than we have ever known in the past. That we have access to an enormous amount of knowledge merely through our phones. Is this correct?

On one level it is certainly un-arguable. Ninety percent of the world’s data in 2013 had been generated in the previous two years. If you need to find anything out, a quick duckduckgo (or if you have to, a google) will often lead to websites detailing all sorts of quirky bits of information. If we want to know the radius of the Earth or the size of an espresso grind, we no longer have to remember the answer, nor even really to have a feel for the answer, instead we can almost immediately find webpages that tell us (here and here).

And yet, this answer seems unsatisfactory. While there is an awful lot of information available to us at the tap of a phone, it is questionable whether that information translates to our own knowledge. Although collectively we can understand amazing things such as gravitational waves, individually we may struggle to explain how a toilet works. We need the plumber’s knowledge as much as we need that of the cosmologists. Does it matter who knows? What level of knowledge does someone need to have to say that they ‘know’ something?

coffee long black gentlemen baristas
Taking time to stop and think about what it’s all about. My coffee at The Gentlemen Baristas

Perhaps this appears a very strange cafe-physics review, where is the physics? But part of the rationale behind Bean Thinking is also to slow down and contemplate and it seems that The Gentlemen Baristas offers the perfect environment in which to do so. A café that mixes the new with the old, a space in which the practices of one can inform the other.

So to return the thought train to the area local to the Gentlemen: Writing in the second century AD, the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote

“In death, Alexander of Macedon’s end differed no whit from his stable-boy’s. Either both were received into the same generative principle of the universe, or both alike were dispersed into atoms.“

It is a quote you will probably find very easily via a search engine, or slightly less easily if you read his “Meditations”. But it is perhaps worth pondering, in what sense we ‘know’ what he was meaning. Strolling past the ribbons and messages memorialising the (estimated) 15,000 people who lay buried in the ‘outcast’ graveyard of Crossbones, what about our own attitudes to our modern outcasts? And perhaps more tellingly, our attitudes to those in positions of power or influence?

Perhaps it will take a lifetime of understanding our personal reactions to the poor, the prostitutes, the homeless and the powerful to really know what Aurelius meant. It certainly requires of us that we stop, pause and reflect on the knowledge that we come by. So it is far from obvious that it benefits us to use the wifi password rather than sit, slow down and contemplate. And where better to do so than in a friendly café with good coffee and seats to ponder the moment?

The Gentlemen Baristas can be found at 63 Union St, SE1 1SG

 

 

Categories
General Observations slow Tea

Back of the envelope calculations with coffee

coffee at Watch House
Coffee is generally a great help for reading, but to properly see the clouds in your coffee, it may help if you prepared yourself a brew now.

To read this post it will help if you have a cup of lovely, hot, freshly prepared coffee or tea with you.

Got it? Ok, let’s begin.

A few weeks ago, there was a talk given by Prof. Paul Williams of the University of Reading about the Mathematics of turbulence and climate change. An entertaining talk about the importance of, and the effort of comprehension required to, use mathematics in order to understand climate change. There were several thought provoking comments through the talk that demanded further reflection. But one, almost throw-away comment has been bugging me since. Although I’ve forgotten the exact words, they went along the lines of

Of course mostly we think about the impact of climate change on the weather, after all, we live in the bottom few metres of the atmosphere and so that is what mostly affects us. What I would like to talk about is the effect of climate change on airplane turbulence…

The bottom few metres of the atmosphere? It’s true. The bit we’re most experienced with is just a tiny portion of it. It’s about perspective. To us, it seems the atmosphere is very big, we pump all sorts of exhaust fumes into it and they disappear. We have expressions such as “the sky is the limit” that suggests that the atmosphere is a huge volume of gas. We all know it is not really limitless, but day to day, on our human scale, it seems enormous.

Now the mathematics that Prof Williams uses to calculate the effect of changing temperature and carbon dioxide levels on the jet stream (and consequently the turbulence felt by planes) is way beyond the sort of back of the envelope calculation that we can do with a cup of tea (or coffee). Understandably, to even start to comprehend these mathematical models requires years of training in maths and physics. However, assuming that we are not ourselves atmospheric physicists, there are things that we can do to help us to see our atmosphere in a more realistic way. And this is where your coffee comes in.

Earth from space, South America, coffee
Clouds swirling above our common home. But if the atmosphere is represented by the white mists on the surface of a cup of coffee, what size coffee are we drinking?
The Blue Marble, Credit, NASA: Image created by Reto Stockli with the help of Alan Nelson, under the leadership of Fritz Hasler

Take a close look at that coffee. Assuming it is not cold brew, hopefully your coffee or tea is still fairly warm. Watch the surface of the coffee. You may start to see movement such as convection in the mug, perhaps you can see a film of oil on the surface. But do you see something else? In very hot tea or coffee, you should be able to see what appear as white mists hovering over the surface of the cup*. It is easy to miss them, but as you watch, cracks suddenly appear in the mists and then there is a re-organisation of them which allows you to start to see them dancing over the surface of your drink*.

These mists are the result of the levitation of many thousands of droplets of water just above the surface of the coffee. I have written about them elsewhere. No one knows quite how they levitate above the surface, but what is known is that they are at a distance of up to 100 μm (0.1mm) from the surface of the coffee.

Let’s construct a scale model of our coffee as the Earth and its atmosphere. These mists can then do a fairly good job of representing the atmosphere with its drifting clouds. So, assuming that the mists are the atmosphere and the coffee is the Earth (on the same scale), what size of coffee would you have to have? Would you be drinking:

a) an espresso

b) a long black

c) a venti

d) a ristretto

Think you know the answer? Let’s work it out with a “back of the envelope” calculation. The easy bit is deciding the radius of the Earth, it’s just under 6400 km, our first problem comes with the estimate of the thickness of the atmosphere. There are several layers in the atmosphere. The one that we are most familiar with, the one closest to us is the troposphere. This extends for the first 16 km above the surface of the Earth (though this varies with latitude, it is only 8 km at the poles). Most of our weather happens in this region and it is also the layer of the atmosphere that planes fly in. Above the troposphere is the stratosphere which extends until about 50 km. Beyond that, things get very rarified indeed though the boundary between our atmosphere and “space” does not happen for several hundred km (indeed, the orbit of the International Space Station is in this bit of our extended atmosphere).

Coffee Corona
Look carefully around the central (reflected) white light. Can you see a rainbow like spreading of the colours? Another manifestation of the white mists on the coffee surface.

As we are mostly concerned with the weather (and airplane flight etc) though, it seems sensible to define the atmosphere height to be the top of the troposphere. After all, most of us will tend to think that the Space Station is in, well, space. This definition is further justified by the fact that about 75% of the mass of the atmosphere is found within this region (the atmosphere gets thinner as you go higher).

What size coffee would we be drinking if the white mists (0.1 mm above the coffee surface) represent the 16 km of the Earth’s atmosphere? We’ll call the coffee height, hc. Our first step is quite easy, we can just use the ratios of the heights to calculate the coffee size:

(height of troposphere)/(radius of Earth) = (white mist height)/(height of coffee)

A bit of rearrangement:

height of coffee = (white mist height)*(radius of Earth)/(height of troposphere)

hc = (0.1) * (6400)/16

hc = 40 mm (4cm)

So for the mists to represent the atmosphere in your coffee, you would need to be drinking a 4cm tall coffee which is probably a smallish long black. I would leave it to you to calculate the coffee size for the atmosphere defined as outer space (beyond the orbit of the International Space Station). But perhaps this perspective gives us another way of looking at our atmosphere. Vast indeed, but fragile too.

*As I was writing this, I had a warm, very drinkable, cup of coffee but it wasn’t steaming and so showed no white mists over the surface. The mists are best seen in freshly made, very hot drinks.

Categories
Coffee Roasters General Home experiments Observations Science history slow Uncategorized

Chemical extraction in a V60

chromatography, paper chromatography, V60
Brewing a coffee, insight into analytical chemistry

Ever considered the connection between your morning brew and a century old technique that, it is fair to say, revolutionised analytical chemistry?

Last week, a new coffee arrived in the post from the Roasting House coffee club, followed shortly by an email with details about that week’s coffee. This is not unusual, the coffee club means that a different coffee arrives every two weeks. What was slightly unusual was the email which started:

“There are some brief tasting notes on the bag of coffee we sent you, but before you go on and read the more detailed description, have a good taste of the coffee yourself….”

The opportunity to do so finally arrived and I prepared a V60. First measuring out the freshly ground beans, rinsing the filter, watching the bloom, then slowly pouring the remaining freshly boiled water onto the grounds, all the while noting the aroma.

Taking this opportunity to slowly prepare (and appreciate) a coffee, I noticed that some of the soluble elements in the coffee climbed the filter paper during the pour. A few hours afterwards, the paper had gained a circular rim of coffee solubles around the top of the paper. Although in many ways quite different, this effect was very reminiscent of the technique of chromatography.

Roast House coffee, tasting chromatography
The coffee in question. What tasting notes would you get if you slowed down and tried this one?

The biggest difference between the behaviour of the V60 filter and “paper chromatography” is that in the former, the bottom of the filter paper is continuously immersed in both the sample (coffee) and the solvent (water). In chromatography on the other hand, a drop of the sample (e.g. coffee or ink) is put onto the filter paper which is then placed in a solvent (e.g. water, ethanol). Different components within the sample travel different amounts up the filter paper depending on how soluble they are in the solvent and how they interact chemically with the filter paper. So different components will travel different distances up the filter paper before they get stuck while the solvent continues to travel up the paper. All else being constant, each component always travels a certain distance relative to the solvent and so this provides a way of separating chemical components ready for further analysis or identification.

Perhaps you remember using chromatography to separate the colours in an ink pen at school? The ink was spotted onto a piece of filter paper and then immersed in water. We watched as it separated into various colours illustrating the number of different dyes that had been used to make up the ink. When used professionally though, the chromatography technique can be used to investigate trace impurities in soil, air, drinking water etc. It has even been used to analyse the components in coffee. From something that can be done in school science, it is an incredibly powerful chemical technique.

What was surprising was that the technique of chromatography was not invented until 1903, while the idea of using paper in chromatography only came about in 1944¹. Those who first used chromatography as a method to identify chemicals (in plants), did so using columns of powder rather than paper. Paper chromatography was invented to investigate the separation of amino acids and specifically was used to understand the composition of the antibiotic tyrocidin¹. Just as the ink in our school experiments separated into different dyes, so the chemicals that they were investigating would separate into different components, different chemicals would stay at different heights on the filter paper.

Since its invention, the technique had been extended to include gas chromatography rather than just liquid and has been developed to be extraordinarily sensitive. It is now possible to analyse chemicals with a mass of just 10^-15 grammes, a quantity which is too small to even easily imagine. Even just a couple of decades after the invention of the technique it could be said:

“Amino acids… could now be separated in microgram amounts and visualised…. (Paper chromatography) would allow one within the space of a week [to do some analysis]… which until then could very well have occupied the three years of a Ph.D….”¹

V60 chromatography chemistry kitchen
A few hours later and the coffee had travelled up the filter paper with the solvent (water).

However, to return to the coffee. Through tasting rather than chemistry, I obtained a toffee aroma, with earthy notes and hints of redcurrant that evolved as the coffee cooled into a sweet toffee taste. The tasting notes further down the email on the other hand said:

“There’s a rich chocolate base, a kind of woody pine taste, sweet summer fruits, even tobacco. Remember, taste it before you judge it! Tobacco notes and woody pine don’t sound particularly appealing and maybe you don’t taste them at all!”

Much more descriptive than my effort. It seems I need to return to my V60 and improve my tasting ‘chromatography’. There are so many ways to slow down and appreciate a good coffee, what do you notice in yours?

A ‘coffee tasting wheel’ can be found here if you, like me, would like to improve your coffee tasting ‘chromatography’.

¹Chapters in the evolution of Chromatography, Ed. John V Hinshaw, Imperial College Press, 2008

Categories
General slow Sustainability/environmental Tea

Coffee cup recycling

a take away cup
It is recyclable, but not easily so.

That old subject again, the recyclability of take-away coffee cups. But before you groan about our disposable culture, there has recently been some great news, at least as far as the university sector is concerned. Regular readers may know of the Bean Thinking list of Top UK Universities for Coffee Cup Recycling. You may also be aware of just how short that list has been. Now though, there are signs of change. Perhaps because it is the start of the academic year, several universities including Oxford Brookes and the University of Bedfordshire have announced new schemes for recycling their cups with Simply Cups.

Owing to the way the cups are made it is extremely difficult to recycle them; although they are technically recyclable, very few companies have the capabilities. Consequently, the majority of the cups that we use for our take-away are just thrown-away, taking many decades to break down.

compostable, coffee cup, disposable culture
Using compostables can be a step in the right direction.

It is often our universities that do the research showing just how environmentally damaging our disposable culture can be. Nonetheless many university catering departments continue to serve coffee in “disposable” cups without putting in place any scheme to recycle them. Over a year ago I started a list of the UK’s top universities for coffee cup recycling. It would be thought that it should be extremely easy to be listed here. To be listed, all a university has to do is take a responsible attitude to it’s take away coffee cup use. Preferably, they would discourage take-away coffee cup use altogether. As Loughborough University recognises, slowing down, talking with colleagues over a stay-in (washable cup) coffee can be far more productive than scurrying away with your non-degradable cup.

However, often we feel that we don’t have time to sit down for a coffee and need to take-away. At this point, to be listed on the guide, all that a university would have to do is either invest in compostable cups (despite the caveats*, this is at least a step in the right direction) or institute a scheme to collect and recycle their coffee cups (as has been done at the University of Bath, Bedfordshire, Kent, Loughborough, Manchester Metropoliton and  Oxford Brookes University).

As may be apparent from the fact that the universities can be listed within this short article, the current list is woefully short. Even after the recent good news from Oxford Brookes and the University of Bedfordshire. Most universities, including my own are sadly still not on it. So, what can you do if your university is not listed here?

  1. If you think it should be listed but hasn’t been it is very highly likely that I just don’t know about it yet, please let me know by contacting me through email, Twitter or Facebook.
  2. If your university is doing very little to discourage disposable cup use: Write to the catering department and waste management department of your university to let them know your concerns. When writing, be aware of the fact that they have probably considered this problem before and are aware of the issues but have concerns/limitations that have prevented them from implementing a policy. Consumer pressure can help to change their minds but there may be (what appear to them to be) valid reasons that they have not yet done so.
  3. Use a re-usable cup. Even if your university does not charge extra for using a disposable cup/give a discount for using a re-usable (thereby encouraging the use of re-usables), systemic change starts with individuals. Be the start of the change you want to see. You can find a review of various re-usable coffee cups here.
  4. Refuse to buy your stay-in coffee if you are served it in a take-away cup. Good coffee deserves to be enjoyed in appropriate cups and poor coffee should be avoided anyway.

You can find the list of the UK’s top universities for responsible take-away coffee cup use here.

 

*The word ‘compostable’ does not necessarily mean that it will compost in a home-composting environment. For this situation to be preferable to the ordinary disposable cup, it would be necessary to have some form of industrial composting facility in place.

Categories
Coffee review Observations slow

Constructive interference at Frequency, Kings Cross

exterior of Frequency Kings Cross
Note the tiles. Frequency, Kings Cross on a rainy day.

It was a rainy afternoon when we ventured to Kings Cross and into Frequency. Suggested by the London’s Best Coffee App as the closest café to our then location, we made our way through puddles and rain onto Kings Cross Road. At that point, a brain-freeze meant that we couldn’t see where Frequency should be. The map on the app was implying that we were extremely close but there didn’t seem to be a café around. Then we saw it in front of us! The striking black and white tiling on the floor somehow hiding this shop-front from view.

The tables inside matched the tiling outside. Black and white triangles meeting at a point. My long black (from Workshop) was placed close to the intersection of these triangles. The coffee arrived in a mug, more cylindrical than standard coffee cups and so closer to mathematical models of coffee cups that are used in explanations of convection and rotation in the cups. An interesting change of aesthetic that also changes the internal dynamics of the coffee. A nice touch was that the mugs were also coordinated with the tiling, though to be fair I hadn’t noticed that at the time.

The coffee itself was extremely fruity, a lovely warming brew to enjoy while watching the rain outside. The interior of the café meanwhile was decorated with a lot of wood around together with a couple of music stands. Perhaps the music stands make sense in a café named Frequency. Indeed, according to the review on London’s Best Coffee (or as it is now known, Best Coffee), there are plans to build a music recording studio here as well as having live musical performances. However, also mentioned in that review was the fact that this café had been designed and built from scratch with the help only of online tutorials. Which makes a particularly resonant connection with something I noticed here.

mug of coffee at Frequency
Coffee at Frequency.

What caught my eye as I contemplated this café was the one bit of bright colour on the ceiling. It was also something that hints at problems that can crop up when you design and build your own electrical circuits: Parallel wires (in this case leading to the lightbulbs). Perhaps in the café, these were intended to represent music staves, certainly that would fit in the theme. However to an experimental physicist who dabbles in designing pieces of kit for electrical measurements, these parallel lines leading to a light mean something entirely different.

They mean noise.

When you are designing a piece of electrical equipment to be used for measuring voltages across an unknown material, there often ends up being a lot of wiring in the probe as well as the bit at the end of the instrument that you are actually interested in. Some of this has a practical purpose. Often we want to measure something when it is very cold so it has to be on the end of a metal rod that is inserted into a vat of liquid nitrogen or helium or that is held in a strong magnetic field. When designing the probe, the bits of wire leading to the interesting bit at the end of the rod can be almost as important to consider as the measuring bit itself.

To see why, perhaps you remember putting compasses around a wire carrying an electric current? As the electric current is switched on, the compass needles move indicating that the electrical current generates a magnetic field. The basis of electric motors and dynamos, the idea is that an electrical current will generate a magnetic field and a moving magnetic field would generate an electrical current.

transmission lines, electrical noise
The wires to the light bulbs in Frequency Kings Cross. Memories of transmission line lab experiments.

Now, imagine two parallel wires each carrying an electrical current. Both of them will produce a magnetic field, but if there is a varying current in one or other of the wires, the magnetic field will also be varying. And if there’s a varying magnetic field, it can induce a current in the neighbouring wire. In this way, electrical noise on one of the wires can be transmitted to the other.

Such electrical noise can be inconvenient if we are trying to speak on the phone and just hear a ‘hiss’, or if we are trying to listen to the radio and just can’t tune in. It could also be more problematic, imagine if there was a lot of electric noise on a machine measuring the electrical activity of your heart, an ECG. Consequently, there are whole books written on how to reduce electrical noise pick up. However one simple way to reduce a lot of the noise is to get rid of those parallel lines the like of which are on the ceiling at Frequency by twisting them together. The ‘twisted pair’ is a great way of making more sensitive electrical measurements. And if you wanted to reduce the noise further, you can shield the twisted pair with another conductor and ground (or earth) it.

The twisted pair works by reducing the magnetic coupling between the two wires. Of course, it may not be quite as immediately aesthetically pleasing as parallel wires on a ceiling but there is something quite elegant about a well made and shielded twisted pair properly grounded in an electrical circuit. And when you put everything together, ground it properly and see the noise from the electrical mains (at 50Hz) disappear, there is a certain pleasing effect from that too.

Café design as a clue to electrical design. Frequency can be found at 121 Kings Cross Road, WC1X

 

Categories
Coffee Roasters General Home experiments Observations slow Sustainability/environmental

How compostable is compostable?

the cup before the worm bin
“Completely compostable”
But how compostable is it?

So we’re trying to do our bit for the environment and ensure that we always get a compostable cup for our take-away coffee. But have you ever stopped to wonder, just how compostable is compostable?

It is a sad fact that most items that are described as ‘compostable’ do not compost as you or I may expect. Throw a ‘compostable’ cup in a compost bin (or wormery) and you may be surprised at how long it takes to disappear. The reason is that the legal definition of compostable generally refers to industrial composting conditions. In contrast to the worm bin, or the home-compost heap, an industrial composting facility is kept at (58±2)ºC. In these conditions, something defined as ‘compostable’ by the EU regulation EN 13432 or the US based ASTM D6400 needs to have completely disappeared within 6 months but have 90% disintegrated to fragments smaller than 2mm by 12 weeks.

Perhaps it is not hard to see why the legal criteria are defined this way. How would you define common criteria for home composting? Although there is a (Belgian led) certification called “OK compost” by Vinçotte, there are as yet no widely agreed definitions for home composting. However, some companies do try to seek out truly home-compostable packaging. In the case of coffee specifically, one coffee roaster trying to keep their environmental impact to a minimum is the Nottingham based Roasting House. Although most of their packaging is paper, (recycled and recyclable), they needed something less permeable for transporting pre-ground coffee by post. Apparently this took quite a search as many bags that said they were home-compostable turned out not to be. Eventually however they chose Natureflex, a packaging that provided a good moisture and air barrier to protect the coffee but that also broke down in a home composting environment.

But how quickly would it disappear in a worm-composter? On the 6th May 2017 my coffee from Roasting House arrived double packed. First in a Natureflex compostable bag and then in the standard (recyclable) paper bag/envelope. It was ready to be placed in the worm bin on the 8th of May 2017.

See the video below for how long it took to be eaten by the worms:

Seventeen weeks later, on 4th September, it was time to declare the bag composted. After 17 weeks, the bag had started to become indistinguishable from other items in the worm bin (such as garlic skin) and when I picked up what bits seemed to remain, they quickly disintegrated in my hand. It seemed time to declare it over for the bag. A truly home-compostable bag, but how does it compare to the ‘OK Compost’ label of Vinçotte.

Coffee bag genuinely home compostable
How it started.
The Roasting House bag before it went into the worm composter.

The definition used by Vinçotte is not for a worm-composting bin but a standard home-compost heap. Ignoring this fact for the time being, the certification requires that a compostable item disintegrates to pieces less than 2mm within 26 weeks and has fully gone within 365 days when held (in a compost bin) between 20-30ºC. Within these criteria, the packaging from Roasting House is certainly “home compostable” as determined by the worms. Although there were bits of greater than 2mm after 17 weeks, just handling them reduced their size to bits in the mm range. And that was only after 17 weeks, well within the 26 specified by the criteria used by Vinçotte.

So now we’re just waiting for the coffee cup. That went into the worm bin on the 20th April 2017 and is still going, 21 weeks later. Will it be home-compostable? Will the lining that’s needed to keep the coffee from leaking out prevent the worms from breaking it down? You’ll find out here! Make sure you sign up to the BeanThinking newsletter or follow @thinking_bean on Twitter or Facebook to be one of the first to find out when the coffee cup has finally gone.

In the meanwhile, if you’re looking for an environmental solution to your take-away coffee cup habit, it is worth investing in a re-usable cup. Most councils at the moment do not provide industrial composting facilities. Moreover, it is not safe to assume that compostable items will eventually compost in a landfill as modern landfills are water-tight and air-tight. As they say here, the modern land fill is not designed to mulch as much as to mummify. So,if you want to avoid green-washing, you may want to invest in a re-usable cup, for a review of these see Brian’s coffee spot here.

 

 

Categories
Coffee review Observations slow Sustainability/environmental

A need for religion at Continental Stores, Russell Square

exterior of Continental Stores
Ghosts of shops past! Continental Stores on Tavistock Place

Many years ago Tavistock Place, now home to Continental Stores, was on my cycle route home. I can no longer remember whether the sign “Continental Stores” was visible then or whether it had a second sign over it. However, the faded red backdrop, the vintage font and the whole feel of the frontage does make “Continental Stores” (the café) stand out a bit from the crowd. Continental Stores is run by the same people who run Store St Espresso on Store St. but much of the original decoration of the café has been kept from the old shop that previously occupied this space. And although this ‘new’ branch is now more than three years old, for various reasons I’ve never quite got to visit until a couple of weeks ago.

We arrived fairly late, just half an hour before closing, and managed to get a long black before the espresso machine (which was apparently having a bad day) finally packed up. Although filter coffee was available, this is not the case when you arrive so close to closing. The coffee was however very drinkable and the window seat provided a great place to watch people pass by. Bubbles formed around the edge of the coffee, reflecting the light streaming through the window in this airy café. White mists skitted over the surface of the drink. There was plenty to consider in the café too, from the oil paintings on the wall to the subtle green colour of the glass separating the interior of the café from the bar area (for more on glass colours click here). A large amount of science in a cosy place. However today’s train of thought took a somewhat different direction. That day, sitting in the café, prompted a thought train to develop in a more introspective direction: what does climate change denial have to do with personal integrity and the need for a continuing dialogue between science and religion? And what does that have to do with coffee drinkers?

Incredibly, it started with a map.

glass and map interior Continental Stores
So much to contemplate! From glass to the map.

On the wall in the main area of the café, behind the counter, is a map depicting the world. Although there is a photo on this page, there is a far better one in Brian’s Coffee Spot review of Continental Stores which can be found here (scroll through the gallery to find it). Also on the map are two circular depictions of the Polar regions. That fact, that the poles are illustrated separately and that the map is a rectangular impression of our spherical home impressed on me the knowledge that it is extremely difficult to truly represent our globe on a flat piece of paper. All maps are projections and the one at Continental Stores is the familiar cylindrical projection where you imagine a cylinder of paper wrapped around the equator of the Earth and then project the profile of the countries around onto it.

A few years ago a Malaysian-Chinese lady, now in her 70s told me a story about growing up in Malaysia (then Malaya) under British colonial rule. At school it was always impressed upon her how much larger Britain was than Malaysia, you could see it just from looking at the maps (which were always of the cylindrical projection as displayed at Continental Stores). It was only later that she realised the importance of map projections. Although Malaysia, at the equator, was fairly well represented by the cylindrical representation, Britain, being relatively closer to the poles, was stretched and so appeared much larger. Britain is in fact larger than the Western Malaysia peninsular but not to the extent that it appeared from the map. Had the map projection been used as a subtle political tool justifying Britain’s rule over Malaya*?

Similar thoughts occurred to me recently with some of the comments that have followed hurricane Harvey in the US (and the floods in south Asia that have killed more than 1200 people but have sadly been far less reported here in the UK). Was the intensity of the hurricane, and the fact that we are experiencing similarly intense storms more frequently, a consequence of climate change?

message inside Continental Stores
From the table to our planet. A message with resonances.

Although that’s an interesting question, it’s not the one that I would like to consider today. Instead, it’s the response on social media generated by data about the frequency of the hurricanes and their strength. “Why are you only showing weather information for the past X years, if you look back further/look more recently…” etc. It is the same with graphs showing global temperatures as a function of time. People ask “Why are they plotted that way, if we looked back further/zoomed in a bit more….” It seems that there is an accusation behind many of the questions; there is doubt about the integrity of the scientist who circulated the graph. What is at the root of this?

When writing a scientific paper (even on a relatively uncontroversial topic like magnetism), there is frequently a lot of discussion about exactly how to present the data. The graphs need to be clear enough and on a scale that the ‘message’ of the paper is delivered quickly. But equally in a way that does not misrepresent the data. Then, different authors have different ideas on aesthetics. The final graph is a balance between these. So why is there such distrust of similar graphs presented on subjects such as climate change? Are we so used to being sold messages in adverts that we immediately suspect the scientists of an evil motive, trying to persuade us to ‘buy’ an ideology?

Clearly there are occasions on which data is presented in a manner to impress rather than to reveal, as was the case with the map. Though even with the map, there is some ambiguity. Some cylindrical projections can be helpful for navigators as lines of latitude and longitude cross perpendicularly. There are times when such a representation would be useful. So when we generate, share or read such  graphs, we need to ask ourselves questions about our reaction to them. Are we representing the data truthfully? Are we trying to make the data fit into opinions that we already hold? These questions apply equally whether we are creating the graph or if we are seeing it on social media and reacting to it.

black coffee Continental Stores
Bringing it back to the coffee. The bubbles reflect the light from the windows. Taking time to contemplate the drink gives us space to reflect.

These considerations generate questions of their own. What do we think science is? Do we believe in the existence of truth? What is truth anyway? What are my motives in sharing/reading this piece of information; am I trying to understand the world or manipulate it to my advantage?

Which is just one reason (of many) that a respectful dialogue between science and the humanities, between scientists and theologians is desperately needed. Religions and philosophies have been asking questions about the nature of being, questions of truth and motive for millennia. Tools such as the examination of conscience have been developed by religious traditions to allow us to interrogate our own motives and to start to understand our own behaviour. In a week when it was revealed that more than 50% of people in the UK describe themselves as having ‘no religion’ it seems to me that, whether we believe in a religion or not, many of us would benefit from such an examination of conscience before we hit ‘retweet’, ‘like’ or ‘share’. Questioning our motives before creating, sharing or commenting. But such tools require space and the time taken to slow down, perhaps in a café, to deliberate on our own attitudes. Time that is needed to help us to see if it is our behaviour that needs amending before we question the integrity of others.

Such deliberations often don’t have conclusions but instead open up more questions. The fortunate consequence of which is that it becomes imperative that we spend more time contemplating our coffee in quiet, welcoming and thought provoking environments such as that found at Continental Stores.

Continental Stores can be found at 54 Tavistock Place, WC1H 9RG.

*I have kept the name of the country Malaysia as it is now known apart from when referring to the time when Britain had colonised it and called it “Malaya”.

 

Categories
Coffee cup science General Home experiments Observations slow

On rings, knots, myths and coffee

vortices in coffee
Vortices behind a spoon dragged through coffee.

Dragging a spoon through coffee (or tea) has got to remain one of the easiest ways to see, and play with, vortices. Changing the way that you pull the spoon through the coffee, you can make the vortices travel at different speeds and watch as they bounce off the sides of the cup. This type of vortex can be seen whenever one object (such as the spoon) pulls through a fluid (such as the coffee). Examples could be the whirlwinds behind buses (and trains), the whirlpools around the pillars of bridges in rivers and the high winds around chimneys that has led some chimneys to collapse.

Yet there is another type of vortex that you can make, and play with, in coffee. A type of vortex that has been associated with the legends of sailors, supernovae and atomic theory. If you add milk to your coffee, you may have been making these vortices each time you prepare your brew and yet, perhaps you’ve never noticed them. They are the vortex rings. Unlike the vortices behind a spoon, to see these vortex rings we do not pull one object through another one. Instead we push one fluid (such as milk) through another fluid (the coffee).

It is said that there used to be a sailor’s legend: If it was slightly choppy out at sea, the waves could be calmed by a rain shower. One person who heard this legend and decided to investigate whether there was any substance to it was Osborne Reynolds (1842-1912). Loading a tank with water and then floating a layer of dyed water on top of that, he dripped water into the tank and watched as the coloured fluid curled up in on itself forming doughnut shapes that then sank through the tank. The dripping water was creating vortex rings as it entered the tank. You can replicate his experiment in your cup of coffee, though it is easier to see it in a glass of water, (see the video below for a how-to).

Reynolds reasoned that the vortices took energy out of the waves on the surface of the water and so in that way calmed the choppy waves. As with Benjamin Franklin’s oil on water experiment, it’s another instance where a sailor’s myth led to an experimental discovery.

chimney, coffeecupscience, everydayphysics, coffee cup science, vortex
In high winds, vortices around chimneys can cause them to collapse. The spiral around the chimney helps to reduce these problem vortices.

Another physicist was interested in these vortex rings for an entirely different reason. William Thomson, better known as Lord Kelvin, proposed an early model of atoms that explained certain aspects of the developing field of atomic spectroscopy. Different elements were known to absorb (or emit) light at different frequencies (or equivalently energies). These energies acted as a ‘fingerprint’ that could be used to identify the elements. Indeed, helium, which was until that point unknown on Earth, was discovered by measuring the light emission from the Sun (Helios) and noting an unusual set of emission frequencies. Kelvin proposed that the elements behaved this way as each element was formed of atoms which were actually vortex rings in the ether. Different elements were made by different arrangements of vortex ring, perhaps two tied together or even three interlocking rings. The simplest atom may be merely a ring, a different element may have atoms made of figure of eights or of linked vortex rings. For more about Kelvin’s vortex atom theory click here.

Kelvin’s atomic theory fell by the way side but not before it contributed to ideas on the mathematics (and physics) of knots. And lest it be thought that this is just an interesting bit of physics history, the idea has had a bit of a resurgence recently. It has been proposed that peculiar magnetic structures that can be found in some materials (and which show potential as data storage devices), may work through being knotted in the same sort of vortex rings that Kelvin proposed and that Reynolds saw.

And that you can find in a cup of coffee, if you just add milk.

 

Categories
General Observations slow

The impact of water on coffee

lilies on water, rain on a pond, droplets
What is the crater shape produced by falling droplets of water on freshly ground coffee?

Recently there has been considerable discussion about the impact of water on the taste of your coffee. Although this is interesting not only from a chemistry perspective, but also an experimental design and an environmental one, Bean Thinking is probably not the best place to explore such effects of chemistry on coffee taste. If you are interested, there is a recent article about it in Caffeine Magazine, click here. Instead, on Bean Thinking, the idea would be to go a little more fundamental and ask instead what is the impact of water on coffee? What effect does dripping water have on the craters produced in freshly roasted coffee grinds?

You may have noticed craters produced by rain drops on sand or paused while preparing your drip brew to think about the different ways that water percolates through a filter compared to an espresso puck. But have you stopped to consider what determines the shape of the crater that is produced as a falling droplet impacts a loose bed of granular material (such as coffee). Perhaps you have looked at images of the Chicxulub crater on the Yucatan peninsula and wondered about asteroid impacts on the Earth or craters on the Moon but what about something closer to home? What if the impacting object were liquid and the impact surface more sand like? It’s a problem that affects how rain is absorbed by soil as well as the manufacture of many drugs in the pharmaceutical industry. But it is also something that we could experiment with in coffee. Is there a difference between craters formed in espresso pucks compared to those in the coffee in the filter paper of a V60?

bloom on a v60
Bubbles in a V60 filter – but what is the impact of individual drops of water on the dry grains of coffee? The ultimate in slow coffee.

Recently, a study appeared in Physical Review E that investigated the crater shapes produced by water droplets on a bed of dry glass beads (imitating sand). The effect of the impact speed of the water droplet as well as the packing density of the granular bed (sand/coffee) was studied. A high speed camera (10 000fps) was used in combination with a laser to reveal how the shape of the craters changed with time, from the initial impact right through until the crater was stable. The authors came up with a mathematical model to consider how the energy of the falling droplet was distributed between the impacting drop and the sand bed. Does the droplet of water deform first or does the energy of the impact go into displacing the sand and so forming the crater?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, when drops of water fell onto dense beds of sand (think espresso pucks but not quite so packed), the craters produced were quite shallow. It would take a lot of energy to displace the densely packed sand but not quite so much to deform the droplet. But when the drops fell onto looser sand beds (think drip brew coffee) the crater produced formed in two stages and depended on the velocity of impact. A deep crater was formed as the drop first impacted the sand. Then as the camera rolled, the sides of the crater started to avalanche producing much wider craters that had different shapes in profile (from doughnut to pancake type structures). For looser beds of sand, the faster the impacting drop, the wider the final crater. You can read a summary of the study here.

So what would happen for craters produced during making an espresso compared to those produced making a drip brew? A first approximation would be that the espresso coffee is more densely packed, so the craters should be shallower and less wide than those produced in the loose packed filter coffee. However then we need to think that the water used in making espresso is forced through the puck with high energy. In contrast, in drip brewing techniques, the water used has a lower impact energy, (it could be said that the clue is in the name). So the energy of the impact would form larger craters in the espresso pucks and smaller craters in the drip brewers, an opposite expectation from that of the packing densities, which effect wins?

coffee ground in a candle holder
Early experiments with coffee grind craters: There are advantages to working with glass beads and high speed cameras.

But is there anything else? Grind size! Espressos are made using finely ground coffee beans, with a typical “grain size” being about 10μm (0.01mm). Drip brewed coffee is somewhat coarser, a typical medium grind being compared to grains of sand (which vary between 0.05-2mm, 50 – 2000μm but we’d expect ‘medium’ ground coffee to be at the lower end of that). This is fairly similar to the ‘sand’ used in the study in Phys Rev E which used grains of size 70-110 μm. A slightly earlier study had shown how the crater shape depended on grain size for ‘sand’ ranging from 98 to 257 μm. That study had revealed that how the water interacted with the different grain sizes depended in turn on whether those grains were hydrophilic (wettable) or hydrophobic (water proof). It is probably safe to assume that the coffee used in an espresso grind has the same hydrophilic properties as the coffee used in drip brew but even so, we still have those three variables to contend with, packing density, impact energy and grind size. So, happy experimenting! Let’s find out how the impact craters left in coffee change with preparation method. And whatever else, it’s a perfect excuse (if one were really needed) to drink more coffee while slowing down and properly appreciating it.

With thanks to Dr Rianne de Jong for pointing me in some interesting directions (not all of which fitted in this piece) towards the interaction of water with coffee, more coming soon I hope.

 

 

Categories
Coffee review Coffee Roasters Observations slow Sustainability/environmental Tea

Cobwebs, Crows & Coleman Coffee, Lower Marsh

filter, Brazilian or Guatemalan, V60, rainbow, glass, Coleman Coffee, Lower Marsh, Waterloo
There’s a lot of physics in this glass cup of coffee, enjoyed at Coleman Coffee, Lower Marsh.

Coleman Coffee on Lower Marsh, Waterloo, is a surprisingly relaxing place. Surprising because the frontage gives little away. A door with windows on either side revealing a small wooden bench on the right and a larger table on the left. A food menu is on the left, the coffee menu in front of you (above the counter) and a note about how the coffee is roasted on a black board on your right. The space feels open and welcoming but it is the garden at the back that I think shifts Coleman Coffee from being a lovely little café to a great spot at which to just spend time and notice things.

My first visit was on an incredibly hot day in early July. For some reason I didn’t see the filter coffee option on the menu and so chose a long black to enjoy outside. The shade of the trees was a welcome respite to the hot Sun and the contrast created by the light provided much to dwell on with the inadequacies of my phone’s camera. Berries had formed on the tree growing up the wall of the café. After my visit I read the review of the café on Brian’s Coffee Spot and realised that these berries were mulberries. The other trees providing the shade were a Jasmine and a Pomegranate. I also found that I had missed the filter option and so a return visit was obligatory! How easy it is not to notice things.

ditch the plastic straw, enjoy a paper one
Chocolate milk and a paper straw.

A second visit sadly revealed the restricted opening hours of Coleman Coffee. Arriving at about 2.58pm, we were told it was take-away only as they were closing at 3pm. However the third visit was worth the wait. By this time the weather had turned and it had been raining, but the garden was still calling. The filter coffee on offer (V60) was either a Brazilian or a Guatemalan. Opting for the nuttier of the two (an allergy to actual tree nuts does not prevent my enjoying nuttiness in coffee!), we took a couple of glasses of water through to the back and awaited our drinks. When they arrived, it was interesting to find that the nutty coffee was truly nutty. A lovely flavour and mouthfeel to enjoy. It was also great to notice that the straw in the chocolate milk seemed to be an old-fashioned paper straw (rather than the environmentally problematic plastic straws). As it had rained, the stools outside were a little wet, even though they had been largely sheltered by the same trees above the garden. This time, the mulberry tree seemed mulberry-less, apart from the one berry lying sorrowfully on the floor. The red of the berry being squished (accidentally) underfoot leaving it lying and injured in the style of Pyramus and Thisbe. Across the other (wetter) side of the garden, three spiders were busy weaving new webs, ready to catch whatever flies came their way. It would have been easy to watch those spiders for hours but I think a good café can linger in the memory long after your visit has ended and so the spiders are still spinning their webs in my mind now.

garden spider at Coleman Coffee Waterloo
Spider on the table. What could be better than time spent contemplating their webs?

Photos of spiders webs glittering with dew drops are common place but somehow strangely attractive. Beads of dew gather at various points on the web leading to descriptions of cobwebs as being laden with jewels. A few years ago, a scientist contemplating spider’s webs asked why it was that water collected like jewels on the webs? Why didn’t it collect similarly on your hair? (You can read more about his story here). The team looked at the webs of one particular spider with an electron microscope. Electron microscopes can magnify things far more than optical microscopes (for images of coffee under an electron microscope click here) and so the scientists were able to observe how the hydrophilic (wet-able) fibres in the web turned from ‘puffs’ to ‘knots’ as they got wet. Water falling on the web was then attracted to these knots, partly due to an effect caused by the knot shape and partly due to the surface tension gradient of the water along the fibres. The results of the study can be found here.

Although it took five years of investigation after the initial contemplation, this study of spider’s webs could lead to tools that could be used for water collection or in devices to aid chemical reactions. Which brings us to the other ‘C’ of the title: crows. Sadly there were no crows in the garden on either of my visits to Coleman Coffee. Nonetheless there is a link. My first visit had been cut a little short as I was headed to the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition. Apart from the fact that it was baking hot inside the Royal Society, this science outreach event had a good mix of science/experiments for adults and for kids, it was great to wander around and learn a large number of new things. So many exhibits caught my eye but the one that connects with Coleman’s and cobwebs was the exhibit on tool making crows.

Spider and web, Coleman
Spider building a web at Coleman Coffee

Crows have been shown to be great tool users. Particularly the New Caledonian Crow which has been shown to even make hooks out of twigs in order to fish out insects from their hiding places. While thinking about what it was that led to this species of crow becoming adept at tool use (and therefore perhaps an explanation of human tool use), it became apparent that the two particularly good tool using crow species lived on remote islands without predators. Not only did they have the physical ability to create tools (a straight beak for crows, a thumb for humans), they lived in a place where they could have time to explore and to create, to develop tools to enable them to get the most tasty bug.

Just as the scientists had needed time to watch, to investigate and to think about spiders webs in order to create new tools, so crows may have needed that time to explore their tool use. Perhaps it’s worth pushing the analogy to inner-city London (or indeed wherever you are). The more we spend time out, contemplating and enjoying nature, the more productive we can be. But to develop, we need to slow down, to think, to contemplate, and to enjoy great coffee in surroundings as special as at Coleman Coffee.

Coleman Coffee is at 20 Lower Marsh, SE1 7RJ