Categories
Allergy friendly Coffee review General Observations

Getting to the point at Sharps

coffee and Caffeine at Sharps
Coffee at Sharps Coffee Bar.

There will be plenty to notice at any café that shares space with a barber’s shop. And so it was the case at Sharps Coffee Bar on Windmill Street. The café is at the front of the barber’s shop which is separated from the tables by a glass wall: people watching in a type of human goldfish bowl. The counter was on the left of the shop as we walked in and it was great to see that in addition to the usual espresso based drinks there was an aeropress coffee available (as well as batch brew). Given the chemistry of pre-brewed coffee, I tend to pass on batch brews though I am aware that there are many people who enjoy speciality coffee who will disagree with me. However, given that the barista on the day was “still perfecting” his aeropress recipe, I enjoyed instead a long black prepared with The Barn roasted beans.

The sign in the window suggested that “maintenance matters” which is something that I am sure that we can all agree on, whether it is on haircuts, coffee equipment or even equipment in a science lab. A stitch in time saves nine so they say. On the board listing the prices, it was good to see that Sharps coffee bar mentioned the use of almond milk. Although personally I generally drink black coffees, cross contamination can be an issue for allergy sufferers and so it is always helpful to be alert to the use of nut-based milks when they are used (you can read more here). Edibles were supplied by Kaffeine. Behind the bar there were a couple of trough-like sinks while the contrast in the wood and the tiling on either side of the bar provided another avenue of thought.

cacti in a row
Sign, window and cacti at Sharps Coffee Bar

In the window, a row of cacti caught my attention. Cacti seem known for two things. One is that they are (generally) prickly and the other that they are extremely water efficient.  But these two facts can also apparently be linked. Some cacti use their spikes or hairs to change the local atmosphere around them so that air is trapped in the hair or that air flow is reduced. Both of these measures would help to prevent water loss from the main body of the plant. It is an example of the structure of something affecting the environment around it. Similar effects can be seen on the hairs on a spiders legs which trap air allowing the spiders to survive if they are submerged as well as to waterproof the legs in more general times. Some plants similarly use hairs (and therefore the air trapped in them) to waterproof their leaves. The benefit of this for the plant is that waterproof leaves mean that drops of water roll off of them causing the leaves to be self-cleaning. This is an effect that people are trying to mimic in order to make self-cleaning surfaces for human use.

View of St Paul's Cathedral London
There is a whispering gallery in the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. An interplay between sound waves and the shape/size of the dome.

Structures can also be used to trap sound waves either deliberately with meta-materials or, almost accidentally such as the whispering galleries of cathedral domes. Moreover the hairs themselves can act as part of a sound detection system. Human ears for example have tiny hairs in the cochlea. As a sound comes in and these hairs vibrate, the movement of these hairs gets converted to a nerve impulse that we can eventually ‘hear’. Perhaps this could take us into a consideration of what hearing is, what sound is and, in a Berkeley-type way whether we actually experience anything outside of ourselves at all. However, more directly it takes us back to the barber’s shop and how evolution has resulted in a wide variety of structural adaptations that allow different life forms to live optimally in their environment.

And with that, it would probably be time to sit back and enjoy another coffee.

Sharps coffee bar is at 9 Windmill Street, W1T 2JF

Categories
Home experiments Observations slow Sustainability/environmental Tea

Tales from the worm bin

the cup before the worm bin
How it all began.
“Completely compostable”
But how compostable is it?

It is hard to believe but it was one year ago this week that the composting experiment that became #willitcompost started. The idea was to test just how “compostable” a coffee cup described as “completely compostable” really was. The problem is that “compostable” has a legal definition but it is not one that you or I may immediately recognise. Legally for a take-away coffee cup to be described as compostable it has to completely disappear within 6 months in an industrial composting facility. Industrial composting is quite different from home composting. In the former, the temperature is kept at (58±2)ºC while in my composting worm bin, it can get very cold indeed.

As has been written about elsewhere, in the absence of better industrial composting facilities, there is very little virtue involved by swapping a disposable cup for a compostable one, to combat the problem of waste it would be far better to remember your re-usable. However, what if you had a composting bin at home? How long would it take the cup to compost? And even, would it compost?

So every week for the past 52 weeks, I have posted a photo of the cup, composting away, in the worm bin. It seems clear that although it will eventually compost, more than 52 weeks is a long time to wait and not practical if you are drinking multiple take-away coffees.

willitcompost
51 weeks later, the lining and part of the rim of the cup are still in the worm bin. Clearly the worms have better things to eat.

In the meanwhile, other questions have been raised. What about other coffee packaging such as the bags for roasted coffee beans? What about the compostable “glasses”? Can anything be done to speed up the composting of the cup?

Last month, the opportunity came to start a new experiment testing these questions. A compostable coffee roasting bag from Amoret Coffee (which was reviewed on Bean Thinking here) was placed in the second shelf of the worm bin together with a cup, a compostable “glass” and a section of food packaging. The cup and the ‘glass’ were cut in half before being placed in the worm bin. One half of each was left as it was but the other half was soaked in (initially boiling) water for 12 hours. The idea of this was that part of the problem that has slowed the composting of the original cup was the lining that is designed to hold hot liquids without leaking. If we could somehow weaken that lining before placing it in the worm bin, perhaps the composting process would be accelerated?

talesfromthewormbin
A roasted coffee bag, a cup (split in two, see main text), a compostable glass and some food packaging, but will they compost?

Starting in late March provides the best chance of a quick composting process due to a particular aspect of worm behaviour. Although the composting worms will continue to eat the waste put into the composting bin throughout the winter, they do slow down quite a lot. If you have a worm bin, you may notice that the amount of waste that you can put into the bin decreases during the winter months. On the other hand, as the weather improves, the worms seem to eat everything very quickly so, to provide the best conditions for composting, the weather has to be reliably warm (or at least, not freezing).

Rather than once a week, updates will be approximately once per month both on social media and in the Bean Thinking newsletter. So keep your eyes on #talesfromthewormbin on twitter or subscribe to the newsletter. Do we really take our environmental responsibility seriously by using compostable packaging or, ultimately, is a more radical approach to waste, single use packaging and consumerism necessary?

Categories
Coffee review Observations Science history slow Tea

Pushing it at Lever and Bloom, Bloomsbury

Lever Bloom coffee
Lever and Bloom under a blue sky.

Does a take-away need to be rushed? A coffee so quick that there is ‘not enough time to prepare a flat white’? Are we always so preoccupied with the distractions of our day that we consume our coffee merely for the pleasant caffeine kick that it provides?

Lever and Bloom in Bloomsbury is a great example of why this does not have to be, indeed should not be the case. Since 2015, Lever and Bloom have been operating out of a cart on Byng Place close to UCL and a number of other research institutes. The character of the surroundings really does affect the space and both times I have been to Lever and Bloom I have either met interesting people in the queue or overheard snippets of intriguing conversation about history I know nothing about.

Coffee Bloomsbury reusable coffee cup
Long black in a keep-cup and telephone box in Byng Place.

It is easy to spot the coffee cart in the corner. Firstly, it is bright red and quite eye catching but secondly because of the queue forming in front of it. Don’t be put off though, the queue moves very quickly so you won’t wait long even if you are in a rush. Queueing however does give you an opportunity to peer into the cart. Space is used extremely efficiently. with each piece of equipment  apparently having its own perfect home. It reminded me of a childhood game of trying to fit in as many objects as possible into a matchbox. A cabinet on the table in front of the cart displays cakes including cinnamon rolls (sadly sold out by the time I arrived in the afternoon). It was also nice to see the number of people ahead of me in the queue who were using re-usable cups.

The lever of the name refers to the (Izzo Pompei) lever espresso machine that is used on the cart. It was fascinating to watch the ground beans being carefully tamped and the lever being pulled to prepare the espresso. Although there is some debate as to the optimum water pressure needed for preparing an espresso, the standard pressure is 9 Bar; water is pushed through the tamped grinds at nine times the atmospheric pressure at sea level. Watching these espressos being prepared reminded me of preparing ceramic samples of an interesting magnetic material a few years ago. We were interested in the electrical properties of a class of materials called manganites. To prepare the materials for measurement we first had to grind the pre-cursor powders (but with a pestle and mortar, no burr grinders) and then, after a couple of further preparatory steps, press them into a pellet ready for firing in the oven. The machine used for pressing the pellets had a lever, not dissimilar to that on the espresso machines and yet, the pressure that we used for the pellets was roughly 1000 Bar. This high pressure was needed so that dense pellets of manganite material would be formed when we heated it in the oven (typically at 1200 ºC). Just as a good espresso depends on the pressure and then the temperature and time of extraction, so the properties of the pellet would be affected by the pressure and then temperature and time of firing in the oven.

Portland Stone fossils
Fossils in Portland Stone. It is astonishing what is revealed when you slow down and notice the buildings around you.

Similar effects affect the rocks of the earth, something that is particularly visible in the area around Lever and Bloom. A geological walking tour around Byng Place, Tottenham Court Road and towards the British Museum illustrates this particularly well. Behind Lever and Bloom, the church of Christ the King is built from Bath Stone. An oolitic limestone, this type of rock is formed of compressed sand and bits of shell. Much as the manganite samples of my study before they were fired in the oven but of a more interesting colour. Heading towards Gower St and the impressive UCL building is made of Portland Stone. Another limestone, this building material is a goldmine for urban fossil explorers. Continuing the walk, on Tottenham Court Road, the Mortimer Arms pub is fronted by quartzite while Swedish Green Marble adorns 90 Tottenham Court Road. Quartzite and Marble are both types of metamorphic rock, formed by pressing together different precursor materials at high pressure and temperature. Other types of marble can be seen on the tour, suggesting the influence of pressure and temperature of formation on the rock structure as well as the type of precursor rock.

It would seem that such a walking tour is perfectly timed for a longer style of coffee, perhaps a latte (in a re-usable cup of course) from such a centrally located place as Lever and Bloom. And of course, assuming you are using a re-usable, there is even more to ponder. The pressure and temperature during the manufacture of the re-usable cup would have affected the properties of the cup (or in my case, glass).

Let me know if you spot any interesting rocks or fossils during your time at Lever and Bloom but whatever you do, I hope that you can enjoy your coffee and then slow down to enjoy it a bit more.

Lever and Bloom is at Byng Place, WC1E 7JJ