Month: October 2018

Categories
Allergy friendly Coffee review Observations Tea

Hear no evil… at the Inverness Coffee Roasters, Inverness

Coffee in Inverness
Inverness Coffee Roasting Company.

Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, so the saying goes and so the monkey, that was sitting on the sofa at the Inverness Coffee Roasting company (and café) indicated. And while I would not like anything evil to be said on this website generally, today it will be taken to an extreme as this cafe-physics review will not say much at all. Not because the coffee was not good, my Americano was a lovely complex dark and very enjoyable brew. Nor because there weren’t things to write about, several avenues suggested themselves for a ‘cafe-physics’ type review. There were also plenty of things to enjoy nibbling on while sitting down in this warm and comfy environment taking in the surroundings. Chocolate from The Chocolate Place was clearly labelled (and so I could enjoy it confident that it was nut-free) with a good variety of interestingly flavoured chocolates. The chocolate/coffee combination always goes well and the salted dark chocolate indeed complemented the coffee. A variety of freshly roasted coffees were in jars ready for selling to the home-brewing crowd and I heard both people behind the counter discussing coffee tastes with different customers to ensure that they could properly recommend a coffee for each of them.

So why, if the coffee was good, the service friendly and the environment interesting am I not going to write much about Inverness Coffee Roasting Company? Well, largely because I had been on holiday and so the preoccupations of the days before would necessarily influence what I noticed about this little café. Although I could happily write about neolithic monuments and considerations about inter-generational solidarity in relation to the re-use of refuse heaps at Skara Brae (as building material) and our own use (or misuse) of refuse in our environmental behaviour today. And it could even fit into a cafe-physics review of this venue as a sign on the wall above the door invited everyone to join the Plastic Free Scotland movement. However, it is not really what a Bean Thinking cafe-physics review is about. The idea behind the cafe-physics reviews is that things are often connected in surprising and beautiful ways and we can generally only see the connections if we slow down and look for them.

hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil
Monkey on a sofa, but there was much more to notice at the Inverness Coffee Roasting Company if you looked around you.

Therefore, while you may (or may not) prefer to read about my holiday considerations of all things thousands of years old, what I thought I’d do with this café review is suggest a few things that I noticed in the café, things that offered a variety of potential thought-trains and then see what you think, what you notice, what you see (or don’t see). Perhaps you will observe something in one of the photos that clicks into a thought train for you, perhaps you can look around you, wherever you are right now – and think about the connections you could make to things you sense there instead? But whichever you do, it is a great time to sit back with a coffee (or perhaps a tea), breathe in and take in your surroundings.

Back in Inverness, the first thing of course was the monkey. Eyes shielded with an arm, suggestive of those who would prefer not to see what is in front of them. Nancy MacLean in “Democracy in Chains” notes that a training in the humanities perhaps opens students to question their society more than other, more utilitarian, subjects may do. Is it hurt pride that makes me rebel against this idea? Can’t physicists question too?

Perhaps it is connected but a sign by the door, and an identical one by the sofa, was written on the glass front of a box of coffee beans: “in emergency break glass”. This suggested so many avenues for exploration to me, I wonder which occur to others?

Behind our seats, a lizard was painted on/engraved into a stone, suggestive of fossils, geology and how we collect evidence. But a second lizard suggested a different direction. An ornamental lizard was positioned as if climbing up the counter. How do lizards climb? What is it about their feat? What connects lizards to a coffee company? Above our heads and above the door, stereotypical of Scotland perhaps, loomed a deer head complete with antlers. But this one was different: it was made of coffee beans and string. How a bean based diet could replace a meat one? The nature of units and how it would not necessarily be sensible to measure the mass of a deer in units of coffee beans? The mind jumped. Jumping beans?

Deer head in beans
Bean there done that?
Gruesome ornament or vegan friendly?

Finally, the logo of the cafe which was featured on signs around the interior and exterior of the space: a flaming coffee bean. The Maillard process and the changes in coffee as it is roasted? The nature of heat/temperature and the manner in which we measure it? What we hear as fire burns, lightning bangs or on “the first crack” of roasting and what this tells us about our atmosphere, our planet and our coffee is made of?

Whatever you notice, please get in touch, either by Facebook, Twitter, leave a comment or send me an email. But one last thing on coffee thought trains that links to real trains and is perhaps reflective back onto what it means to pause and watch. We left Inverness the day after our visit to Inverness Coffee Roasting by train. Inverness station has a relatively steep (1:60) gradient for 20 miles on leaving the station. It is Scotland in autumn, it had been raining and leaves had been falling on the line. Five or ten minutes out of the station, our train to Kings Cross juddered and came to a halt. A signal failure apparently. As the driver re-started the train, it slipped backwards, and again. We weren’t able to get up the hill. And so we had to return into Inverness station. Once back at Inverness station, the guard came across the tannoy and suggested that the signallers had given us the go-ahead to ‘have another run’ at the hill to see if we could get up it this time. So we tried again, juddering and shaking to a stop a few hundred metres beyond where we had stopped before. Back to Inverness station it was. The ever hopeful guard came across the tannoy again: “Third time lucky, fingers crossed”. This time the train left the station faster, building up speed, moving along more quickly and powering out of the station. The carriage was silent, were we going to make it? Past the first point we stopped at, past the second, a bit further, the family behind clapped, the train continued then slowed down and shook, juddered and then sped up again. We were over the hill and on our way back to London.

A last consideration on the conservation of energy and its relation to coffee and thought trains? Or a metaphor for how we may not find those connections in that cafe come to us quickly but if we persist and keep noticing, we can go on a fascinating journey?

Do let me know your thoughts.

The Inverness Coffee Roasting Company can be found at 15 Chapel Street Inverness, IV1 1NA

Categories
General Home experiments Observations Science history Sustainability/environmental

Air raising

Small waves seen from Lindisfarne
How do clouds form? How does temperature vary with altitude, and what does coffee have to do with any of it?

You put a drop of alcohol on your hand and feel your hand get cooler as the alcohol evaporates, but what has this to do with coffee, climate and physics?

Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) was the grandfather of Charles of “Origin of the Species” fame. As a member of the Lunar Society (so-called because the members used to meet on evenings on which there was a full moon so that they could continue their discussions into the night and still see their way home) he would conduct all sorts of scientific experiments and propose various imaginative inventions. Other members of the Lunar Society included Matthew Boulton, Josiah Wedgwood and Joseph Priestley. The society was a great example of what can happen when a group of people who are interested in how things work get together and investigate things, partly just for the sake of it.

One of the things that Darwin had noticed was that when ether* evaporates from your hand, it cools it down, just as alcohol does. Darwin considered that in order to evaporate, the ether (or alcohol or even water) needed the heat that was provided by his hand, hence his hand started to feel cooler. But then he considered the corollary, if water (ether or alcohol) were to condense, would it not give off heat? He started to form an explanation of how clouds form: As moist air rises, it cools and expands until the moisture in the air starts to condense into droplets, clouds.

hole in water alcohol
There are several cool things you can notice with evaporating alcohol. Here a hole has been created in a thin layer of coffee by evaporating some gin. You can see the video of the effect here.

As with many such ideas, we can do a ‘back of the envelope’ calculation to see if Darwin could be correct, which is where we could also bring in coffee. The arabica growing regions are in the “bean belt” between 25 °N and 30 °S. In the sub-tropical region of that belt, between about 16-24°, the arabica is best grown at an altitude between 550-1100 m (1800-3600 ft). In the more equatorial regions (< 10º), the arabica is grown between 1100-1920m (3600-6300 ft). It makes sense that in the hotter, equatorial regions, the arabica needs to be grown at higher altitude so that the air is cooler, but can we calculate how much cooler it should be and then compare to how much cooler it is?

We do this by assuming that we can define a parcel of air that we will allow to rise (in our rough calculation of what is going on)¹. We assume that the parcel stays intact as it rises but that its temperature and pressure can vary as they would for an ideal gas. Assuming that the air parcel does not encounter friction as it rises (so we have a reversible process), what we are left with is that the rate of change of temperature with height (dT/dz) is given by the ratio of the gravitational acceleration (g) to the specific heat of the air at constant pressure (Cp) or, to express it mathematically:

dT/dz = -g/Cp = Γa

Γa is known as the adiabatic lapse rate and because it only depends on the gravitational acceleration and the specific heat of the gas at constant pressure (which we know/can measure), we can calculate it exactly. For dry air, the rate of change of temperature with height for an air parcel is -9.8 Kelvin/Km.

contrail, sunset
Contrails are caused by condensing water droplets behind aeroplanes.

So, a difference in mountain height of 1000 m would lead to a temperature drop of 9.8 ºC. Does this explain why coffee grows in the hills of Mexico at around 1000 m but the mountains of Columbia at around 1900 m? Not really. If you take the mountains of Columbia as an example, the average temperature at 1000 m is about 24ºC all year, but climb to 2000 m and the temperature only drops to 17-22ºC. How can we reconcile this with our calculation?

Firstly of course we have not considered microclimate and the heating effects of the sides or plateaus of the mountains together with the local weather patterns that will form in different regions of the world. But we have also missed something slightly more fundamental in our calculation, and something that will take us back to Erasmus Darwin: the air is not dry.

Specific heat is the amount of energy that is required to increase the temperature of a substance by one degree. Dry air has a different specific heat to that of air containing water vapour and so the adiabatic lapse rate (g/Cp) will be different. Additionally however we have Erasmus Darwin’s deduction from his ether: water vapour that condenses into water droplets will release heat. Condensing water vapour out of moist air will therefore affect the adiabatic lapse rate and, because there are now droplets of water in our air parcel, there will be clouds. When we calculate the temperature variation with height for water-saturated air, it is as low as 0.5 ºC/100 m (or 5 K/Km), more in keeping with the variations that we observe in the coffee growing regions†.

We have gone from having our head in the clouds and arrived back at our observations of evaporating liquids. It is fascinating what Erasmus Darwin was able to deduce about the way the world worked from what he noticed in his every-day life. Ideas that he could then either calculate, or experiment with to test. We have very varied lives and very varied approaches to coffee brewing. What will you notice? What will you deduce? How can you test it?

 

*ether could refer to a number of chemicals but given that Erasmus Darwin was a medical doctor, is it possible that the ether he refers to was the ether that is used as an anaesthetic?

†Though actually we still haven’t accounted for microclimate/weather patterns and so it is still very much a ‘rough’ calculation. The calculation would be far better tested by using weather balloons etc. as indeed it has been.

¹The calculation can be found in “Introduction to Atmospheric Physics”, David Andrews, Cambridge University Press

 

 

Categories
Allergy friendly Coffee review Observations Science history slow Tea

Creating an impression at 2Love Coffee House, Clapham Junction

coffee, cake menu, Clapham Junction, monmouth coffee
The menu at 2Love in Clapham Junction and some of the coffee making equipment in the window.

There is a lot of coffee paraphernalia on display in the windows at 2Love Coffee House on St John’s Road near Clapham Junction. Reusable cups, filters, moka pots, Chemex’s etc. Stepping inside, a piano greets you while the counter is on the left. The wall behind the counter is lined with jars of different sorts of tea while the coffee menu is on a blackboard close to the window. Coffee is roasted by Monmouth and is also available to purchase for brewing at home. Moreover, the number of re-usable cups on display meant that I have to admit to a touch of reusable cup envy when I saw the variety of glass cups on sale, have I used my cup enough to justify a second*? One great feature about this café was the care that they have taken to specify the allergens in their cakes on the blackboard, it is a considerate touch for people with allergies. Although we didn’t enjoy a cake on this occasion, it is great to know that I can!

There is definitely a musical feel to the café, with statues of musicians on shelves around the shop and pictures of different singers on each of the walls. Although we managed to find a table, it was rather crowded with the amount of chatter and distractions in the café initially challenging my assumption that all cafés can offer a space to contemplate and consider connections. However, this brief doubt in the idea behind Bean Thinking did not last long. The change in direction started with our discussion over an Americano and a fruit juice: can there be a justification for not eating certain meats if you are not already vegetarian/vegan and if so, what is it? This didn’t seem to go down too well with the table adjacent to us. On the wall behind our table was a metal picture of a horse drawn cart where the figures had been raised out of the picture to form a 3D image. It was reminiscent of the patterns given for stone rubbing as a child. But it was also reminiscent of something else, something that shines a light on an area of manufacturing as well as, perhaps, our conversation about the ethics of meat eating.

Not quite a mirror at 2 Love
3D Metal picture, musician statue and poster at 2Love Coffee House, who is the fairest of them all?

It concerns Chinese (or Japanese) magic mirrors. Known about for millennia (and not just in China, Aulus Gellius (c125 – approx 180 AD) wrote of them in the second century¹), they are slightly convex mirrors made of bronze. One surface appears to be an ordinary mirror but on the reverse surface, images of mythology or special Chinese characters are cast in relief. A Nature paper of 1879 describes why they were considered ‘magical’:

“If a polished surface is looked at directly, it acts as an ordinary mirror, reflecting the objects in front of it, but giving, of course, no indication whatever of the raised patterns on the back; if however a bright light be reflected by the smooth face of the mirror onto a screen, there is seen on this screen an image formed of bright lines on a dark background more or less perfectly representing the pattern on the back of the mirror, which is altogether hidden from the light”.¹

You can see photos of such mirrors and their reflections here but how would such an image be produced? Apart from magic, the first explanations for the effect focussed on it being trickery on the part of the makers of these mirrors. Perhaps the image was patterned onto the front of the mirror using more dense (or less dense) material, covered with a thin layer of lead or tin and highly polished so that you would never notice it by looking at your reflection only by shining light at it? Maybe there was other trickery involved on the part of the mirror makers to deceive us into thinking we could see through the mirror to the back. Later researchers wondered if these mirrors really existed at all as few could be found when they searched for them amongst Japanese mirror workshops. And yet a few mirrors with this magic quality were found and subject to study in the late nineteenth century.

window display 2Love
How much is that cup in the window?
Some of the reusable cups on sale at 2Love coffee house.

The results showed that the image was not formed if projected too close to the mirror but only if the screen were held some distance away from the mirror’s surface. Moreover careful optical experiments showed that the image was formed by the surface of the mirror having thicker regions that were less convex than the rest of the mirror so that these reflected the light differently². Although the image at the back of the mirror had been cast and not stamped on the back, the stresses and strains formed by the pattern on the metal somehow propagated through the (thin) mirrors and produced distortions on the surface of the mirror. Even when highly polished, these minute distortions in curvature remained causing the reflection of the ‘magic’ image under certain lighting conditions.

The theory describing the optics behind the magic mirrors was described as a ‘beautiful fact’ in a fairly recent mathematical description. But exactly how the stress of the pattern at the back gets transferred to the surface of the mirror remains to be understood³. Nonetheless, the fact that imperfections on one side of a material can be revealed by the projected reflections from the surface of the other, a process known as “Makyoh imaging”, is now used to check the integrity of semiconductor wafers before they are used in the manufacturing of devices. A piece of physics based neither on magic, nor on trickery, that is useful for our computer based lifestyles.

When faced with something that seemed improbable, it is interesting that our first explanations were based on magic, deceit on the part of the one who made it or distrust of the phenomenon altogether. It was only by carefully studying something that was too easily dismissed that the beautiful physics and industrial relevance of the property was revealed. For me this has pertinence to the question of our own investigation into what we think about the world. Do we place too much weight in our judgement of what we do not understand merely based on our own experience of how things are? Do we need to look more carefully at what we thought we knew? Great pondering points for a visit to a café and confirmation that, provided you have good coffee and a nice chair to sit on, contemplation directions can be found no matter how popular the venue.

2Love coffee is at 89 St John’s Road, Clapham Junction, SW11 1QY

¹ “The Mirror of Japan and its Magic Quality” Nature, April 10 1879, p 559

² “The Magic Mirror of Japan, Part 1”, WE Ayrton and John Perry, Proc. Royal. Soc, 28, 127 (1878-79)

³ “Oriental Magic Mirrors and the Laplacian Image”, MV Berry, Euro. J. Phys. 27, 109 (2006)

*Although there are differences depending on what you take into account, lifecycle analysis done here, here and here suggest a break-even point of disposable to reusable cups from 15 to 100 re-uses. However, if you consider that part of the solution to our environmental problems involves breaking the consumerist mindset then perhaps, if it ain’t broke, no need to replace it.