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On dew, greenhouses & IR thermometers: Coffee & Science at Amoret

starting with a coffee
Always good to start with a coffee. The evening started with two coffees (from Ethiopia and El Salvador). What will be the effects of climate change on the coffee industry?

January 2020 was the 6th warmest on record in the UK, with a mean temperature 2C higher than the 1981-2010 average. Early in February it was announced that Antartica had recorded the highest temperature ever recorded there of 18.3C, beating the previous record of 17.5C in March 2015. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 in January 2020 was measured to be 413 ppm following the trend that has seen the atmospheric CO2 concentration increase more than 10% from just the year 2000. That the polar regions would warm faster than other parts of the planet had long been a prediction of global warming based on increased CO2 emissions. Nonetheless, to see the figures reported quite so starkly was startling.

Each month brings new headlines and more concerns about whether we are responding fast enough to limit global warming to 1.5 or 2C. And yet, the greenhouse effect was proposed back in 1824; the idea that carbon dioxide (and water vapour) were greenhouse gases suggested during the 1850s (1,2) and it was back in 1895 that Arrhenius predicted that doubling the atmospheric levels of CO2 (relative to 1890s levels) would result in a global temperature increase of 5-8C.

So given that it is such an established theory, why are we still arguing about it? And, more importantly perhaps, what has this to do with coffee?

It is, in many ways, an ideal connection for the theme for one of the Coffee & Science evenings that we’ve been holding at Amoret Coffee in Notting Hill. And so it was that a group of us got together over coffee to discuss the greenhouse effect and its links to coffee.

coffee bowl pour over
The first connections can be seen with the condensation. How does dew form, and why does it suggest that space is cold?

The first coffee-greenhouse connection is in the condensation. When you make a pour over, or even if you pour your coffee into a cold mug, you will notice the condensation forming on the colder glass (or ceramic) surfaces as the steam evaporates. We know that the droplets form because the temperature of the surface is below that at which water vapour will re-condense into liquid. Technically, this temperature is known as the dew point. And it is partly to dew that we owe our understanding of the greenhouse effect.

Back in 1814, William Charles Wells made a series of detailed observations about how, where and when dew formed. He was able to show that more dew formed on clear (or not terribly cloudy) nights and on surfaces that were exposed to the sky; they were space facing. Which brings us to a second coffee connection: just as your coffee cup warms you by radiating its heat (in the infra red) to your hands, so all objects with heat radiate their energy out. Wells realised that this meant that space was cold because, just as a coffee cup if it is not being heated and not surrounded by reflecting material (think about the inside of a thermos flask) will radiate its heat and get cold* so the surfaces of the earth, if there is no energy coming in from space and no surfaces above them to reflect their heat back at them, will also get cold.

If space is cold, you can calculate what the temperature of the Earth should be if the energy it is losing is balanced by the energy it gains from the Sun and when you do this, it turns out that the mean temperature of the Earth should be -18C or about 30C lower than that observed**.

Earth from space, South America, coffee
One common home.
The Blue Marble, Credit, NASA: Image created by Reto Stockli with the help of Alan Nelson, under the leadership of Fritz Hasler

This leads to the idea that there is a natural greenhouse effect whereby gases in the Earth’s atmosphere form a layer which lets through a large amount of the energy from the Sun but lets a lot less energy escape back through it from the Earth (owing to the lower frequency of the radiation being emitted by the Earth compared with that coming in from the Sun). This ‘natural’ greenhouse effect results in a warming of the Earth to a delicate balance and to the temperatures that we experience on Earth***. Fairly clearly, if this delicate balance is disturbed by adding extra greenhouse gases to the atmosphere it will lead to a warming effect (as Arrhenius predicted back in 1895), the question is how much and how fast?

We were very fortunate to be joined for the evening by Dr Robin Lamboll of the Grantham Institute of Imperial College London. Robin explained the latest science and understanding of the effects of climate change and of adding increased CO2 into the atmosphere. Particularly highlighting how an increase in CO2 leads to an increase in water vapour (owing to the initial temperature increase produced by the CO2) which is itself a greenhouse gas, and so the warming effects of a small amount of CO2 can be amplified by this mechanism.

At this point the conversation diverged away from coffee, not just because Robin is a tea drinker (!) but we moved onto the effects of sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere, local vs global temperature effects and the science of Eunice Newton Foote. We discussed what we know, and what we are just starting to understand, such as how what happens in one part of the world may lead to consequences in other parts of the world (weather wise). We also got to a discussion of albedo and the reflection of heat by ice via playing with a couple of infra red thermometers that we had to hand and the different ways that human eyes and shrimp eyes detect colour. How is this connected to climate change and coffee? I’m afraid that there is a connection but the path to it is a little circuitous for a write up. It’s the sort of thing that pops up when you have a number of people of different backgrounds all contributing to the discussion. This is what, from my point of view, makes these evenings so interesting (and on a personal level induces such pre-event nerves): the fact that the conversation can go in so many directions, with such different contributions from the attendees, that each evening takes on a different character, with a different set of connections and a new set of things to think about. I hope that others feel the same way!

“An Essay on Dew”, Wells book of 1815 summarising his observations on dew. An excellent piece of observational science.

Our next Coffee & Science evening is scheduled for March 2020. Please do sign up to the events list or keep an eye on the Facebook events page to learn details as they are announced. Thanks again to Dr Robin Lamboll for coming along in January. I look forward to seeing both familiar faces and some new people in March.

Bean Thinking’s Evenings of Coffee & Science @ Amoret Coffee are held approximately every 2 months from 5.30 until about 8pm at Amoret Coffee in Notting Hill. More details can be found here.

*Two caveats here: firstly the coffee will also get cold through convection and conduction, the connection is illustrative rather than precise – though were you to put your coffee into a vacuum it would cool via radiative cooling only. Secondly, Wells himself never made the coffee connection but instead considered the latest physics theories about heat.

**In “Introduction to Atmospheric Physics”, David Andrews, (2000)

***For details about how we can know what the temperatures have been over such a time period and the effects of other cyclical temperature variations on the climate, it’s worth reading “The Ice Chronicles” P Mayewski & F White, (2002)

Categories
Coffee Roasters General Observations

As quick as (a) Quarter Horse

Dog and Hat, Dog & Hat, Hundred House, Quarterhouse coffee
The package from Dog & Hat with Hundred House and Quarter Horse. Is it a particularly contemplative dog with the monocle?

Links with science can be found everywhere, from the café to the coffee roaster. A couple of weeks ago a delivery from Dog and Hat coffee gave me an opportunity to explore the random thought paths that may occur if you stop to ponder your coffee at home rather than in a café. The first coffee, an Ethiopian from Hundred House prompted thoughts on star gazing. But the second coffee, a Mexican from Quarter Horse coffee was equally thought provoking.

Finding time to prepare a V60 and sit with the SCAA “flavor wheel” as a guide, I was rewarded with a sweet, well rounded and perfectly enjoyable brew. I found fruity notes of blueberry and cherry/pineapple though the tasting notes on the packaging say “green grape, toffee and cocoa”. Sadly I missed the cocoa but this offers a good excuse for another slow brew with the coffee wheel at hand.

Thinking about the name of the coffee, I started to consider how you could quarter a horse. Perhaps not a literal horse given the ethical considerations but rather an irregularly shaped volume. How would you divide, into equal portions, an irregularly shaped object such as a horse? It seemed related to the question of finding the shortest route between two locations, how would you calculate the best route to take from A to B? In the 1950s a computer scientist called Edsger Dijkstra (1930-2002) came up with an algorithm to calculate precisely this problem. Originally designed to show the shortest routes between 64 cities in the Netherlands, Dijkstra’s algorithm is now ubiquitous in our lives.

Quarter Horse but how would you
A close up of the Quarter Horse Coffee Bag.

One of the ways in which we have started to rely on such algorithms is in car GPS devices or even on our phones trying to navigate to our destinations. Or at least, many of us do. London taxi drivers however have been shown to have developed a different brain structure from the general population that means that, for them, Dijkstra’s algorithm may be unnecessary. A few years ago, a study compared brain scans of people who had been driving London’s “black cabs” for a number of years to those of us in the general population. A follow-up study followed three sets of people over several years. A control group of people in the general population and a second group of people who studied the “Knowledge”, the navigational test that London taxi drivers have to pass in order to become cabbies. The Knowledge tests the driver’s ability to recall tens of thousands of London’s streets and the prospective cabbie can be asked to navigate between two points anywhere within a 6 mile radius of Charing Cross. Typically it takes years to acquire the Knowledge and not everyone who starts on the Knowledge will pass (the pass rate is only about 50%). This means that this second group of people splits into two groups; those who studied and passed the Knowledge and those who studied but did not pass.

The studies proved illuminating. One particular part of the brain, the posterior hippocampus had a greater volume of “grey matter” (the brain processing cells) in taxi drivers who had studied, and passed, the Knowledge compared with the general population. Moreover, those that had been taxi drivers for longer, showed larger posterior hippocampi. The changes in the brain seemed to lead to the cabbies having not only better navigational ability than the general population but better memory for London based information. The study of the trainees moreover confirmed that these brain changes occurred as a result of learning the Knowledge, showing that our brains are adaptable and still able to develop well into adulthood. While the brains of all the study participants started off similarly, those that went on to pass the Knowledge had a larger posterior hippocampus than those who either didn’t study or studied but hadn’t passed. However it was not all good news for the cabbies. The growth of the posterior hippocampus seemed to occur at the expense of the anterior hippocampus in long serving taxi drivers (but not newly qualified ones). The improved memory for London based information shown by the taxi driving group was also accompanied by a poorer ability to learn other visual information/memory related tasks in those that passed the Knowledge compared to the general population.

taxi and motorcycle, London
London black cab drivers have been shown to have a larger volume of grey matter in the posterior hippocampus area of their brains, demonstrating that our brains remain adaptable well into adulthood.

Perhaps the ability of the cabbies to navigate quickly around London’s streets suggests a second connection with Quarter Horse. A Quarter Horse is a breed of horse that can sprint very quickly over short (less than a quarter of a mile) distances. Which goes faster, the cabbie with the Knowledge or us with our smartphones once we have plugged in our destination? We are reminded of the tale of the hare and the tortoise. But I think a different tale is more appropriate. A tale that in reality was only ever a snippet of an ancient saying but has been developed into tales by thinkers such as Isaiah Berlin and Ronald Dworkin.

“The fox knows many things but the hedgehog one important thing”.

What does this mean? It seems there is a connection here between coffee roasting and taxi drivers, between algorithms and personal development, between coffee science and writing about coffee science. Is this connection really there or is it a meaningless statement that leads us into blind alleys of coffee consideration? It may be time to stretch our brains, grow our grey matter a bit and contemplate. Am I a fox or a hedgehog and where do London cabbies and coffee roasters fit in?

Quarter Horse coffee is online at https://quarterhorsecoffee.com

You can find out more about the coffee subscription site Dog and Hat on their website https://dogandhat.co.uk

You can read more about the taxi driver study on the Wellcome Trust’s press release about it here.

Enjoy your coffee, have fun thinking, grow your grey matter.

 

 

Categories
Coffee cup science General Observations Science history slow

Drip coffee

The universe is in a cup of coffee. But how many connections to different bits of physics can you find in the time it takes you to prepare a V60? We explore some of those links below while considering brewing a pour-over, what more do you see in your brew?

1. The Coffee Grinder:

coffee at VCR Bangsar
Preparing a V60 pour over coffee. How many connections can you find?

The beans pile on top of each other in the hopper. As the beans are ground, the bean pile shrinks along slipping layers. Immediately reminiscent of avalanches and landslides, understanding how granular materials (rocks & coffee beans) flow over each other is important for geology and safety. Meanwhile, the grinding itself produces a mound of coffee of slightly varying grain size. Shaking it would produce the brazil nut effect, which you can see on you breakfast table but is also important to understand the dynamics of earthquakes.

Staying at the grinding stage, if you weigh your coffee according to a brew guide, it is interesting to note that the kilogram is the one remaining fundamental unit that is measured with reference to a physical object.

2. Rinsing the filter paper:

V60 chromatography chemistry kitchen
A few hours after brewing pour over, a dark rim of dissolved coffee can be seen at the top of the filter paper. Chromatography in action.

While rinsing the filter we see the process of chromatography starting. Now critical for analytical chemistry (such as establishing each of the components of a medicine), this technique started with watching solutes ascend a filter paper in a solvent.

Filtration also has its connections. The recent discovery of a Roman-era stone sarcophagus in the Borough area of London involved filtering the excavated soil found within the sarcophagus to ensure that nothing was lost during excavation. On the other hand, using the filtered product enabled a recent study to concentrate coffee dissolved in chloroform in order to detect small amounts of rogue robusta in coffee products sold as 100% arabica.

3. Bloom:

bloom on a v60
From coffee to the atmosphere. There’s physics in that filter coffee.

A drop falling on a granular bed (rain on sand, water on ground coffee) causes different shaped craters depending on the speed of the drop and the compactness of the granular bed. A lovely piece of physics and of relevance to impact craters and the pharmaceuticals industry. But it is the bloom that we watch for when starting to brew the coffee. That point where the grinds seem to expand and bubble with a fantastic release of aroma. It is thought that the earth’s early atmosphere (and the atmosphere around other worlds) could have been helped to form by similar processes of outgassing from rocks in the interior of the earth. The carbon cycle also involves the outgassing of carbon dioxide from mid-ocean ridges and the volcanoes on the earth.

As the water falls and the aroma rises, we’re reminded too of petrichor, the smell of rain. How we detect smell is a whole other section of physics. Petrichor is composed of aerosols released when the rain droplet hits the ground. Similar aerosols are produced when rain impacts seawater and produces a splash. These aerosols have been linked to cloud formation. Without aerosols we would have significantly fewer clouds.

4. Percolation:

A close up of some milk rings formed when dripping milk into water. Similar vortex rings will be produced every time you make a pour over coffee.

Percolation is (almost) everywhere. From the way that water filters through coffee grounds to make our coffee to the way electricity is conducted and even to how diseases are transmitted. A mathematically very interesting phenomenon with links to areas we’d never first consider such as modelling the movements of the stock exchange and understanding the beauty of a fractal such as a romanesco broccoli.

But then there’s more. The way water filters through coffee is similar to the way that rain flows through the soil or we obtain water through aquifers. Known as Darcy’s law, there are extensive links to geology.

Nor is it just geology and earth based science that is linked to this part of our coffee making. The drips falling into the pot of coffee are forming vortex rings behind them. Much like smoke rings, they can be found all around us, from volcanic eruptions, through to supernovae explosions and even in dolphin play.

5. In the mug:

Rayleigh Benard cells in clouds
Convection cells in the clouds. Found on a somewhat smaller scale in your coffee.
Image shows clouds above the Pacific. Image NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response

Yet it is when it gets to the mug that we can really spend time contemplating our coffee. The turbulence produced by the hot coffee in a cool mug prompts the question: why does stirring your coffee cool it down but stirring the solar wind heats it up?

The convection cells in the cooling coffee are seen in the clouds of “mackerel” skies and in the rock structure of other planets. The steam informs us of cloud formation while the condensation on the side of the cup is suggestive of the formation of dew and therefore, through a scientific observation over 200 years ago, to the greenhouse effect. The coffee cools according to the same physics as any other cooling body, including the universe itself. Which is one reason that Lord Kelvin could not believe that the earth was old enough for Darwin’s theory of evolution to have occurred. (Kelvin was working before it was known that the Sun was heated by nuclear fusion. Working on the basis of the physics he knew, he calculated how long the Sun would take to cool down for alternative mechanisms of heating the Sun. Eventually he concluded that the Sun was too young for the millions of years required for Darwin’s theory to be correct. It was the basis of a public spat between these two prominent scientists and a major challenge to Darwin’s theory at the time).

 

Of course there is much more. Many other links that take your coffee to the fundamental physics describing our world and our universe. Which ones have you pondered while you have dwelt on your brew?

Categories
Coffee review General Observations Science history Tea

Time standing still at VCR, Kuala Lumpur

VCR chalkboard
A trip down memory lane via a new cafe. VCR in Bangsar, KL

One of the first science-based talks I gave was about how VCR tapes worked. Depending on how you viewed it (and whether you had to listen), this was either an achievement given that I was at school and didn’t really understand magnetism nor magnetoresistive devices, or a thing to be suffered through (for much the same reasons). So when I learned that a new café called VCR had opened in Bangsar in Kuala Lumpur, it prompted a series of fond (and a few embarrassing) memories.

Moving on, it is clear that this second branch of VCR (the first is in Pudu, in the main part of KL), aims to provoke such memories of times past. From the name of the wifi to the pulleys behind the counter and the wooden screen at the back of the café, various details around the café pull your memory in different directions. However the coffee is very much in the present. With three types of coffee available to try as a pour over as well as the standard espresso based drinks, this café has a lot to offer. The coffee is roasted by VCR themselves in their Pudu branch. There is also an extensive food menu with an interesting Chawan mushi as well as an intricate avocado toast (topped with pomegranate seeds, toasted quinoa and feta).

coffee at VCR Bangsar
Coffee and pour over jug. But is the number 68 or 89?

The friendly baristas were happy to advise on which coffee to match with which brewing device (though there seemed a marked preference for V60s on the days I visited). In total I tried 4 pour-overs, one with the Kalita Wave and the others by V60. These coffees were all excellent but very different. A couple were fruity, one was sweet and full bodied, one reminded me a bit of the local fruit durian, not I hasten to add because of its taste, but because the aroma from the cup was so different from the flavour of the drink. It was a great privilege to be able to try these different coffees consecutively and to really experience the variety of flavours in coffee. Great care was taken while making the pour over before it was brought over to the table, together with a jug of water, it also seemed to me that the baristas kept a discreet eye on me afterwards to ensure I enjoyed the coffee. So it was a good experience to have had the opportunity both to enjoy one of those pour overs and to observe the people and the surroundings of VCR when I had to wait for 1 hour for someone with no phone and no book. If you get the opportunity to do this I would very much recommend it. Find a comfortable café, order a coffee and then sit, without distractions, and watch what your mind notices and where it wanders for an hour.

An obvious place for a mind to wander would be to the mechanism of tape recording (and why mini-disks are the superior recording medium for the elegance of the physics involved). However, in an hour a mind wanders far further than the name. Supporting the cakes (and a display case for the 2nd place award of the brewers cup), was a table with a concertina type decoration around its edge. Was this a nod to the Kalita Wave brewing device? This is a significant difference between the V60 and the Kalita Wave: the ridges (or wave pattern) on the filter of the latter. How does coffee flow past these ridges? Does this difference in flow dynamics make a difference to the taste of the coffee?

variables grind size, pour rate, pour vorticity
It seems that there would be a lot of physics to observe in the fluid flow in a Kalita Wave filter.

A few weeks previously a friend had made a (lovely) coffee with her Kalita Wave. It was interesting to note the different dose of coffee she used and the way the grinds built up in the ridges (compared with my ‘normal’ V60). Why do the grinds end up in the ridges? Why is there a layer of dust on the blades of a fan? Why do some corners of a building collect more dust or leaves than others? Are these questions related and does it change the flavour of the coffee in the Kalita?

In fact, there are many subtleties in understanding how fluids move around solid objects. One of these is that at the interface of the fluid with the solid, the fluid does not flow at all, there is a stationary layer. Known as a boundary layer or Prandtl boundary layer (after the person who first suggested their existence, Ludwig Prandtl), realising these layers existed revolutionised the field of aerodynamics. The problem had been how to model the drag experienced by a solid object in a fluid flow. Although perhaps only of academic interest in terms of the flow of coffee around a Kalita filter or a spoon, by the end of the nineteenth century and particularly, with the invention of airplanes, how to calculate fluid (i.e air) flow around a solid (i.e. wing) object became very important for practical reasons.

vortices, turbulence, coffee cup physics, coffee cup science
Another cool consequence of boundary layers:
Vortices created at the walls of a mug when the whole cup of coffee is placed on a rotating object (such as a record player).

Prandtl introduced the concept of a boundary layer in 1904. The idea allowed physicists to treat the main body of the moving fluid separately to the layer, very close to the solid, that was dominated by friction with the solid. This meant that the Navier-Stokes equations (that are used to describe fluid flow and ordinarily do not have an analytical solution) are simplified for this boundary layer and can be quantitatively solved. Although simple, by the 1920s Prandtl’s layer (and consequently the solvable equations) were being used to quantitatively predict the skin friction drag produced by airplanes and airships.

The boundary layer allows us to understand how vortices form behind cylinders or around the corners of buildings. I suspect a mix of the boundary layer, turbulence caused by the coffee going over many of the ridges and the brick like stacking/jamming of the coffee grains would combine to explain the difference in the grind shape around the Kalita Wave and the V60 filters. What this does to the flavour of the coffee and whether better brewing would involve more agitation, I will leave to Kalita Wave coffee lovers to investigate. And when you do, I would love to hear of your results, either here on Facebook or Twitter.

 

Categories
Coffee review Coffee Roasters General Observations slow

Time for a slow coffee?

enamel mug, teh halia, Straits Times kopitiam
This enamel mug connected glass to the Giants Causeway (Straits Times kopitiam)

Every two weeks, the Daily Grind on Bean Thinking is devoted to what I have called a cafe-physics review. The point of these reviews is to visit a café, slow down and notice what has been going on in a cafe physics-wise. I focus on physics because it is my ‘specialist’ area but the point is to notice the connections between the coffee, or the cafe and the world around us. To see how what is going on in your mug is reflected in the science of the wider universe. Realising that things that seem disparate are in fact connected: It is the same maths that describes electrons moving in a metal and the vibrations on the surface of a cup of coffee. That sort of connection to me is mind boggling. Yet there is more. Thinking about the connections between physics and coffee can lead to meditations on the environment and sustainability, or considerations about how our attitude to drinking coffee changes our perception of it.

Everything is connected.

Parquet floor at Coffee Affair
How many people have walked on this floor? The story of evolution at Coffee Affair

It is my strong belief that whenever we go into a cafe, order a coffee and then proceed to sit down with our smart phones or tablets and check our e-mail or our Twitter accounts we lose a fantastic opportunity. It is the opportunity to be properly present and to notice what is going on around us. It is the opportunity to slow down and to appreciate what life has given us and the surprising things that the world has to offer. To look at the beauty and the complexity of the world and to say ‘wow’.

This appreciation is open to us all, provided we seize the opportunity to slow down and take that time to enjoy our coffee.

So, this week’s Daily Grind is an invitation. It is an invitation open to anyone who sits down with a coffee. If you notice anything peculiar, or interesting, that you feel deserves a mention as a cafe-physics review why not write an edition of the Daily Grind? It does not matter where in the world you are or what your level of science knowledge is. If a full Daily Grind article is too much but you have a great observation, write a paragraph review of your favourite cafe and I’ll add it to the cafe-physics review map. Think that you don’t know enough science? Never mind, share your idea with me and we can work on it together.

Hasten coffee, long black, black coffee, espresso base
Sometimes the link with physics/science is a little bit tenuous, as it was at Espresso Base

Your observations need not be physics-based. It would be great if it is based on some aspect of science, but, as past examples have shown, this link can be a little tenuous if the cafe/subject warrants it.

So, over to you. I hope that someone will respond to this invitation. Please do contact me if you would like to pen a review or if you have any questions. It is my hope that you are all enjoying such great coffee in the huge variety of cafe’s that we now have that there will be plenty of opportunities for people to slow down and to notice and then to share it with the Daily Grind.

Please contact me here, or in the comments section below. I look forward to hearing from you.

 

Some brief guidelines for a cafe-physics review:

1) The cafe should, preferably, be a good independent.

2) Any science/history etc. needs to be verifiable but, as mentioned, if you’ve noticed something great but are unsure of the science, get in touch and we’ll work something out together.

3) If you have noticed something fascinating with your coffee but at home and not in a café, contact me anyway.

4) Please do not write a cafe-physics review of any cafe you are financially associated with. I will have to refuse/delete any ‘reviews’ that I find are adverts.

Categories
Coffee review Observations Science history slow Sustainability/environmental

In the Greenhouse at CoffeeGeek

Coffee Geek and Friends, Coffee Victoria
Coffee Geek and Friends

Earlier this year, a new café opened up in Victoria. Coffee Geek and Friends is located at the far end of Cardinal Place as you enter from Victoria Street. Cardinal Place is an odd sort of shopping centre, a small collection of shops with a glass roof. The building site near Coffee Geek as well as the constant stream of people rushing to and fro make Coffee Geek an ideal place to spend some time watching the world go by. Coffee is by Allpress espresso and is served in very individual mugs. Apparently there is a range of geek-ery in the cafe including a ‘centre piece’ water filter but I admit I missed that as I was too focussed on my coffee. Coffee Geek and Friends is definitely a cafe to keep in mind (along with Irish & June’s) if you need a good place to meet near Victoria Station.

It was a very humid day when I enjoyed my coffee at Coffee Geek and, because the mug had not been pre-warmed before my Americano/long black (my notes don’t specify which) was poured into it, condensation quickly formed around the rim of the mug. The condensation forms for the same reason that dew forms after a cool night: the vapour pressure of the water above the coffee (or the ground) has reached the dew point at the temperature of the mug. The lower the temperature, the lower the vapour pressure has to be for the water in the atmosphere to start condensing into liquid droplets. Hence you will often find that your coffee is more ‘steamy’ on a winter’s, rather than a summer’s day.

Condensation on mug in CGaF
Look carefully at the rim of the mug. Do you see the condensation?

Just over two hundred years ago, William Charles Wells made a study of dew. He observed the weather conditions under which dew formed. He observed on which surfaces dew collected. He noted whether the dew formed on space facing surfaces or ground facing surfaces. After several years of careful study he published his “Essay on Dew” in 1814. His work, showed that the earth radiated heat at night (when it was not being kept warm by the Sun) and therefore that space was cold. Cloud cover reduced the amount by which the ground cooled which implied that cloud cover was acting as a type of blanket for the Earth, keeping the heat trapped inside. Later calculations of the balance between the heat radiated by the Earth and the heat received by the Sun confirmed that, without some heat getting trapped by clouds and ‘greenhouse’ gases in the atmosphere, the earth would be a good 30 C cooler than it is observed to be. Although these calculations are just rough, “back of the envelope” figures, detailed calculations confirm that the Earth is in a delicate balance, heated by the Sun, cooled by radiation and kept warm (and live-able) by a layer of natural greenhouse gases. This “natural greenhouse effect” has been necessary for our development, the problem is that now we are adding yet more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere which threatens to tip the established delicate balance by a few degrees.

Cardinal Place roof, greenhouse
The roof of Cardinal Place shopping centre. A very appropriate place for a meditation on the greenhouse effect

What we now call the greenhouse effect are these extra gases, which are more efficient at trapping heat within our atmosphere. If you can imagine what has been happening over the past three hundred years or so as we have been pumping yet more of these gases into the atmosphere at an accelerated rate, we are in danger of tipping this delicate balance towards further heating of the earth. The 2015 Paris Climate Conference is being held with the aim of requiring all nations to agree to a legally binding commitment to reduce the amount of extra greenhouse gases that we emit to a level that will only result in a temperature increase of 2C. To achieve this requires all of us to work together to reduce our own ‘carbon footprint’. Each of us will have to find our own, individual ways to reduce our emissions but perhaps when we look at the condensation on the rim of our coffee cup, we could remember William Charles Wells and his essay on dew and just think, what can I do, at this moment, to reduce my carbon footprint? Maybe it could be something as simple as turning off that phone (to conserve the battery) and watching what is going on in a café instead. A small gesture but one that would be good for us as well as the earth.

Coffee Geek and Friends is at the northern end of Cardinal Place shopping centre (opposite Westminster Cathedral).

As a Coffee Geek note, I would like to just comment that my notes on Coffee Geek and Friends were written using a “linux-sure” ball point pen. Not particularly environmentally friendly but definitely quite geeky.

Categories
General Home experiments Observations slow Sustainability/environmental

An opportunity to become a cafe-scientist

coffee, Timberyard, wooden tray
A great place to sit and do some citizen science: Timberyard, Seven Dials has plenty of seats outside.

There are many things to be gained from putting down your smart phone when you enter a café. Firstly, there is the opportunity to fully experience the coffee. The sounds as it is made, the smell, the taste, even the feel of the coffee. Then there is the opportunity for people watching; their behaviour as they order their coffees or have their meetings or try to alleviate boredom while playing with their smartphones. Of course, there is also the opportunity to look at the history of the café and its surroundings, to think about a café-physics review or just slow down and notice things. There’s always something interesting going on.

If you are lucky enough though to be in Athens, Barcelona, Belgrade, Berlin, Copenhagen, London, Manchester, Milan or Rome there is now even more reason to put down that phone while you savour your coffee. By doing so, you could be helping scientists with a few questions that they have about atmospheric pollutants. If you are not in one of those cities, you miss out this time, but you may want to keep reading because if enough people get involved now, perhaps next time the iSPEX-EU project may come near you.

contrail, sunset
What sort of aerosols and pollutants are floating in the atmosphere above your head at this moment?

The question is, what are the atmospheric pollutants that are in the air near where you are now? Perhaps you are in a café on a main road and the answer seems obvious, it is those cars and buses that keep passing by. But there are in fact many forms of atmospheric aerosols or particles and they range in size from a few nanometers to tens of microns (which, in terms of coffee grind is from much smaller than the smallest Turkish coffee to approximately the size of a small particle in an espresso grind). Is it really so clear that where you are, in the centre of that big city, is that polluted? If on the other hand you are on the coast in Barcelona, just how salty is that salty sea air? The iSPEX-EU project allows you to measure it and find out.

These particles of dust, salt and soot etc. can have  an effect on human and animal health, so clearly we want to know more about their distribution and their prevalence. But there are also, more subtle reasons why we may want to know about them. They may have an effect on global warming and they are certainly needed in order for clouds to form, (though as yet we still do not fully understand this process). We need more data about what aerosols are around and where they are to start to know what questions to ask (let alone answer) about health, the climate and cloud formation. Yes, we have satellite measurements and pollution data at specific locations, but what people are missing is that local information. What are you actually breathing? When you look up at the blue sky, what pollutants (or other type of aerosol) are you looking through? Can we get enough data to know how the air quality varies between the cafés of Hackney and those of Hammersmith?

Skylark Wandsworth
Another ideal cafe for iSPEX-EU measurements, great coffee and a lovely outdoor seating area at Skylark cafe, Wandsworth Common

To get this data the scientists involved in iSPEX-EU need people, many people. People who are willing to spend 5 minutes turning their iPhone (sadly it is an iPhone-only project) into a pollution detector. The more people that they can get measuring, the more data that they will be able to obtain. All you need is an app from the App-store and a (free) device that fits over your iPhone camera which you can pick up from somewhere local to you. Then, you just take a seat outside the café on a lovely blue sky day between now and the 15th October, aim your phone at the sky and take a series of photographs which are shared back with the scientists coordinating the project. If you are curious to know how your air quality compares with that in another participating city, you can check the live map to see how the measurements are going across Europe.

The device works by looking at the colour spectrum as well as the polarisation of the light reaching the camera as a function of angle. This information gives tell-tale clues as to the size of the aerosols as well as their prevalence. There is a lot more information on the website of the iSPEX-EU project and so I would recommend that if you do want to know more, you click their link here. In the meantime, why not sign up with iSPEX-EU, take a seat outside in that café and enjoy a great coffee knowing that, as you do so, you are contributing to our understanding of atmospheric science.

If you do decide to participate, please let me know of any great locations that you find, both for the coffee and the measurements, or share your pollution measurements with me in the comments section. I look forward to seeing some great data on the live map.

To get involved with the iSPEX project, you can follow the link here.