Dog & Hat – Bean Thinking

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.

Hundred House: Wonder what they are?

What would happen if, rather than five minutes taken noticing the surroundings of a café, you were to look closely at the coffee you brewed in the morning? Different roasters, different coffees, an opportunity to notice something new in each brew. And so it was that a couple of weeks ago a package arrived in the post from the coffee subscription site “Dog and Hat“. Together with a note (in answer to a question I had sent them) ‘Recycled box, paper, mail bag’, came two coffees. An Ethiopian honey processed coffee from Hundred House and a Mexican washed coffee from Coatepec via Quarter Horse coffee.

Each time I moved the bag from Hundred House, a lovely aroma was released. So I moved it around quite a lot. While brewing a V60 with it, the morning light poured through the window producing beautiful lensing effects through the bubbles on the coffee surface and reflections from the coffee itself. The brewed coffee had such a sweet, fruity aroma reminding me of cherries that gave way to plums on tasting. What I took as toffee seemed to be described on the tasting notes as “dates” or “molasses”. Close enough I think. A lovely coffee to enjoy slowly.

The Hundred House coffee bag. With that aroma, indeed how I wonder what you are.

Printed onto the bag was a star with extra lines coming out of it, suggestive of a twinkling star at night. Although each star is massive, they are all at such a great distance from us that they appear to us as point sources of light. And since all light gets refracted when it goes from one medium to another (think about the appearance of that paper straw in a glass of water) the star will appear to twinkle from our position on the Earth below our turbulent atmosphere. Although on a clear night we may not notice it directly, regions of relative hot and cool air in the atmosphere are constantly moving. Layers of air move over each other creating waves much like you see on the seashore and it is this turbulent environment that refracts the light from the stars in such a shimmering way. We can see a similar effect in tea (though not so easily in coffee*): When we pour hot tea into a cold cup, the convection in the cup leads to there being areas of hotter and cooler tea. The refractive index of water is temperature dependent and so the light incident on the tea gets refracted (bent) by different amounts depending on whether it encounters a cool region or a warm region. This leads to the lines of light that we see dancing on the bottom of the cup¹.

KH instability, Kelvin Helmholtz instability — Not a great example of a Kelvin Helmholtz instability but it gives the general idea. This one was quickly snapped from a moving car, I’m on the lookout for a better example.

Although atmospheric turbulence is inferred by the twinkling of stars, a beautiful visualisation of that turbulence can be seen in the form of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. Named after Lord Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz, this instability manifests as a string of waves on a cloud. It occurs when a fast moving layer of air flows over a slower moving one. The phenomenon is fleeting. If you are lucky enough to see it, the pattern manifests only for a very short time. They are definitely worth watching out for.

Depictions of atmospheric turbulence can also be seen in some paintings. It is said that Vincent van Gogh’s depiction of turbulence in his painting “Starry Night” is extraordinarily accurate. Certainly it is striking that the turbulence depicted by van Gogh does look like the turbulence in a coffee cup. However apparently it goes much deeper than this. In a numerical analysis of the turbulent patterns in a few van Gogh paintings, researchers showed that van Gogh’s depiction was very close to the mathematical (Kolmogorov) description of turbulent flow.

Coffee, Van Gogh — Van Gogh in a coffee cup. Reminiscent of his painting “Starry Night”, there are remarkable mathematical similarities between what van Gogh depicted and real turbulent events.

On their website, Hundred House discuss their aim of being a “collective space, where conversation, art and industry meet, over a cup of coffee”. Pouring a coffee, and watching the turbulence in the cup, perhaps pause a while to consider these points of connection and maybe add a bit of science to the mix. This week if you are in the Northern hemisphere, the Perseid meteor shower offers a particularly great time to reflect on turbulence in the atmosphere and the twinkling of the stars. If you locate the “W” of Cassiopeia (currently in the north east viewed from London) and watch, slightly underneath it towards Perseus, you should see a few meteors of the Perseid meteor shower (perhaps 60-70 per hour during the peak of 11th-13th August). While watching for the shooting stars, it is worth looking at those that twinkle. Which twinkle more, the stars of Cassiopeia or the stars toward the horizon? Why do you think this is?

Whether you watch the stars or just prepare your coffee, take the time. Enjoy your brew.

You can find out more about the coffee subscriptions at Dog and Hat coffee, here and more about Hundred House coffee, here. Do get in touch (email, Twitter, Facebook or comments) if you notice anything you want to share.

*We don’t see this so often in coffee because coffee, generally, absorbs more light than tea and so it is harder to see the bottom of the cup.

¹Another effect that can lead to these patterns in swimming pools and similar large bodies of water is caused by waves on the surface of the water. Where waves form on the surface of the pool, the curved surface acts as a lens focussing the light to the floor of the pond. As the waves move on the surface, the pattern on the pool floor will change similarly to that in the tea cup.