Perhaps an unusual post but there is so much opportunity to stop, think and notice at the moment. Whether it is relaxing in a café with a cold brew or sipping a take-away in a park. There is time to slow down and ponder. Here are three points that have been puzzling recently. What do you think? Perhaps you have other things that you ponder while sitting in a café? Let me know either in the comments section below, on twitter or on Facebook.
Oat milk filtering through the Kone filter – but what does oat milk tell us about Brownian motion, molecular ‘reality’ and the nature of a scientific theory?
Molecules, the atmosphere and oat milk.
On pouring home-made oat milk into a cup of black tea, it is noticeable that a large part of the oat milk is dense and falls to the bottom of the cup (before being stirred by the turbulence in the tea). A similar phenomenon is found in the rarefaction of gases through the height of the atmosphere and in the distribution of dye in water paint. This latter effect was used to establish the existence of molecules back in 1910. The idea that Brownian motion was caused by molecules had been problematic because there was no way to see molecules in a liquid producing the Brownian motion. The theory linking the two was only developed properly in the early twentieth century. What makes a scientific theory? Is it legitimate to postulate something that cannot currently be observed experimentally?
Packing value
Why does roasted coffee often come in plastic packaging that is unrecyclable and not very reusable? What could prompt a move to a more circular economy. Would it be possible to recycle plastic bottles into coffee ‘boxes’ with an air valve at the bottle top (see pictures). This would increase the recyclability without seeming to affect the taste of the coffee?
An idea for a circular economy suitable coffee packaging? Recycled plastic bottles as airtight coffee containers.
Related to that, what are your coffee values? Do you favour taste and aroma, traceability, sustainability? Does the packaging that your coffee arrives in feature? Which of these is more important to you? Does the way you drink coffee reflect this?
Footfall past a café
How many people are walking past the café you are sitting in each minute? How many does that translate to per day (accounting for differences in day/night footfall)? Assuming the paving stones remain the same, how long would it be until the successive footprints of all these people caused erosion of the pavement surface? What are the implications of this for the geological features near you?
Whatever you think about in a café or while drinking a coffee, enjoy your time taken out to think. Perhaps you will notice something (or realise something) very interesting or noteworthy and if you have any thoughts on any of the above do let me know either in the comments, on Twitter or on Facebook.
Banana bread and coffee with a sugar pot in the background at Sugar Pot, Kennington
What is it that makes a great café? A space to slow down and think? Good coffee and cakes? A local business that forms part of its local community and gives back to that community in different ways? As I was looking around for a new café to try, I was reminded of Sugar Pot in Kennington. Their website suggested that it ticked all of these boxes and so I was eager to try it (so eager in fact that I didn’t note the opening times, they close at 3 on week-days which is a problem when you arrive at about 2.55). So a second attempt at trying Sugar Pot was arranged, this time safely before lunch. This time, in the morning, there were quite a few chairs and tables outside the café in a roped off area of the street. (We hadn’t noticed this on the first occasion we visited as they had all been piled up inside the shop by the time we arrived). Most of these tables were occupied indicating that it is clearly an attractive place for locals to meet and chat over coffee. Fortunately there were also a fair number of tables inside which suited us as a café often offers more to ponder inside than out (though outside offers a different perspective particularly for people watching).
Inside, each table has an individual character and one in particular offered several points to think about both in terms of physics and aesthetics (you will have to visit to understand). However, it was elsewhere that my attention was drawn that day. Coffee is roasted locally by Cable Bakery while the cakes are from John the Baker of the Kennington Bakery. Sugar Pot definitely gets a tick in the “allergy friendly” box because they answered confidently (and with required caveats about traces) my dreaded question “does it contain nuts?” So I was able to enjoy a lovely slice of banana bread with my coffee. Most of the usual espresso based drinks are available (but not listed on the menu) together with a French Press coffee for those who prefer a non-espresso brew.
Noticeboard, magazines and coffee counter at Sugar Pot in Kennington
The community feel of the café was immediately apparent with a notice board adjacent to the counter being packed with notices of different activities happening around the locality and within Kennington Park which is just opposite. Underneath the counter were books and magazines and an advert for volunteering with the local bee keeping and urban farming organisation Bee Urban. This is indeed another way that Sugar pot gets involved in its local community. The coffee grounds are donated to Bee Urban for use in their Kennington Park based composting facility. Bees of course have an Albert Einstein link with physics as he is alleged to have said
“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollinators, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”
I do not know if he really did say this but it is a sad reflection on our society that rather than address our environmental crimes we are researching pollinating with drones. However, it turns out the the bee has a much more exciting, almost shocking, link with physics and one that I only discovered thanks to the excellent book “Storm in a Teacup” by Helen Czerski¹. The bee is indeed a very positive creature.
Whether or not they have a happy disposition, it seems that 94% of bees are, electrically speaking, positively charged². They pick up a static charge while flying through the air in a similar way to a balloon being rubbed on your hair. Flowers meanwhile have a negative charge meaning that in addition to colour, shape, scent and pattern, bees can recognise flowers by their electric fields. These fields in turn mean that pollen from the flower ‘jumps off’ and adheres to the bees fur before the bee has even landed, increasing the efficiency of the bee as a pollinator. But it turns out that there is much more to it. When the positive bee lands on the negative flower, there is a charge transfer that results in a change of the electric field around the flower for a duration of 100 seconds or so. By constructing artificial flowers held at different voltages containing either a sugar reward or a bitter centre, researchers at Bristol university found that bees could learn to recognise which ‘flowers’ contained the sugar and which were too bitter to be visited by sensing the electric field around the ‘flower’. It suggests that the changing electric field of real flowers provides a mechanism by which the bee can recognise if a flower has been recently visited by another bee and so been recently pollenated. This would mean that by ‘feeling’ the electric field of the flower, the bee may decide that it would be more rewarding to carry on to a differently charged flower. You can read more about the research in the paper here.
It seems to me that learning about how the bee senses its environment reveals even more about the amazing way that nature (and physics) works. And this offers a link back to Sugar Pot. On the shelf behind the counter back at Sugar Pot was a card that had the message “Keep safe, live to be”. What does it mean “live to be”? In the environmental encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis urges everyone to slow down and notice things such as the bee commenting that “If someone has not learned to stop and admire something beautiful, we should not be surprised if he or she treats everything as an object to be used and abused without scruple.” He goes on “… when media and the digital world become omnipresent, their influence can stop people from learning how to live wisely, to think deeply and to love generously… True wisdom, as the fruit of self-examination, dialogue and generous encounter between persons, is not acquired by a mere accumulation of data...”³ Which is one reason that in order to be, we may want to come back and take a closer look at those bees. Taking time to experience our coffee in a relaxing space such as Sugar Pot and to watch and ponder as the bee uses senses of which we are barely aware can never be a waste of our time. Indeed, it is possible that our world may depend on it.
¹Storm in a Teacup, Helen Czerski, Transworld Publishers, 2016
² Clarke et al., “Detection and learning of Floral Electric Fields by Bumblebees”, Science, 340, 6128, 66 (2013).
What packaging does your coffee come in? Is it paper, compostable? The bits of packaging here are part of an experiment to see how long they will take to break down in a worm composting bin #talesfromthewormbin
The problem is oat milk. If you are having a go at living plastic free (or even reducing your reliance on single use plastic) during Plastic Free July, you have probably encountered at least one sticking point. Something that you are finding a little tricky to let go of. There are things that are too difficult to eliminate right now (meat/fish packaging is one example although there have been efforts to change this in some locations) but these are not necessarily sticking points. No, sticking points are things that seem that they should be easy to eliminate but for some reason are not. For me this is oat milk.
For the past three years, I have been participating in Plastic Free July with the aim of trying to find ways of living that reduce my plastic waste. And for the past three years, the problem has been oat milk. It is becoming a bit of a nemesis. Although proper, dairy based milk is available in glass bottles, this does not appear true for non-dairy based milks. Although some packaging can be recycled, it is a significant contributor to my waste pile. So, how about home made oat milk? It should be easy shouldn’t it?
Oat milk filtering through the Kone filter.
You can find plenty of recipes for oat milk online (a few are here, here and here) but I’ve always found it messy and, well, wasteful. The worms have enjoyed the oats in the past but surely there’s something better that can be done with them? Well, this year, things seem a bit different. And part of that is because of a coffee filter.
Years ago I tried the coffee Kone filter as an attempt to reduce my use of paper filters in the chemex. Sadly, I didn’t get on with the Kone. Unlike a paper filter, some sediment made it through the filter leading to more of an immersion type coffee drink rather than a filter. Consequently it went to the top of a cupboard and lay forgotten for a few years. Until this June when I re-discovered it as a filter for the oat milk. Rather than a muslin bag, the Kone can be cleaned easily and the whole process is significantly less messy (and slightly quicker – stirring the contents of the Kone with a spoon is easier encouragement to get the oat milk through than squeezing the muslin bag). Although there remains significant work before this can start to be a habit rather than just for a month, this July’s oat milk is a lot more promising than previous years. I’ll keep you updated as to whether the oat milk remains being home made in August.
Preparing your own dairy-free milk also offers new opportunities for watching physics such as the pitch-drop experiment here.
In the meantime, do let me know how you are getting on with your own Plastic Free July. Do you have any sticking points? On the other hand, are you finding that you are enjoying taking your re-usable cup around with you when you get a take-out coffee? Also, if you have any recipes for things that can be done with these left over blended oats. I’d love to hear of your culinary experiments.
In the following recipes, because I do not know how much oat milk you are making, I’ll call the amount of blended oats X g. In my experiments X has been either 115g or ~60g.
Oat and Apple Tarts
Xg blended oat left overs
Xg sugar
X/2 g flour
Pinch cinnamon and nutmeg to taste
teaspoon baking powder
Cooking apple (peeled and cut into smallish chunks)
Mix the blended oat left overs with the sugar and then stir in the flour, baking powder and spices. Spoon onto a greased baking sheet so that they make circular blobs of about 3cm diameter. Place the apple pieces into the mixture and bake at 180C for about 15 minutes until risen and slightly browned.
Sort of Flapjacks
X g blended oat left overs
X g sugar
X/2 g flour (but this isn’t really necessary).
Oat flakes, spelt flakes, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, dried fruit, whatever you would like to put in a flapjack
Mix everything together, spoon into a lined and greased baking tin, bake at 190C for 15 minutes until firm. Keeps in an airtight container for days.
Hobnobby biscuits
Not quite there yet. If you have a better recipe or can improve this one, please let me know.
A work in progress – the quantity of oats is not right yet and perhaps they need to be toasted oats or even spelt flakes.
X g blended oat left overs
X g sugar
X/2 g flour
teaspoon baking powder.
X-2X g oats
Mix the blended left overs, sugar, flour and baking powder together. Stir in the oats. Spoon on a lined and greased baking sheet so that you get ‘biscuit sized’ portions. Bake for 25 minutes at 190C or until brown.
Kahaila on Brick Lane. A small shop front concealing a large interior.
It’s always great to find an independent café selling good coffee (and cake) while giving something back to the community. It’s a reason to seek out small businesses rather than chains. Kahaila café on Brick Lane absolutely falls into this category. Although I had visited Kahaila previously, on that occasion the beigels (almost) next door were ‘calling’ and I did not give this space the time it deserved. This time however, the beigel shop had come first allowing us plenty of time to sit and ponder in this spacious café.
I had an espresso (toffee notes) together with a raspberry topped vegan chocolate cake (confidently nut free). There were a large variety of alternative cakes on offer at the counter along with cold drinks should you want them in summer. The espresso was a very enjoyable accompaniment to the cake (or should the cake be an accompaniment to the coffee?). The large room at the back of the café offered plenty of seating and was well lit by sunlight streaming through a window built into the roof.
One thing that immediately makes this café different from many others, is the fact that there is a donation box on the wall. Information cards on the table tops explain that Kahaila works as a charity providing education and support to women prisoners, helping women who have experienced abuse or are vulnerable in other ways to learn skills in a bakery and also offering a safe house for women who have been victim to exploitation and trafficking. All in all a café in which it would be good to spend more time (if only it were closer!). And assuming that the cakes are from the bakery, it forms a giving-circle with some great bakes on offer.
The vegan chocolate cake was a case in point. Beautifully presented, balanced in taste, in a perfectly sized portion to enjoy with a coffee. Ordinarily cakes require butter and eggs, how did the bakers manage it? Of course, a recipe was not given at the counter, nor would it necessarily have been particularly helpful to answer the question. Because the answer, if one exists, is a mix of their experimentation with flavours and textures together with an advancing knowledge of what each cake ingredient does.
The way these sugar cubes stacked in the jar and the sugar granules at the bottom reminded me of something. I was not able to put my finger on what it was…
Consider the egg yolk. In addition to adding mouth feel and texture to the cake or biscuit, the yolk contains emulsifying agents, such as lecithin, which act to stabilise suspensions of oil in water¹. With a hydrophobic section at one end of the molecule and a hydrophilic section elsewhere, the presence of lecithin molecules in the mixture prevents droplets of oil from grouping together and coalescing so as to separate into oil/water layers. By experimenting with non-egg based lecithin, a baker can combine different flavours and textures to produce a vegan cake.
A few years ago, a somewhat similar problem was vexing materials scientists: how to remove toxic lead from piezoelectric devices. Piezoelectric devices expand or contract when they are subjected to an electric field. This makes them useful for moving mechanisms such as watches and even as a way to open/close hot water valves in coffee machines. The problem was that one of the best piezoelectric materials we had was lead zirconate titanate (or PZT for short). In order to make the PZT material, the lead had to be sourced in quite large quantities and yet, being toxic and environmentally damaging, it was considered advantageous (even necessary) to remove the lead.
A painted doorway inside Kahaila in combination with flowers in front suggests a thought train about the way bees see.
However, just like the egg yolk in cookie recipes, you cannot just remove it and produce the same sort of effect in the finished product. You need to understand what role the lead was playing in order to be able to substitute it properly and even then, the effect may not be as good as the original ingredient (without some tweaking elsewhere in the recipe also). Consequently a lot of research has been undertaken in order to find new piezoelectric materials and to understand them so as to optimise the piezoelectric effect. Partly this involves adding the new ingredients slowly to understand their role. Partly it involves changing the growth conditions(somewhat equivalent to the baking temperature) in the crystals that are made. Always it involves experimenting and understanding the role that different ingredients play in our final devices.
Research is still ongoing to find a good substitute for lead in piezoelectric devices. But it goes to show that there are many connections between diverse areas of our experience. Unlike research into piezoelectric materials though, the advantage in experimenting with cakes is that the test of the result is in the eating. Now to experiment with some biscuit recipes…
Kahaila is at 135 Brick Lane, E1 6SB
¹On Food and Cooking, the science and lore of the kitchen, Harold McGee
An espresso using coffee from Redemption Roasters and a chocolate brownie. What more could you ask?
Many years ago, there was an aquatics shop on the site of what is now The Observatory, a combined photography gallery and coffee shop. Although there is plenty to see through this glass fronted café, you do not feel that you are in a goldfish bowl so much as that this is a space created for you to slow down and contemplate your surroundings. The large rooms and comfortably spaced tables do, of course, give the opportunity for people watching: when we visited, there were people working with their laptops on some tables while others were having business meetings. Then there are the photographs, currently (though only for a few more days), an exhibition of photographs from the 60s and 70s by John Bulmer.
The coffee is supplied by Redemption Roasters and I enjoyed a dark, toffee like espresso with a very good slice of a chocolate brownie (confidently nut free). Several types of milk are on offer for milk based coffee drinks as well as a selection of cold drinks, together with a wide variety of cakes. It is definitely a place to return to when in the area.
Cakes on the counter at The Observatory. Note the twin lens reflex “camera” on the shelf behind the counter.
While waiting for my coffee, I noticed the grain of the wood in the table. Dark, almost parallel lines on a lighter wood. You can see it in the photograph. Looking around the café, such parallel lines were everywhere. Planks of wood lined the walls, vertical, parallel lines stretching up to the ceiling. In the room towards the back of the café, the ceiling also had parallel lines on it which, given I was viewing them from a distance, appeared to converge with the effect of perspective. It is difficult to know whether these effects were deliberate in a gallery/café so dedicated to an exploration of the visual but I like to think that the small twin lens reflex camera on a shelf (which sadly turned out to be a pencil sharpener on sale) was a nod to this idea shifting lines of sight and perspective.
By definition, two parallel lines are lines that will never meet, no matter how far the lines are extended. If they were to meet at any point, they would not be parallel. This offers a way of measuring the distance to stars as well as providing food for thought on our way of seeing our place in the universe. The idea is that of parallax. If you were to measure the relative position of a star against the background of stars at midnight in June, and then go back to measure the same star relative to the same background at midnight six months later in December, you may find that the star seemed to have moved. The amount it moves, its parallax, is determined by how close the star is to the earth (have a look at the diagram).
As the point of view moves around the Sun (represented here by a V60), the closest coffee bean appears to shift relative to the background coffee beans. The lower two diagrams are an attempt to see things from the perspective of the Lego person separated by “6 months” distance.
Take as an example the star Sirius. Located relatively close to us at a mere 8.6 light year distance, Sirius has a parallax of 0.38 arc seconds or, equivalently, about 0.0002 of the angular diameter of the moon viewed from Earth¹. Stars that are further away are going to have an even smaller parallax until the parallax becomes so small as to be difficult to measure. Even for nearby stars such as Sirius, the small size of the effect meant that it wasn’t until 1838 that it was first measured. Which may be part of the reason that the theory of Aristarchus (310-230BCE) never caught on when it was proposed.
Aristarchus was an early proponent of the idea that the Earth went around the Sun (and not the other way around). The Greek’s realised that if Aristarchus was correct, there should be a parallax effect for the stars viewed at different times of the year (every 3 months)¹. Unfortunately, the Greeks also considered that the stars belonged to a thin shell, so effectively all the stars were at the same distance from the Earth. Consequently, the parallax effect that they looked for (if Aristarchus was correct) was for two stars on that shell to move first towards then away from each other as the Earth circled the Sun¹. They never observed this effect and so considered the heliocentric theory “inconsistent with observations”¹. Although we would now say that the fact that they didn’t observe any such shift is consistent with the huge distances to the stars (and therefore small shifts) involved, for the ancient Greeks it was a problem. As Archimedes commented, if Aristarchus’ theory had been true, it would mean that the universe was much bigger than they at that time thought.
Guardini has written about the effect on the human psyche of this changing idea of the universe and our own place in it (from the Greek’s idea of finite and limited, to finite with a God outside, to infinite and back towards finite but incredibly large). Do our ideas, our models, about the universe affect not only how we interpret the experimental evidence we see, but also our way of being, our behaviour towards our fellow humans and our planet?
Viewing things from a different angle, seeing the effect of a change of line of sight, it brings us right back to the photography in the gallery and the twin lens camera on the shelf. There are certainly many things to contemplate while enjoying a coffee at The Observatory. Which means a second espresso should definitely be a possibility.
You can view some street photography, including some photographed with a twin lens Microcord TLR camera on Artemisworks gallery here.
The Observatory is at 64 Marchmont St, WC1N 1AB
¹Astronomy, the evolving universe (6th edition), Michael Zeilik, John Wiley & Sons, 1991
Notice the rainbow pattern around the reflected light spot? The universe is in a cup of coffee but to understand rising sea levels, it’s helpful to look at tea.
The universe is in a glass of wine. So said Richard Feynman. It has been the focus of this website to concentrate instead on the universe in a cup of coffee, partly because it is much easier to contemplate a coffee over breakfast. However there are times when contemplating a cup of tea may be far more illuminating. Such was the case last week: if only a politician had paused for a cup of tea before commenting on rising sea levels.
There are many reasons to drink loose leaf tea rather than tea made with a bag. Some would argue that the taste is significantly improved. Others, that many tea bags contain plastic and so, if you are trying to reduce your reliance on single-use plastic, loose leaf tea is preferable. Until last week though, it had not occurred to me that brewing a cup of tea with a mesh ball tea infuser (or a similar strainer) was a great way to understand the magnitude of our problem with rising sea levels. If a stone were to enter a pond, the pond-level would rise; if a spherical tea strainer (full of loose leaf tea) were to be placed in a cup, the soon-to-be-tea level would rise.
Clearly, because we know our physics, we would not place a strainer of tea into an existing cup of hot water as we know the brewing process relies on diffusion and turbulence, not just diffusion alone. So what we more commonly observe in the cup is actually a tea-level fall as we remove the straining ball. Fortunately, we can calculate the tea level decrease, h:
A schematic of the tea brewing process
My cylindrical tea mug has a radius (d) of 3.5cm. The radius (r) of the mesh ball is 2cm. We’ll assume that the tea leaves completely expand filling the mesh ball so that the ball becomes a non-porous sphere. Clearly this bit is not completely valid and would anyway create a poor cup of tea, but it represents a worst-case scenario and so is good as a first approximation.
Volume of water displaced = volume of mesh ball
πd²h = (4/3)πr³
A bit of re-arrangement means that the height of the tea displaced is given by
h = 4r³/(3d²)
h = 0.87 cm
This answer seems quite high but we have to remember that the mesh ball is not completely filled with tea and so the volume that it occupies is not quite that of the sphere. Moreover, when I check this answer experimentally by making a cup of tea, the value is not unreasonable. Removing the mesh-ball tea strainer does indeed lead to a significant (several mm) reduction in tea level.
Assuming we are truly interested in discovering more about our common home, we can gain a lot through contemplating our tea. The Blue Marble, Credit, NASA: Image created by Reto Stockli with the help of Alan Nelson, under the leadership of Fritz Hasler
What does this have to do with politicians? Last week a congressman from Alabama suggested that the observed rising sea levels could be connected with the deposition of silt onto the sea bed from rivers and the erosion of cliffs such as the White Cliffs of Dover. If only he had first contemplated his tea. Using a “back of the envelope” calculation similar to that above, it is possible to check whether this assertion is reasonable. As the surface area of the oceans is known and you can estimate a worst-case value for the volume of the White Cliffs falling into the sea, you can calculate the approximate effect on sea levels (as a clue, in order to have a significant effect, you have to assume that the volume of the White Cliffs is roughly equal to the entire island of Great Britain).
Mr Brooks comments however do have another, slightly more tenuous, connection with coffee. His initial suggestion was that it was the silt from rivers that was responsible for the deposition of material onto the sea bed that was in turn causing the sea level to rise. About 450 years ago, a somewhat similar question was being asked about the water cycle. Could the amount of water in the rivers and springs etc, be accounted for by the amount of rain that fell on the ground? And, a related question, could the amount of rain be explained by the amount of evaporation from the sea?
The initial idea that the answer to both of those questions was “yes” and that together they formed the concept of the “water cycle” was in part due to Bernard Palissy. Palissy is now known for his pottery rather than his science but he is the author of a quote that is very appropriate for this case:
“I have had no other book than the heavens and the earth, which are known to all men, and given to all men to be known and read.”
Reflections on a cup of tea.
Attempts to quantify the problem and see if the idea of the water cycle was ‘reasonable’ were made by Pierre Perrault (1608-80) in Paris and Edmond Halley (1656-1742) in the UK. Perrault conducted a detailed experiment where he measured the rain fall over several years in order to show that the amount of rain could account for the volume of water in the Seine. Halley on the other hand, measured the amount of evaporation from a pan of heated water and used this value to estimate the evaporation rate from the Mediterranean Sea. He then estimated the volume of water flowing into that sea from a comparison to the flow of the water in the Thames at Kingston. Together (but separately) Perrault and Halley established that there was enough water that evaporated to form rain and that this rain then re-supplied the rivers. Both sets of calculations required, in the first place, back of the envelope type calculations, as we did above for the tea-levels, to establish if the hypotheses were reasonable.
If you missed the coffee connection, and it was perhaps quite easy to do so, the question that Halley studied concerned the rate of evaporation as a function of the water’s temperature. This is something that is well known to coffee drinkers. Secondly however, one of Halley’s experiments about the evaporating water was actually performed at a meeting of the Royal Society. It is known that after such meetings, the gathered scientists would frequently adjourn to a coffee house (which may have been the Grecian or, possibly more likely, Garraways). As they enjoyed their coffee would they have discussed Halley’s latest results and contemplated their brew as they did so?
What this shows is that sometimes it is productive to contemplate your coffee or think about your tea. Notice what you observe, see if you can calculate the size of the effect, consider if your ideas about the world are consistent with your observations of it. But in all of it, do pause to slow down and enjoy your tea (or coffee).
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.
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?
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?
The cafe is in here. The new farm shop at Blue Tin.
Blue Tin is not an easy café to find, one that you can wander into just off the street. In fact, although it serves coffee and cake, Blue Tin is not really a café at all but a friendly place for a drink attached to a farm shop. Open to walkers and passing cyclists, horse riders and drivers, Blue Tin seems to be almost in the middle of nowhere. Approximately 4km by road from Nuffield, Blue Tin can be found just off a single lane country road. You will know when you actually arrive at the farm because of the sign and the box advertising fresh eggs (complete with honesty box for when the shop is closed).
We first came across Blue Tin (when it was a shop in a shed rather than a shop/café in a building) while walking in the area. There are some good walks in the area which can be very pretty when the bluebells are out and so it is well worth combining a visit to the café with a walk in the Oxfordshire countryside. Despite only opening in December 2017, the café associated with Blue Tin has put a lot of effort into ensuring that their coffee is ethically sourced, great tasting and locally roasted. The coffee is roasted by Horsebox Coffee and is of course also available to purchase in the shop. The espresso based drinks use the Dark Horse espresso blend (though I wasn’t sure whether this was occasionally rotated when the seasonal espresso is available). We had an Americano and a latte. The Americano indeed had the chocolate notes described on the coffee bag, while the milk of the latte really complemented the espresso base. Cakes are also available though we didn’t try on this occasion.
On the wall of the cafe is a schematic showing where each product sold in the shop originates. Seen here is the earlier version that does not include the coffee (roasted within 5 miles). Everything is local and the meat is particularly local having been brought up in the farm next to the shop.
There is plenty of space to sit down inside and contemplate the shop while enjoying your coffee in this welcoming environment. The arrangement also gives you time to consider the farm and space for your mind to wander. One place my mind was wandering that day was to the importance of our beliefs in our decision making, even while they are informed by science.
For example, it is often said that we could significantly help climate change by becoming vegetarian or including one meat free day per week in our diet. In a 2013 paper, the authors calculated the emissions associated with farming, producing, packaging and storing 66 categories of food item that were sold in a (modelled) medium sized supermarket. In order to calculate this various assumptions about the produce had to be made¹.
To summarise the paper (though it is well worth taking the time to read it), the study suggested that avoiding meat altogether could reduce our individual carbon footprint due to food by 35%. However even introducing a meat free day (combined with a switch to poultry rather than beef and significant reduction in the amount of food we waste/packaging used) could introduce a reduction of 26%.
Americano, Latte and shop. The coffee-space at Blue Tin farm shop, Oxfordshire
Does the science therefore “say” that we should all go vegetarian? It is worth looking more closely at the paper and considering our own belief systems. In the report, beef had a total CO2 equivalent emissions of 25.13 Kg per kg of food¹. One suggestion of the authors was to swap beef for poultry. Poultry has a total emissions of 4.05 Kg CO2 equivalent per Kg. But looking through the table of calculated emissions for each food type, “spirits and liqueurs” had a total emissions of 3.16 Kg CO2e per Kg. Perhaps (hopefully) you could say you would take a long time to drink a kg of spirits, but even wine has 2.41 Kg CO2e per Kg. As a rough estimate, 1 bottle of wine (750 ml) is 3/4 Kg, so the bottle of wine with dinner is contributing roughly equivalently to the shared roast chicken. There are nutritional arguments for eating meat. Can we say the same of drinking wine? What of coffee? (not included in the table I’m relieved to say!)
The study shows the quantity of emissions associated with each type of food stuff. It does not show us how to act. Each decision we make (eliminate meat/go teetotal/all things in moderation) is based on what we believe about the world. Even the idea that it would be a good thing to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions in order to try to limit climate change is a moral one, not a scientific one. These decisions depend on what we think is ‘good’, what is ‘bad’, what life is about. In short it depends on our beliefs about the world and our place in it rather than purely the facts. These are philosophical, or dare I say it, even religious questions. Science can inform us of the damage that we are doing but it cannot help us to decide whether that matters, nor even if it does matter, what we should do about it.
You won’t need the sugar. Another view of the cafe at Blue Tin.
Whether we decide to buy better quality² meat less frequently, go vegan or even do nothing are not decisions that we are making entirely based on the science. Although informed by the science they are nonetheless based also on our existing beliefs about the way the world is and the way the world should be. We may decide for example that, while we should reduce our consumption of “cheap” beef/imported lamb, we should take care to buy more expensive meat from somewhere that takes care of their animals throughout the farming (and slaughtering) process but eat it less often. Depending on the rest of our diet, this could similarly reduce our food-related greenhouse gas emissions (if for example we mostly ate vegetarian with occasional meat consumption). We may similarly decide that eating meat is intrinsically wrong and so go entirely vegetarian.
These are choices we make, informed by the science but based on our ideas of morality. They are not easy choices nor are they choices we will necessarily agree with each other about. To make these choices requires time set aside to think about what matters to us, about what we believe in. And this means that there is no intrinsic conflict between science and religious belief any more than there is a conflict between science and the decisions we make in general. We need science to inform our beliefs but we need also to recognise the role of our beliefs (conscious or subconscious) in our decision making.
In short, we need to slow down, pause and really think about things. And where better to do so than in quiet and comfortable places with good coffee (and cake) such as Blue Tin?
¹Interestingly, the authors assumed that for beef, the effective emissions were increased owing to deforestation and land clearance that is associated with beef production in some places. If this is not accounted for, the effective emissions from beef are still calculated to dwarf much of the other food stuffs but not by quite so much. The footprint would therefore be less for beef raised on an existing local form, slaughtered and purchased locally. Similarly, the ‘vegetarian’ diet that was modelled by the authors contained dairy (with similarly high emissions as beef).
²Again ‘quality’ is a subjective term that cannot be easily ‘scientifically’ quantified, instead it is argued based on what we believe ‘good’ means. Do I mean that the animal had healthy conditions during life? Was well cared for? That it tastes good? That I could speak to the people who farmed the animals? I’ve left it deliberately slightly ambiguous here.
Blue Tin Produce is at Garsons Farm, Ipsden, OX10 6QU
The sign towards the entrance at Kurasu Kyoto, Singapore
Kurasu Kyoto, in Singapore, was recommended to me as a great place to experience pour-over coffee. Although they will serve espresso based drinks too, it is the pour over coffee for which they are famous. The Singapore branch is at the front of a shared working space in an office block. Entering from the street, you have to go up one level before the smell of the coffee will guide you to the café.
Ordinarily, coffee chains would not be featured on Bean Thinking. However, despite it’s name, this is a ‘chain’ of only two outlets, the original branch in Kyoto, Japan and this one in Singapore. The menu featured several coffees with their differing tasting notes together with a few other drinks. Coffee is shipped from Japan weekly as well as being locally roasted in Singapore. It is very much a place to enjoy your coffee while sitting on the comfortable chairs before getting back to work (or perhaps, a place to meet potential colleagues over a refreshing cup of coffee). And it is highly likely you will enjoy your coffee which is prepared for you as you wait.
The bar and some of the coffee equipment in the cafe space at Kurasu Kyoto Singapore
There is no hint of automation here. Each cup of coffee is prepared carefully and individually by the barista behind the bar. V60 or Kalita, it was somewhat mesmerising to watch the pour over being prepared, rhythmically, carefully, by hand. Indeed, automation seems almost alien to this place where the act of making coffee is truly artful. Once prepared, the coffee is brought to your table in a simple ceramic mug for you to taste for yourself and see how your tasting notes compare.
As I was watching, two thoughts occurred to me, the first of a directly scientific nature, the second more about our society. Firstly watching the barista slowly prepare the pour over, it is difficult not to be reminded of the pitch drop experiment.
You may remember the story from 2013 and then again in 2014. Two experiments that had been set up in 1944 and 1927 respectively finally showed results. The experiments were (indeed are, they are still going) very similar and concerned watching pitch (which is a derivative of tar) drop from a funnel. Pitch is used to waterproof boats and appears to us almost solid at room temperature although it is actually a liquid but with an extremely high viscosity. To put this into perspective, at room temperature coffee has a viscosity similar to water at about 0.001 Pa s, liquid honey has a viscosity of about 10 Pa s, but this tar has a viscosity of 20 000 000 Pa s. The experiments involved pouring this tar into a funnel and then waiting, and waiting, for it to drip. Both experiments seem to drip only approximately once a decade but until 2013 (and 2014 for the other experiment), the actual drop had never been seen. Both experiments are now building their droplets again and we await the next drop in the 2020s.
Imagine waiting that long for a drip coffee.
Apparent simplicity. The coffee at Kurasu Kyoto Singapore
But then a second thought, there is currently a lot of angst, particularly about automation and our environmental and/or political situations, as if they are something from outside ourselves being imposed upon us. To some extent it is true that we are not in control over many things happening around us. But in our feeling of powerlessness, are we resigning more than we ought to of our responsibility for the power that we do have? It was something that deeply concerned Romano Guardini in his essay “Power and Responsibility”¹. To use the example of automation and the pour over. Guardini argues that people become poorer as they become more distant from the results of their work (e.g. by automating the pour over coffee with a machine). And that the better the machine, the “fewer the possibilities for personal creativeness”¹ that the barista would have. For Guardini, this has consequences for the human being for both barista and customer. The barista clearly loses the element of their creativity when preparing a pour over with a machine but the customer too is affected by the loss of a personal contact, possible only through individually created things. Rather than celebrating each other as individuals we become consumers with tastes “dictated by mass production”¹ and people who produce only what the “machine allows”. To respond to the challenges of our contemporary society involves discovering where we each have responsibility and exercising it, no matter how small or large that responsibility seems (to us) to be.
Which is somehow resonant with the interview that one of the Kyoto based baristas at Kurasu Kyoto gave that was recently circulated by Perfect Daily Grind. Asked what was her preferred brewing method, she replied it was the V60 because of the control that the individual barista could gain over the flavour of the cup merely by tweaking some of the details of the pour. A knowledgable art rather than a technology. And it is precisely this knowledgable art that you can see carefully and excellently practised in the Singapore branch.
Kurasu Kyoto (Singapore) is at 331 North Bridge Road, Odeon Towers, #02-01
“Power and Responsibility” in “The End of the Modern World”, Romano Guardini. ISI books, (2001)
At the top end of Lamb’s Conduit Street there is an unassuming café in a fairly modern building at the corner of Long Yard. In recent weeks I had been hearing a lot about Redemption Roasters and their café. First came the review by Double Skinny Macchiato, then various comments on Twitter, in Caffeine magazine and finally, an article in the FT. In an ideal world, it seems to me that cafés can act as seeds towards forming a better society. Local and independent, a friendly place where you can chat with the baristas (or café owners), and so where communities can form and develop. All that I had heard about Redemption Roasters café fitted, in some way, into this ideal which meant that it was not going to be long before I headed towards Bloomsbury and tried this new café.
Plenty of seating could be found inside the café, with tables of two or four and benches around the space. The counter was immediately in front of us as we went through the door and the friendly barista took our order (long black and soya hot chocolate, what else?) while we took our seats. There were a fair few staff in the café when we visited, so many in fact that we weren’t initially sure who were staff and who were customers. Nonetheless, their joviality transformed the café’s fairly austere decor more into the feel of the welcoming space of a living room.
A layered hot chocolate? No, just the reflection of the saucer in the glass.
Having taken our seats and started to look around, we found that much could be said about the science in this café. From the SMEG refrigerator and individual radiators to the light reflection off individual sugar crystals in a glass on the table. Moreover, when our drinks arrived, the reflection of the (blue) saucer in the hot chocolate glass made it appear as if the hot chocolate were layered. In fact it was an optical illusion caused by the way our minds process the colour blue in shadows, more on that in this great article about colour, Goethe and Turner. But it was to a different lighting effect that my thought train eventually turned. Above the counter are a series of hanging lights with angular shades over them. Above our table were LED bulbs inset into the ceiling.
The way that the LEDs above us had been placed produced two shadows from the spoon on the saucer of my cup. A dark shadow and a light shadow at a slightly different angle. One reason that LEDs have caught on as a light source is that they are more efficient and so better environmentally and cheaper financially. So you may think that LEDs are one way of reducing our (collective) environmental footprint. But does this work? According to a study that measured the outdoor light levels around the world from 2012 to 2016, the answer is no. It would appear that while on a local level, people are enjoying cheaper lighting, on larger scales (nationally, globally), this decreased cost is leading to us installing more lights. Consequently, on the global scale, the area of land that is lit has increased by 2.2% per year with very few countries showing a reduction or even a stabilisation of the amount of outdoor areas that are lit.
Determining a presence by noticing an absence. The two shadows of the spoon came from the light bulbs inset into the ceiling.
Does this matter? Well, it is something that is affecting us, the way we view our world and the wildlife that we share our planet with and so it is something that we ought to be thinking about. In brightly lit areas of the UK, trees have been shown to produce buds up to 7.5 days earlier than in darker areas. Artificial light is causing problems for nocturnal insects and animals, with knock on effects for crop pollination. And when was the last time you looked up at the sky on a clear night and saw seven of the Pleiades let alone the Milky Way? How does it change our psychology and philosophical outlook when we can no longer gaze at the night sky with wonder and without the glow of streetlights?
Some astronomers have called for increased shielding of street lighting as a way for us to both enjoy well lit streets and be able to enjoy looking up at the night sky. Shielding such as that over the lights over the counter at Redemption Roasters café, where the light is efficiently directed downwards rather than be allowed to escape into the sky. Small steps that can make a big difference. It is interesting to notice that around central London at least, many newer lampposts are more efficiently shielded than older ones. Pausing for a coffee in Redemption Roasters café is a great moment to consider this problem and your reaction to it. Have you stopped to gaze at the night sky recently?
After leaving the café, I realised I had lost an opportunity to notice something else. Frequently, after visiting a good café, I will look up the area in my London Encyclopaedia¹ to see whether there is anything of interest historically in the area of the café. As expected, Lamb’s Conduit St was named after a conduit made from a tributary of the river Fleet restored by one William Lamb in 1577. But Lamb also donated 120 buckets for poor women of the area to use for collecting their water, which explains the statue of a woman with an urn at the top of the street. However what was also mentioned was that at the entrance to Long Yard (ie. very close to Redemption Roasters) there is an ancient stone inset into a wall with a description about the Lamb’s Conduit. Somehow I missed this though Double Skinny Macchiato evidently found it. So if you do visit Redemption Roasters café, and I would very much recommend that you do, as well as taking some time to savour the coffee and to notice the surroundings, please do look out for this elusive stone and if you find it, do let me know.
¹The London Encyclopaedia, Weinreb, Hibbert, Keay and Keay, MacMillan, 2008
Redemption Roasters Cafe is at 84 Lamb’s Conduit St, WC1N 3LR
