Month: July 2019

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Details at The Italian Coffee Club, Shepherd’s Bush Market

Italian coffee club, Shepherd's Bush Market
The Italian Coffee Club. Plenty of chairs both inside and out.

What’s in a name? A hundred impressions and assumptions, an idea that to know somebody is to know their name? And so it was that The Italian Coffee Club thew me. Towards the Uxbridge Road end of Shepherd’s Bush Market, The Italian Coffee Club is in a wooden lined chalet. A few tables outside and some prominent signage leave you in no doubt as to the fact that coffee is served here. A sign asks if you would like to try the signature Italian blend, while another informs you that the aroma of the coffee “comes from here”.

Which goes part the way to explain why I was surprised when I walked in. Inside, a number of chairs and tables line the, fairly narrow, space leading to the counter. Towards the counter are various large jars of freshly roasted coffee beans ready for retail. Perhaps this should have given me a clue to check my assumptions. The roasts were varied with a good choice of origins, including several single origin. The coffee menu offered the usual choices and…. V60s of any of the various coffees that they sold (sadly I noticed this only after I had ordered an Americano). The coffees are roasted by The Italian Coffee company and include several direct-trade relationships. Although I had the “signature” Italian blend on the day, I did purchase 200g of the La Abuela washed Colombian to take home with me as beans. La Abuela means grandmother and apparently this coffee farm (which is one of those with which The Italian Coffee club has a direct trade relationship) is run by an 80 year old lady growing coffee that scores 83+ in the speciality quality score.

The aroma of coffee comes from here, The Italian Coffee Club, Shepherd's Bush
There were several signs about the aroma of coffee. This was one of them outside the cafe.

Looking around this chalet/cafe, the first thing that caught my attention was a sign about “smelling the aroma”. This immediately conjured up thoughts as to how it is that we actually perceive smells. In some ways an incredibly basic sense, in others, something that we still do not understand. It also prompted me to think about anosmia (smell blindness) and its allegorical relevance to my assumptions as I had entered the cafe about the coffee I would find.

The jars of coffee were the sort of transparent bottle with a rubber seal, reminiscent of vacuum physics. A (presumably decorative) manual coffee grinder at the bottom of the shelves could have prompted thought trains about automation and whether the coffee making process is improved by the uniformity of grind obtained by industrial grinders or the imperfections (but connections) that we would have through a fully manual brew (I think it may depend on what we mean by ‘improve’).

And then I looked down at my coffee and noticed a hair floating on top of it. I knew it was mine because it hadn’t been there originally and it was of the right length and colour. But I could tell it was there due to the indentations on the liquid surface around the hair, much as you can see the indentations around the feet of a pond skater. How much force was the hair exerting on the surface of the coffee to make such indentations? And when would it ‘fall through’?

Hair, surface tension, coffee
I wasn’t worried: it was definitely mine! But look at the way the surface of the coffee is affected by the hair. Why does it bend in such a way?

The surface tension of the coffee is caused by the water molecules in the liquid being attracted by the other water molecules into the coffee but not having anything above the surface to balance that force. Consequently, there is a net attraction for the molecules at the surface into the coffee and a ‘skin’ is formed on the surface, rather like an elastic sheet. This ‘skin’ takes a certain force to break it, which can be measured and which is called the ‘surface tension’. My hair, about 5cm long, as a typical human hair, weighs about 168 micrograms. Which means the gravitational force acting on it is F = mass x gravitational acceleration = 1.68 microNewtons. Expressed as a Force per unit length, this works out as 34 microNewtons per meter. In comparison, at 60 C, the surface of water requires a force of https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/water-surface-tension-d_597.html0.067 Newtons per meter to break through it. My hair would be no match: the surface tension supports the hair.

What about a pond skater? That has a slightly larger mass (at 0.02 g) and it is also slightly shorter (20 mm), so its force per unit length is also larger at 0.01 Newtons per meter. So although it is going to push down more on the surface of a pond (or my coffee) than my hair is, it still won’t break the surface.

cat in Shepherd's Bush Market
It’s the little things….

As this is a coffee blog, what if we took the example of a coffee bean and, neglecting for one minute any other considerations, calculated the force it exerts on the water/coffee. Beethoven’s 60 beans of coffee had a mass of 9 g. So one bean has, roughly, a mass of 0.15 g. Each bean is about 1cm long and so it exerts 0.15 Newtons per meter on the water surface. Certainly enough to break it: so we could use coffee beans to measure surface tension. A novel purpose for the coffee bean, but I prefer my more traditional approach of grinding and drinking it.

Which took me back to the Colombian, La Abuela that I purchased from The Italian Coffee Club and tried, at home, as a V60. Sweet and syrupy, with cherry fruit: an enjoyable coffee for some time to ponder.

The Italian Coffee Club can be found in Shepherd’s Bush Market, Shepherd’s Bush.

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Cracking pour overs

cracks in a wheat field
Cracks in the soil in a field after a dry spell. But there are many connections between coffee and soil.

Summer this year has so far been quite hot and dry. Perhaps you have seen the grass dying back. Or maybe you have noticed the cracks forming in the soil in your local parks and fields. Such cracking is the result of the very dry weather and hopefully you won’t find it in your coffee, but there is another effect concerning soil compaction that connects to brewing a morning coffee as well as farming it.

It’s about the rain. As each raindrop falls to the Earth, it makes an impact with the soil underneath. While a light drizzle is not going to have that much of an impact, a larger raindrop of diameter say, 5mm, is going to hit the earth at about 9m/s – and that could cause quite a stir. Each impact will shake off smaller sized particles of soil which dislodge and get stuck in the pores between the larger soil particles. So the smaller particles start to ‘clog’ the pores between the soil particles and reduce the ability of water to penetrate into the soil. And although it seems a small effect, the result of this clogging of the pores by the smaller soil particles is to reduce the water permeability of the soil by 200-2000 times*: a soil crust is formed.

lilies on water, rain on a pond, droplets
The impact of a drop? Each rain drop can have a significant effect on the soil surface

This crust not only reduces the amount of water that gets through to the roots (by reducing the soil’s permeability), it also acts as a barrier for seedlings coming up: while many seeds can get through quite strong layers, even Sorghum struggles to push through if it needs pressures of 13-18 Bar to break through this crust*. So even without any farming machinery causing further soil compaction, just the rain is going to affect how additional water goes through the soil and how plants can grow out of it.

We are getting to the coffee bit.

The crust strength is influenced by the number of small (clay-type) particles in the soil. Clay particles are less than 2 microns in diameter which is smaller than the grind size you would find in even a Turkish coffee grind. But if we were to grind very brittle coffee beans (that shattered into many smaller particles as well as the grind size we want), or we were to use a blade grinder leading to a large distribution of grind size in our freshly ground coffee, we may expect to see some effects like this while brewing.

optical microscope image in water
Two coffee grinds compared under a microscope. How does the uniformity of particle size in a grind affect the clogging of a pour over? Magnfied 5x

If we think about a pour over brew (as opposed to an espresso or an immersion type), the initial pouring of water over the grind bed will dislodge any smaller particles in the grind and clog the grind in the same way as the rain on the soil. So if we were grinding way too fine, or using a blade grinder, or had a preference for darkly roasted (more brittle) coffee beans, it is possible that our pour-overs would tend to ‘clog’ more than if we were using a uniform medium grind of more lightly roasted beans. Has anyone experimented with this?

But the second soil connection we may notice as we prepare our pour over is that after our initial pour, as we let the coffee ‘bloom’ and the CO2 bubbles out, we receive a lovely aroma. A wonderful coffee smell as the grind bed continues to out-gas. This may remind us of petrichor, which is that great, and distinctive, smell of rain. And it turns out that petrichor is formed by the rain hitting the soil surface and producing air bubbles as it falls. The air bubbles then burst releasing aerosols from the soil which are so familiar to us as the scent of rain. A similar process to the blooming of the coffee grind. But just as with the coffee grind, as the water continues to fall and particularly if the pour over clogs to leave us with a water layer on the surface of the coffee (or soil), the aroma will reduce (or at least change) as the mechanism producing the smell changes.

bloom on a v60
Blooming petrichor, or should it be coffichor?

On a farm or in a garden, the effect of this soil compaction can be reduced by practises such as mulching. In addition to reducing the impact of individual rain drops on the soil surface, the mulch reduces evaporation of the water from the surface and changes the albedo of the soil. All things that may help coffee farmers to grow healthier coffee plants. In our pour overs, it is probably not a good idea to add any form of mulch! But this does mean that we can experiment more with the grind!

There are many more connections between your coffee and the earth around us, what will you notice?

*Soil Physics, WA Jury and R Horton, Wiley and Sons Publishing, 2004

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Good vibrations at Rosslyn, Mansion House

Coffee at Rosslyn, Mansion House, EC4N, coffee clock, base
Coffee time at Rosslyn, EC4N. Why is it that base 60 was used as a counting system in Mesopotamia? And why is it that the echoes of this are still seen in our clocks and the angles of a circle (unless you use the radian system) but not in our everyday counting system?

It’s always “coffee time” at Rosslyn apparently, at least according to the clock above the door. In front of you as you enter the cafe is the counter and, as you move down to collect your coffee (for take-away) the day’s edition of the Financial Times is stuck to the notice board where you wait. An interesting touch, somehow making a resonant connection with the City coffee houses of old such as Jonathan’s, just around the corner, where the stock market was originally located.

There are not many stools or tables in Rosslyn, which appears to be designed as more of a take away space. Nonetheless, we found a perch by the window overlooking the bench seats outside. It is a perfect place to watch the world go by. The massive junction of Poultry providing plenty to see.

Coffee is roasted by Modern Standard and there are bags of roasted coffee on sale (together with some of the mugs) at the other end of the counter to the FT. The occasional (welcome) plant reminds us that life is not just concrete, glass and cars/buses. Although it was sunny, it was not yet hot and so we had a soy hot chocolate and a long black, went back to take our seats and waited for the drinks to arrive.

The wooden spoon that came with the coffee was an interesting touch, reminding me of Barn the Spoon and his work in Hackney. While the clock got me thinking about our use of base 10 as a counting system and the older systems that used base 60.

coffee, hot chocolate, plant, mugs, wooden spoon.
A quiet moment with a coffee and a hot chocolate at Rosslyn. Notice the spoon.

Contemplating these things we noticed a strange effect in my coffee. Or rather, I noticed it and brought attention to it by taking repeated photographs of the coffee while tapping the bench just to try to capture what I was seeing: a resonance pattern on the coffee surface. At this point, your mind may connect to several different things. There’s the resonance effects involved in the Whispering Gallery in St Pauls close by to Rosslyn. There are the resonance patterns caused in bells, drums and violins and the relation between these, air movement and music. There’s the fact that these movements initially revealed the excellence of the table as a movement sensor: the ripples on the coffee revealing footsteps behind us rather like we detect earthquakes in the earth. (My later attempts at photographs were in that sense “faked” as I was tapping the table beside the cup to try to reproduce the effect so that it was visible on my camera).

Or there was the fact that this movement in the coffee cup is exactly the same phenomenon as something in our lab. But whereas in the cup it is an interesting, almost aesthetic feature, in the lab it can be a major pain to deal with.

The problem comes in that the coffee cup was in the middle of the bench. This had been an accident in terms of where we were seated but it had large effects. Because the bench table has its legs at each end, but nothing in the middle, the table itself acts as if it is a massive drum. And one of the more fundamental resonances of a drum has the maximum movement at the centre of the drum: the edges don’t move much but that bit in the middle oscillates wildly. In the coffee cup this manifests as a ripple pattern on the coffee surface, reflecting the street outside in slightly distorted fashion. In the lab this means that some of our instruments become incredibly difficult to use.

ripple pattern coffee Rosslyn
Can you see it? The ripple pattern caused by the coffee being on the drum of the table at Rosslyn. An interesting effect to watch in coffee but what if this sort of thing happens in a physics lab?

Consider for example the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM). This microscope is able to resolve the structure of films down to an almost atomic resolution. It does this by monitoring the resonance of a small silicon cantilever as it approaches the surface of the material being studied. Just for a moment, put a wooden sugar stirring stick (or a lollipop stick) on the edge of a table and ‘twang’ it. It vibrates just as the silicon cantilever does in the AFM. Then think, what if you put the stick in honey and ‘twanged’ it – or put a magnet on the end of it and ‘twanged’ it over a bit of iron, how would the oscillation change? This is what the AFM does but with the atomic forces that are present when you get very close to the surface of a sample. But the phrase “very close” is key. Typically, the cantilever will be nanometers from the surface of the sample and, as it is very sensitive to the forces at the surface of the sample, if that sample moves because the instrument is vibrating up and down on the floor, the image will be at best blurry and unusable and at worst, you are going to be damaging your cantilevers.

And so, it is important to ensure that the AFM is placed in a suitable area of the lab: not in the middle of a floor in a high level building because that will just act as a drum in exactly the same way as the coffee cup was being vibrated at Rosslyn. If you’re not fortunate enough to have the AFM in a basement lab, you could place the AFM (and other vibration sensitive instruments) at the corner of the room, so the vibration amplitude of the floor-drum is minimised. You could also try to place the instrument on concrete blocks to ‘damp’ the vibration. An extreme example of this sort of damping is the ‘quiet labs’ of Lancaster University just next to the M6 motorway. These labs have been designed to minimise vibration noise and the team there routinely achieve atomic level resolution with their atomic force microscopes.

The silence of an area next to the M6 contrasting with the noise of the City. The directions that contemplating a cup of coffee takes you are always surprising.

Rosslyn is at 78 Queen Victoria Street, EC4N 4SJ