clearing the air – Bean Thinking

Seeing the trees for the wood at OJO Coffee, Bangsar, KL

coffees on display at OJO — OJO Coffee, Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur

It is very easy to sit for a long time watching the people and the surroundings at OJO Coffee in Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur. Initially I had thought that this medium-sized café with an impressive number of power points dotted around it was an independent. However similarities with CoffeaCoffee around the corner and a couple of other clues (CoffeaCoffee t-shirts) suggest that it is actually part of the CoffeaCoffee chain, something that was confirmed when I asked the barista. However, the standard of coffee in this chain should prompt some of the smaller independents to up their game a bit (and certainly all of the UK based chains). Not content with just serving the typical coffees of ‘latte’, ‘cappuccino’ etc. (which are made using their own blend), OJO’s additionally serves about 15 types of single origin coffee made with your choice of method (Hario V60, Aeropress or French press). For a while this summer I became a bit of a regular at OJO and so I would particularly recommend the Indonesian Sumatran prepared by V60, but with so many coffees to choose from (from the relatively local Indonesians to South American coffees from much further afield) there is plenty to try at this café.

wooden mosaic — The wall made of wood at OJO

The interior of OJOs is decorated with many types of wood. Different cuts of wood are made into a sort of wood mosaic on the wall while the tables are made using several types of wood so as to give a symbolism about the Sun that is a type of motif of the café. Much of the floor is wood too and so this got me thinking about the rainforests in this country. Malaysia has a rich variety of wildlife and forest, it is home to the Orangutan as well as many other species. Teak trees that can be used for more expensive furniture grow along the roadside. Much of this timber can be obtained sustainably and in a way that respects the rainforest and I am certainly not suggesting that the wood in OJOs was anything but sustainable. However, perhaps inevitably, there are many pressures on these invaluable forests. Some of these pressures have, in the recent past, resulted in significant deforestation. One such pressure is that of palm oil.

Palm oil is a massively useful commodity. It is now used in food products from margarine to biscuits to raisins (surprising but true, check the ingredients list of a packet of raisins) and non-food products such as soaps. It is literally everywhere. Both Malaysia and its neighbour, Indonesia, have profited enormously from growing and exporting palm oil. Unfortunately, at times the rainforest is cleared to make way for the palm oil plantations. As it is easier to burn felled trees to clear the land rather than to painstakingly pull the roots up by hand, the cleared forest is burned. But the ground is not any ordinary soil, the ground is often peat based which means that the fires on the surface penetrate deep below the ground and produce phenomenal amounts of smoke.

If at this point you were wondering where the ‘physics’ bit of this café-physics review is, I assure you it is coming. It is indeed linked to this environmental story and to OJOs, please keep with me.

Each year, parts of Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia are enveloped by a haze produced by this burning peat land (It made the BBC in 2013 when it was particularly bad, but some haze is present for a few weeks every year). Haze has the appearance of thick fog but smells of smoke. At times, visibility can be reduced such that the tops of nearby tall buildings are obscured. Each time land needs clearing for new palm oil plantations, this smoke is produced. The haze can be reduced by local weather patterns but on many days, the haze is cleared by the torrential rains that can occur in this part of the world.

the haze is coming in — L-R: The haze comes in over part of KL in 2013 (series of 3 pictures)

It is commonly said that ‘rain clears the air’ but this is not completely true. It is not the raindrops themselves that somehow wash the air free of the dust of the haze, it is the vortices that form behind them*. Just as a spoon dragged through coffee produces vortices behind it, so a raindrop falling through the air forms vortices in its wake. The size of these vortices will depend on the size of the drop and the speed at which it falls through the air; a tea spoon and a dessert spoon pulled at different speeds through the coffee similarly produce different forms of vortex. So the amount of dust that is ‘sucked in’ and falls to the ground will depend on the type of rain that falls. Perhaps if you are in Malaysia, Singapore or Indonesia when this haze is present, you could make a study of which sort of rain clears the air most effectively. I have an idea but not the evidence to see if the idea is correct, it would be interesting to know what you think.

As I left OJO one afternoon, the rain had started to come down. The rain, or at least the vortices behind the raindrops, cleared some of the haze that had been around earlier. It is a temporary solution to a longstanding problem. A more long lasting solution may be to start (or continue) asking manufacturers of those biscuits you are eating: just how sustainable is the palm oil they are using?

OJO is at No 23, Jalan Telawi 3, KL

* JR Saylor and BK Jones, Physics of Fluids, 17, 031706 (2005)

Rain drops at Notes, Covent Garden

Notes Covent Garden, rain, puddles — No one wanted to sit outside when we visited Notes at Covent Garden

It was a cold and wet afternoon in early January when I finally had the opportunity to try Notes (Covent Garden branch). Inside, there were plenty of places to sit while warming up and drying off enjoying a coffee. Although it seems small from the outside, inside, the branch feels quite open, with the bar immediately in front of you as you come through the door. One of the attractions of Notes to me, was the fact that I knew that they served different single estate brewed coffees. I think I tried a “La Benedicion” coffee, or at least that is what I seem to have scribbled in my notepad. We took a stool-seat at the window to look out at the rain as my coffee arrived in a 0.25L glass jar. It is always nice to try different single estate coffees and generally, if I know that a café serves single estate coffees I will seek them out to try them for the Daily Grind.

The reflection of the Notes sign board in a cup of tea — The reflections in a cup of tea

Watching the rain form puddles outside, my thoughts were turned to the reflections bouncing off the water in the puddle. It struck me that the appearance of puddles depends on the water molecules behaving both as individual molecules and as molecules within a group. The rain creates ripples in the puddle which can only occur because each molecule is (weakly) attracted to the other water molecules in the puddle, forming a surface tension effect. A ripple is a necessarily collective ‘action’. On the other hand, the reflection of the lights from the street is the response of each individual water molecule to the incoming light. The reflected image is made from the response of many individual molecules. Reflection is more of an individual molecule thing.

Warning sign, train, turbulence — Such turbulence should be familiar to anyone who has stirred a cup of coffee.

I continued thinking about this when I got home where it occurred to me that there was another connection between rain and coffee. It is often said that “rain helps clear the air”, or something similar. Yet this is not quite true. If you have a coffee in front of you at this instant, take a moment to drag a spoon through it. Note the vortices that form behind the spoon. Such vortices form around any object moving through a fluid. In the case of the coffee it is the spoon through the water. For the rain, as the rain drop falls through the air it creates tiny vortices of air behind it. Just as with the coffee spoon, the size of these vortices depend on the speed and size of the falling drop. These vortices pull and trap the atmospheric dust bringing it down to earth more quickly than rain alone could do. The air is cleaned more by this ‘vacuum cleaner’ action than by the ‘wet mop’ of the rain itself.

I’m sure that there are many other coffee-rain connections that you can make if you sit in a café as I did on a rainy day. Let me know your thoughts on this or indeed, on anything that you notice and think interesting while sitting in a café. There is so much to notice if we just put down the phone or close the laptop while enjoying our brew.

Edited to add: Sadly, this article was posted just as Notes Covent Garden was closing down. Notes still has branches at Trafalgar Square and in Moorgate and is opening new branches in Kings Cross and Canary Wharf in February I believe. Hopefully they will all serve single estate brewed coffee and have good window seats from which to observe the rain when it falls.