How Can You Make Lots Of Coffee?

quoll asks: "I work for a software development company which is entirely Linux based, and tries to release all of its code as Open Source. It's a great place to work, and I've just been asked to help make it better. After going from 12 people to 19 we suddenly don't have enough coffee making capacity, and I've been asked to research a coffee machine which can keep up with the expected increase in demand. Unfortunately I'm only familiar with feeding coffee to small groups, using drip-filters and the like. I suspect that we could use an espresso machine, but I'm concerned about the need to spend 10 minutes to make a single serving. How do other companies provide large quantities of nice (ie. non-instant) coffee? What sort of machines do people recommend?" Yes, I know that this is under the "Java" topic, but it gets so underused these days that it was getting lonely, and the icon is rather appropriate, yes?

Comments

Cold Soak Concentrate

[StandardDeviant]

Heh, well before I tell you this "recipe" you need to wonder what your risk tolerance is, becuase it is possible to make this stuff so strong that it'll cause "negative physical manifestations", just like drinking 50 or so cups of regular coffee will. No I'm not kidding.

Get regular ground coffee. Good stuff, cheap stuff, whatever. Just get a lot of it, like at a warehouse store or something.

Place coffee in a container, like a pitcher. Fill the container about 3/4 full. Add cold water to ~fill the container. Place container in refridgerator for at least five days, a week would be better. During this step the organic components (incl. the caffeine) are leeched out into the water just like any other organic chem extraction at low temp). The relatively long extraction time causes effective removal of most of the organics. If you wanted to be really maniacal about it you could remove the first concentrate and resoak the grounds for another week, maybe do a double 4 day soak, something like that (sort of the chemEng approach to coffee production).

OK. Now you're set. You can either drink it straight (like REALLY FUCKING STRONG cold espresso), or dilute it to taste with hot water (1conc:1water to 1conc:3water were common). You can also use the concentrate to etch optical glass. (j/k)

Seriously, depending on how strong you make the concentrate you can start seeing physical manifestations of caffeine overdose like heart beat abnormalities, eyes losing focus, tremors, etc. Watch your intake carefully at first until you have the procedure tuned to your satisfaction. I can imagine you hitting the LD50 with this stuff if you make it too strong and drink a lot of it.

The advantage to this is you can make up gallons and gallons and gallons ahead of time of the concentrate and the stuff goes a LONG way.

If the concentrate just isn't strong enough for you (good lord), you can add a crushed package of NODOZ or the like (over the counter caffeine pills) to the initial grounds before soaking. *If you do this make sure you don't drink the concentrate straight!*

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