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Optical Feedback For Perfect Coffee
FOLICOR writes "One man's quest for the perfect cup of joe leads to
a new coffee maker" Somehow I have to hope that this is fake, but it looks like he's using an led to make sure his coffee is brewed reliably. I brew mine on my stove in a syphon cheerfully referred to as The Coffee Bong. Super primitive.
Who was it who said that "the problem with marijuana isn't that it leads to other drugs, the problem with marijuana is that it leads to fucking carpentry"?
rark!
Let me be blunt: If you aren't drinking espresso -- good espresso -- you haven't tasted coffee. And I mean espresso, not cappuccino, not latte, not frapparichinomochalaloopy. That's the kind of stuff you make when you want to cover up the taste of bad espresso.
Good espresso is nothing like the over-roasted, over-extracted, bitter and charred-tasting stuff you've had when you finally worked up the courage to try an ``espresso'' at *$s or some other gourmet coffee chain. If you're lucky, they gave you 3 or 4 ounces of unspeakably bitter drek. If you weren't lucky,... Well, I'm just thankful that you're still with us.
Good espresso is like heaven in a cup. Deep, rich, dark, and luxurious, good espresso has no bitterness. Its potent perfume only hints at the depth of complexity that awaits you upon the first sip. Creamy, caramelly, exploding with flavor, with a touch of sweetness on the tongue: This is what good espresso tastes like. No need to add sugar, the real stuff is quaffed straight.
Oh, and does espresso help your coding? You betcha! Nothing cuts through code fog like a double ristretto. Fires up the brain into smooth working condition. Clarity? You own clarity. With espresso cup in hand, ease in to the Captain's Chair: You are in command.
Face it, you need the real stuff. Here's how to get it:
- Stop buying stale coffee at stores and ``gourmet'' shops.
- Get an old hot-air popcorn popper and start homeroasting.
It's cheap, it's easy, and it's so worth it. You won't
believe how much better truly fresh coffee tastes. If you go no
farther than this and get a french press and a cheap grinder, you'll
have better coffee at home than you'll be able to find anywhere else.
- Get a decent espresso machine. No steam toys. Read the
user-contributed reviews on www.coffeekid.com. Plan on
spending at least 250 USD for a decent machine. Spend the money:
you'll pay for it in under a year from your coffee-chain savings.
- Get a good grinder. You can't make real espresso without
one. This is the one that people skimp on and later wonder why their
fancy 1000-USD espresso machine can't make good espresso. Plan on
another 200 USD, minimum. Again, it pays for itself.
- Lurk in alt.coffee
and drink in the wisdom. Learn how to pull a ristretto that extracts the deep, beautiful essence of
15g of freshly ground, freshly roasted coffee into 1.75ounces
of pure bliss. Once you've had a "god shot", you'll never be able to go back to bad coffee again.
Do it. It will change your life.P.S. Here's a good starting roast/blend for espresso: 2 parts brazillian cerrado, 1 part sumatra mandheling, 1/2 part monsooned malabar, 1/2 part monsooned cherry aa robusta. Roast each part individually, just a bit into the second crack. Blend and store in an airtight glass container. The next morning, open the container and try to contain your amazement at how great the stuff is.
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
Thinking about that...
Basically, a coffee percolator is an inverted bong, as the heat comes from the bottom, forcing the water around instead of suction forcing air around.
Thinking along those lines two weeks ago I took an old percolator, and with the help of some duct tape and a hacksaw I made a bong! The top, where the glass knob normally is where you can see the coffee bubbling, has been replaced by a bowl, which leads down into the former coffee chamber that has been sealed airtight except for the tube leading down into the water.
There's a pipe-tube-hookah thing leading into the spout, also sealed airtight. The pipe is built with a little tiny piece of plastic PVC so it's easy to disconnect it and put it inside for safekeeping.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, ANYTHING can become pot smoking paraphenalia. Just be creative!
My other pipes include an old wireless Nintendo controller (where the thumbpad was,a bowl is now) and a telephone handset (think about it!).
Enjoy, and study plenty at four twenty.
Is it RFC 2324 compliant?
sulli
RTFJ.
My friends and I were doing something similar for potheads all over the world. Ours was a regular straight-pipe bong with a red LED and a CdS photo-detector. This controlled a small air-pump near the top of the bong. One started, the airpump would shutoff once the voltage dropped to a sufficient level due to the smoke in the chamber.
Somthing to regulate the temperature would be better. Boiling water impares the taste - Too cold and you don;t extract all thr flavour.
93 degrees centigrate at 18 bar pressure will produce the ultimate coffee.
Also, I would imagine that the use of different beans would create variations in colour which this machine could never deal with.
- - Sha la la la . . .