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Self-Heating Coffee Hacking
ptorrone writes "Awhile back I wrote about the new Wolfgang Puck self-heating coffee containers that took 10 years and $24 mil to develop. Well, I managed to find them in a local store and bought them to take apart to see how they work. Once activated, they reach 145 degrees in about 6 minutes. This isn't a review of the beverage, it's all about the stuff that makes the liquid hot, how it works, pictures and links to patents. I am looking in to how these could be recycled too."
He should definitely put that into the wikipedia.
This would be great for taking soups along with you. Especially for lunchs or breakfasts, or on hiking trips.
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
Okay, maybe it is neat that they've been able to make this work, but doesn't it seem just a bit wasteful to anyone but me? Western society at it's best, I guess.
robert
Would have been interesting if they made seperate compartments or something to allow for reheating later. And on a seperate note, what the hell did they spend $24 million on? The chemical compound? Beyond that everything else seems to be simple and already existing technology.
It does. But in addition to the coffee mug you need movie tickets, a box of chocolates and sometimes flowers.
The article notes that the container, while appearing very large, actually holds less coffee than one would originally think. Even after the author removed the insulation, there was still little room for the coffee itself.
Also, because it uses a water / calcium oxide reaction (basic high school chemistry stuff), which means that it'll heat once and then become nothing more than another cup. While I have no idea how much these retail for, I'm sure that the price is inflated more by the "oh shiny" factor than production or development costs.
-- arstchnca
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It's a great idea however the amount of coffee you actually get to drink compared to the mechanism that makes the whole thing work is quite a small amount (i.e like the size of a short macchiato).
I totally agree. I appreciate the Make post on how it works, but this product is taking throw away culture to an extreme. The convenience can't possibly be worth all the manufacturing and materials going into a single hot cup of cofee. And given the way it's packaged, there's no way you're going to reasonably recycle any of this. This is so wasteful it honestly offends me.
25 Million and 10 years? That's like employing 15 scientists and engineers at a good wage (plus room for admin overhead), all working 40 hour weeks for an entire decade.
For this low-tech device? Something doesn't add up.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
You see, the thing that many people in the US completely miss is that the breweing of coffee was perfected in 1855 and it is senseless to mess with it.
We don't buy that line for ANYTHING, least of all our sources of caffeene.
Not to mention that the invention of instant coffee added a whole new "ready in the front line" class to the beverage.
And, of course, the fact is that since we're the land of the free and capitalism and all that, if your "well trained barrista" and whatnot could manage to sell coffee, they'd smack Starbucks around.
Starbucks et al exist because they make coffee that people drink. Simple story.
That pretty much covers it. Tear it apart, see how it works. That's been the way to "hack" for at least 50 years.
"This is so wasteful it honestly offends me."
Condoms are wasteful too.
Well, I didn't have millions, my girlfriend (now wife) luckily for me overlooked that requirement.
Also, when I said "Americans" before, I didn't mean to imply that this is something that only Americans do, but instead I said that just because that's where my experience is. I understand that people in plenty of other places do the same thing to a lesser or greater degree.
Finally I can get a hot cup of coffee anywhere I go, because, you know, it's not like there's a place to buy coffee on every corner.
Oh wait, Starbucks...
...and a million other convenience stores, restaurants, cafes and coffeeshops.
I dunno where you are from, but at least in the NY area I've seen a number of Wolfgang Puck cold coffee drinks, akin to the Starbucks variety. They've become pretty common over here, and I think I've seen them in NY Penn Station among other places.
Bialetti link
I have a fairly good espresso maker with a steam wand but have found the Bialetti to be less hasle and it makes better coffee.
Also, I got a battery powered stove top milk frother that allows me to make as much foam and latte milk as a pan will hold, quickly. I can get stiffer foam out of the steam wand but the stove top frother creates a nice foam that works when I need to make several at once for guests.
To the sibling poster who said that Starbucks employees are well trained, I beg to differ. What the parent poster is talking about with regards to a profesional is not a graduate of a 2 week course on coffee making. They are talking about someone who has grown up in a culture that has an appreciation for excellence in coffee. You can't get that at Starbucks, no matter how hard they smile. Sadly, Europe is the place I have had the best coffees. I've had close in the North End in Boston. Starbucks is burnt motor oil by comparison.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
Exactly! Being very empathetic can score you chicks, but it's just as likely to gain shopping partners.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
While I have no idea how much these retail for, I'm sure that the price is inflated more by the "oh shiny" factor than production or development costs.
Yeah, pretty much. A 4 pack sells for about $6. I found these in a grocery store a couple months back and picked up a 4 pack for the "oooh shiny" factor. The coffee was only so-so, of course, but it did deliver as promised. Coffee got properly hot.
I too was struck by the weight and heft of the thing. I felt that it's be useful for camping trips because, if necessary, you could beat a puma to death with the damn thing. Way, way overbuilt. Very solid feel to it.
I have not purchased them again, and likely will not except for possible camping purposes. The real question, for me, is where would one need this sort of device? At home, you have a microwave if you need to heat up a plastic tube of premade coffee, so the self-heating is redundant. Most workplaces have coffee makers for the employees which tend to be always full. In the car on the way to work, you could stop by a coffee house or fast foodery or something. It would be handy for being out in the wild, far from power and easily obtained coffee, but how often does that occur? People who go camping usually only go maybe once a year, and usually they are in RVs nowadays, with power and coffee making devices.
It's basically a product without a large market.
If the thing held soup, now, you'd have something. Lots of office worker types would likely keep several in their desks. Because while many offices have microwaves, and microwavable soups already exist, not having to get up to have some soup has an odd attraction to it.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
This "new" thing is in the First World War was used by the English army to warming up their canned food.
Finally, I do buy food that I throw out all the time. I would be a big fat pig if I ate every french fry I ever bought. Is it wasteful? I dunno, everyone who grew the potatoes, transported them, turned them into french fries, cooked them and sold them to me thought they were making a reasonable profit on them. I thought it was a good value for my money - in fact I got TOO MANY with my "#4 lunch special". I ate what I wanted and tossed the rest. Then the garbage man gets paid to haul it away. Whee!
At which time it goes into a landfill and quite rapidly decomposes, providing fuel for the non-immediately-biodegradable substances to start decomposing.
The "waste" is that this coffee cup goes into the same landfill, takes up about as much space as two super-size french fry orders, and yet last, oh, let's just estimate that it lasts about ten million times as long in said landfill.
The PROBLEM here is that not all costs are passed on to the consumer OR to the provider. The cost of waste disposal is horrifically uncapitalized in the US, primarily because, aside from materials deemed "hazardous waste", there is no good way to regulate it. If waste management were properly capitalized, styrofoam cups would run for hundreds of dollars. But, it's not. You pay as much to throw out the styrofoam cup that rents landfill space on the order of eons as you do to throw out the serving of lasagna you left too long in the fridge, which will be gone from the landfill (as a discrete body of substance) in a matter of weeks.
No matter how "free market driven" an economy is, it needs to understand where free markets fail. They OFTEN fail when public goods and services are needed to handle their byproducts, and this is a perfect example of that.
In other words: yes, this is a horrendous waste of resources, and even though I do firmly believe in free market forces, I'd love for my government to step in and put a mandatory recycling program (vendor-funded) or heavy use tax on products such as this. Because it's not the producer who pays for this today, nor the consumer, nor the garbage man. It's your children and mine, who have to live in this filth.