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The Javabot Combines Engineering and Coffee
WormholeFiend writes "The Javabot is the coffee machine of the future — completely next generation. It is the fully-automated system that runs the Roasting Plant Coffee Company in New York and its design is illustrative of what can be achieved using new thinking and methodologies to something that was previously regarded as a black art. The system is part of the experience because the coffee system runs throughout the shop. It's the first walk-in coffee machine in effect, and customers sit there and watch as their coffee beans rush past in pneumatic tubes, as they move from storage bins to staging, roasting station, grinding and a brewing machine where they are dispensed with the repeatable accuracy of a purpose-built machine. Customers can choose from any blend of seven different beans and every aspect of the process is controlled."
...does it run java?
Does it look like this one?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
a machine that drinks coffee, and we can take people out of the equation altogether!
Full color illustration here!
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Here it is.
Skyshadow's Law: The more complicated the coffee maker, the worse off you are.
The best cup of coffee I've ever found is from a little coffee shop near my wife's office in San Francisco (I won't say the name, but it's near the SoMa Caltrain station). They make their excellent brew in a decidedly low-tech way:
Each customer chooses the type of coffee they want or (and this is a better option) tell the barrista to use their judgement. The beans are scooped up, ground and then poured into a very conventional filter basket along with enough water to produce one cup of coffee.
And that's it -- the best cup of java you're likely to find made by probably the lowest-tech possible method.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Of course it doesn't run Java!
If it did, the coffee machine would need 15 mins to start, require all the beans to be named a certain way, the path to each individual bean type explicitly defined in the CLASSPATH, and would freeze for 20mins doing garbage collection, usually at the most inappropriate time.
In that case, here's a link to the actual coffee shop that runs the Javabot
Just get a personal coffee roaster and a grind & brew coffee maker. I know, I know. You want pneumatic tubes. Who doesn't? But a personal hot air coffee roaster can be had for $80+, while a grind and brew can be had for $100 and up. The result is the same, even if it's not as fun to watch.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Having tried roasting a small batch of coffee beans myself, and doing the attendant research prior to doing so that any engineer would do, I understand that coffee just roasted doesn't taste as good as coffee roasted yesterday. It needs time to outgas some volatile compounds, not dangerous, just bad tasting. I suppose you could draw a vacuum to speed up the process, but it might be excessively complicated and still take too long. I'm not sure.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Let me get this straight...the coffee goes from green bean to brewed cup in the matter of (tens of?) minutes? Any true coffee connoisseur knows that "the coffee attains its peak 4 to 24 hours after roasting." Ref: http://www.sweetmarias.com/ and http://www.coffeekid.com/ and alt.coffee.
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
It's not a toxicity issue, the gas is CO2. The issue is the flavor it imparts to freshly roasted beans. How major an effect it has probably varies from palate to palate. I've roasted my own coffee and gotten all kinds of results even though I've tried really hard to be consistent. Allowing the bean to out gas does seem to make a better cup but I say that with the proviso that I've never done a full-on double blind study to see if it's true or if I'm fooling myself.
Your idea of de-pressurizing the bean might work but before I went to the expense, it'd be worth doing the double blind to ensure it's necessary.
What makes the biggest difference is the quality of the bean. I've roasted Vietnamese beans that were god awful and Costa Rican beans that were sublime. Green beans come in all kinds of shapes and colors. The Vietnamese beans I sampled were a motley lot of various shapes in the same bag whereas the best beans have a consistent color and shape within the same bag. The color varies from region to region so there isn't a 'right color' as you can find good coffee in all shades of green.
One problem with this guy's business plan is dealing with neighbors who object to roasting coffee. I generate quite a bit of smoke when I roast my piddling pound of coffee and I have to wait until the wind is blowing away from one of my neighbors who has lupus. I can well imagine all sorts of problems trying to roast in a congested area.
Someone should open a store that does this with marijuana instead of coffee. I think total automation so the consumer doesn't have to do anything but suck in the nifty chemical would go even better with potheads than wired coffee addicts who need something to do with their ampup.
Something like this would put Vancouver on the map.
--
make install -not war
Ah, a luddite. How cute.
I've got news for you. Your standard of living, or that you can afford to spew pretentious words on Slashdot instead of being out in the fields with an ox-drawn plough, is because things like that already happened.
E.g., look at the clothes you wear. There's been quite the movement against mechanical looms in the 19'th century. In fact, that was _the_ original luddite movement. Turns out that it wasn't self-destructive or short-term after all. Previously you'd have maybe one set of clothes, total, for a decade. And you'd stitch and patch them when they broke, because it would be too expensive to buy a new set.
E.g., the fact that they're clean. Previously washing the clothes was a very time-consuming manual process, and it wouldn't be done anywhere near daily. If you enjoy pulling a clean new t-shirt out of the drawer daily, or a pair of socks, or underwear, or whatever, then roll it around in your head that people used to just wear the same clothes through mud and dirt and whatnot for quite a while.
E.g., if you enjoy a nice office job with a computer, it's only because agriculture got heavily mechanized and a small number of farmers can feed the rest of society to do better stuff. We used to need 5 peasant families to support a knight. Maybe also add a burgher family, although those were a lot fewer than that actually. Almost three quarters of the population used to be out there ploughing dawn to dusk, just for subsistence, in the good old days of non-mechanized manual labour. By sheer probabilities, chances are that would be your lot in life, if we still were at that point.
E.g., for that matter, read that again: dawn to dusk. Literally, that was how the acre was defined: the surface that a peasant with one ox can plough in a day, from dusk to dawn. That would be your daily schedule, for 6 days a week. Not to keep some cushy office job by putting up with a PHB's demands for overtime. That would be the _normal_ schedule, and just for subsistence.
E.g., enjoy all that free TV and free content on the internet and whatnot? Well, that too is because society now makes enough of a surplus, that marketing can blow on subsidizing those in exchange for ads. Previously your only entertainment would be the pub, sitting and listening to the same stories around the fire, and maybe a village dance on sundays. Don't think even books, because those were quite the uber-expensive things before Gutenberg went and made it a "highly reproducible mechanical process".
Etc, etc, etc.
Turns out that none of that actually made us any poorer. We just end up producing more, and affording to divert more work into entertainment and services.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...is whether the coffee produced by the Javabot tastes good.
Never. It talks about "machine of the future," that it's purpose is "to produce the most flavorful cup of coffee available," efficiency, control, etc.
It does not say whether that purpose was achieved.
The writer does not say that he tried some coffee made by the Javabot and that it tasted good.
The writer does not quote anyone who says they tried some coffee made by the Javabot and that it tasted good.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
It's the first walk-in coffee machine in effect, and customers sit there and watch as their coffee beans rush past in pneumatic tubes, as they move from storage bins to staging, roasting station, grinding and a brewing machine where they are dispensed with the repeatable accuracy of a purpose-built machine.
(Big Yawn)
When I can watch my coffee being GROWN via a live 24/7 satellite feed and Juan Valdez personally inspecting my every bean --- THEN I'll truly be impressed...