Tag: coffee technology

Instant coffee: First you snip it, then you dip it

Actually, to slightly misquote Carl Sagan, if you want to make instant coffee from scratch, you must first create the universe, and then you have to make a pot of coffee, and then you have to dry it out and add a bunch of chemicals in the process. And then you put it in a tin. And then you add water. So it’s not really instant at all. It’s only instant if you assume that the coffee process is all about having other people do the work for you. But despite this slightly more passionate than normal introduction, Instant coffee isn’t something I spend a lot of time thinking about (except when I suggest that it’s a sin). Why you’d want to drink the rehydrated dregs of old coffee is beyond me. But if it’s your cup of tea, then this instant coffee/straw/stirrer combo is probably right up your alley.

Via Yanko Design

Brown gold

Turns out coffee is sustainable after all. Last week’s debate after my flagrant flippant disregard for the environment could have been avoided if only I’d read this article about coffee biodiesel.

The bowser of the future

The bowser of the future

I had posted something from Gizmodo on this a while back (and they’ve got another story on this today) but this piece from the Economist goes into the research in some depth. So I can have my coffee, and drink it too. Where coffee=cake=sustainable living.

“In the case of coffee, the biodiesel is made from the leftover grounds, which would otherwise be thrown away or used as compost. Narasimharao Kondamudi, Susanta Mohapatra and Manoranjan Misra of the University of Nevada at Reno have found that coffee grounds can yield 10-15% of biodiesel by weight relatively easily. And when burned in an engine the fuel does not have an offensive smell—just a whiff of coffee. (Some biodiesels made from used cooking-oil produce exhaust that smells like a fast-food joint.) And after the diesel has been extracted, the coffee grounds can still be used for compost.”