Woodworking Coffee Adicts

[BlIss]

I have just remembered something. (It is 10 years since I made coffee in anger with a "proper" machine). We always used to throw away the first two coffee extractions of the day.

The reason being they didn't taste any good. Probably it is to do with the cleaning process. The closest I can liken it to is coating a tea pot (not scrubbing it clean) or seasoning a cast iron frypan.

It seems coffee has to pass through first.

Regards
Paul

As a young apprentice many yars ago I was asked to make sure every one mugs were clean prior to smoko...

Fresh out of school and the smiles were always on me as well as a few well know tricks of the time... Blue Sparks for the welders, or when working with the cranes - sent to the store for a "Long Wait - thinking Weight "....

Any way, wanted to do teh right thing and asked my mum what was teh best way to clean stained tea mugs.. "SALT "

So wanting to get the old fallers off my back, got a bag of salt and spent the best part of 1hr scrubbing and cleaning about 15 mugs AND then washed and set them out on teh table. Boiled the big kettle, got the tea leaves all ready and the big tin of condensed milk.

Smoko time came and the machine shop cleaned up and made their way over to the smoko area...

WELL knock me over with a chuck key.... The noise and red faces and bellows... WT.... I bolted with a couple of those just under 50, chasing me well out into the yards...

Crapped my self and it was my dad later that night, at home; that he told mum what happened...

She laughed and told me.. Salt is good to scrub and clean, but like a good baking tray... The old timers like the tannin stain in their mugs a it gives it the tea flavour. Never scrub that stain off..

5 years later on finishing my trade as a Fitter and Turner, I was told I was lucky to not be killed that day AND that some of the old timers were still trying to get the flavour back, in them there tin mugs.

[AlexS]

At a place I once worked, one of the women would, every so often, get sick of the scungy coffee mugs and put them through the autoclave. The screams would go on for a week, but she never learned ... until one day, someone araldited her mug to the shelf.

[tea lady]

At a place I once worked, one of the women would, every so often, get sick of the scungy coffee mugs and put them through the autoclave. The screams would go on for a week, but she never learned ... until one day, someone araldited her mug to the shelf.

[tea lady]

TL

I am afraid that Leanne and I fell into this trap. Fantasizing about having a glamorous little coffee shop that is. We were offered an opportunity to walk in to an existing business and took it on. Fundamentally we didn't know what we were doing and had had no previous history in hospitality or catering. Leanne was a competent cook and I was enthusiastic. They were our credentials.

We served excellent quality food, all made on the premises, offered 19 different teas (loose leaf) including 4 green teas and excluding some herbals, an excellent coffee (way better then most), opened 7 days a week and a couple of nights for dinner and in the end hardly made a living from it.

The only thing we were not going to do was starve to death.

We had a get-out clause in our lease and get out we did before we deceased.

In many ways I don't regret this little excursion in our lives, but I would not do it again and I would certainly explain to anybody contemplating this life how exacting it is.

Regards
Paul

Its OK Paul! I don't think I'm in danger of ever openin ga cafe!

At the risk of being banned from this thread, at work I make myself a coffee with instant but put milk in the mug first and stir in the "coffee" then add the hot (not boiling) water! Seems to work at a pinch! Guess I'm not as much a coffee snob as I thought! The tea on the other hand. We're fussy about the tea!

[artme]

I like Starbucks coffee grounds!!







































They make great mulch or are a good addition to the compost heap!!!

And they are FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!

[BobL]

I like Starbucks coffee grounds!!
.
.
.

They make great mulch or are a good addition to the compost heap!!!

And they are FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!

And they keep slugs and snails away - they don't like the residual caffeine.

[artme]

And they keep slugs and snails away - they don't like the residual caffeine.

I wonder if they make the worms hyperctive?

[Sir Stinkalot]

I like Starbucks coffee grounds!! ......
And they are FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!

Unfortunately somebody is having to pay for those grounds ......

[artme]

Unfortunately somebody is having to pay for those grounds ......

Fortunately I am no longer one of the payers!

[BobL]

In the search for a better coffee and to protect my coffee machine, which cost ~ 3 times more than my table saw, I decided to upgrade my water purification system. Until now I had been using a twin (sediment and carbon) filter system which produces nice drinking water but does not remove any dissolved calcium from the water. This builds up as scale in the coffee machine boiler and is a PITA to clean.

The new system looks like this


1 & 2 are the original sediment and carbon filters - our normal filtered drinking water is tapped off at this point
3 is a small reverse osmosis (RO) cartridge
4 is a permeator pump that uses the brine drain from the RO unit to fill and pressurise tank T. The waste brine then drains to waste via the red hose to drain D
CM is the Solenoid that opens on command from the coffee machine and delivers pressurised water from the tank to the coffee machine.
5 is a Deionizer cartridge that provides super distilled quality water for a variety of purposes and processes such as metal bluing.
M is the water quality out monitor.

Can I taste the difference - of course not, , but it should protect the machine.

[texx]

very interesting cos i have just had my machine cleaned out because of cal builkd up .
i currently only run through a charcoal type filter straight after the pressure reducing valve on the town water supply , but after a little more than 12 months and after a recent filter change the machine started to play up with help over the phone to the machine tech in brissy i tried afew things to fix the issue but did no good so i had to take the machine to the big smoke , problem turned out to be calcium in a couple of pipes restircting the flow to the boiler ..she is up and running again now but i still have to come up with a better filter system to stop it happening again .
i have been thinking of plunbing it in to the tank water instead of the town water . my coffee guy in brissy gave me the ph number of a guy to ring who had the same problem with his evap air con and fixed it with a magnetic jigger , ( must ring him soon and get some more info on it )
my machine is a BZ35 .. which also reminds me i need to roast today among other things .
see ya

johno

[Ozkaban]

This ones for you, Bob... Amazing setup!

[Cliff Rogers]

Strewth Bob....

[BobL]

Cheers Guys,

While I do perhaps operate on another level I do know several coffee geeks that make me look pretty average. The guy I bought all this water purification gear from has a similar but bigger water purification setup as mine but he has also about half a dozen coffee machines. One machine is customised with a digital temperature control, a shotcam that point up underneath the brew head and displays the extraction on a small LCD screen located on a stand above the machine, and a set of coloured lights that shine out from under the machine that colour change depending on what the machine is doing

Tex, forget about the magnetic thing, my water purification mate is constantly being asked to replace these things with a real water purifier.

[AlexS]

Interesting, Bob. What brand of sensor(s) and display to you have? What parameters are you measuring? Are you logging?