It's Monday 10th of November 2014. This NHPR episode 1,636 entitled, How I Make Coffee.
It is posted by name Moris and in about 16 minutes long.
Feedback can be sent to name not Moris at email.com or not leaving a comment on this episode.
The summary is, I'm a great level on coffee. This is How I Make Mine.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honest host.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15 that's HBR15.
Bit your web hosting that's honest and fair at An Honest Host.com.
Hello, how can I public radio? This is Dave Morris. Today I want to talk to you about
coffee. I reckon coffee is a subject of interest hackers because I think probably most hackers
that I know drink quite a lot of it. I'm also following in the footsteps of such worthy individuals
as Clare 2 who's always talked about coffee in his GNU world order podcast and X1101 who has
done an NHPR episode on how he makes coffee. This one is my contribution to the How I Make Coffee
theme. So, let's talk about my history in terms of coffee briefly. I'm a coffee lover. Obviously,
I've tried many ways of making coffee. I remember when I was a child my parents made
theirs in a percolator on the stove top. Thing that boiled and made coffee made water bubble up
through coffee. It was smelled really good, but obviously at the age I remember this maybe five or six
or something wasn't a very pleasant result. I've never used a percolator myself, but I've owned a number
of filter machines over the years. The ones where you put coffee into a paper funnel and poor water
of it, they seem to do a pretty reasonable job. At one time I owned a strange device called a
Kona coffee maker, which was very fancy and quite expensive, I simply recall. It's an all-glass thing.
You can see details of it if you're interested in the link in my show notes. It was a bit too
fragile for me since it was all glass and being a bit clumsy. I think I must have banged it with
something when I was washing it up and it smashed. I don't remember making particularly good coffee,
but it would also make tea, which was an unusual thing. Back in the day, I used to visit
Indonesia quite a lot, and that's a pretty important producer of coffee in the world. There's
lots of good coffee available there, but if you ever ask for coffee in some of the sort of lower-end
eating places, which is the vast numbers, you end up with a usually strangely enough, a glass
tankered into which they put a large tablespoon full of ground coffee, and usually lots of sugar
because everything has sugar in it in Indonesia, and then they chuck boiling water in that and
stir it up, and that's your coffee. I never got on with that particularly well since you ended up
at least I ended up straining the ground through my teeth as I was drinking it. I never knew
to stop, so I wouldn't recommend that. There was a fashion for the cafeteria or French press,
and I've had a few of those over the years, and pretty much all of them up until recently
had been glass, so that's the thing about the glass thing is that it suffers from my
clumsiness when I'm washing up, and there's also the issue where pushing down the plunger,
so in some of them, they're really, really stiff to push down, and I think that means that
the pressure inside the glass is getting pretty high because you're relying on the pressure to
push the coffee, separate the grounds from the coffee, and I just seemed to break them with
monotonous regularity, so that's not a bad way of making coffee, and still do use it and have
an all-metal cafeteria, but I have an alternative, which I much prefer nowadays, which is using
the mocker pot, so I bought one of these four years ago. Never, I'd never actually heard of these
before. My son has also a keen coffee drinker had bought one himself, and recommended that I should
get one, so I did. I've had to got two. One's a three cup, that's three, fifty millimetre espresso
cup, so it's not a huge lot of coffee. I also bought a nine cup, which is much bigger, it's
probably enough for, well, obviously for nine people if you just drink a little espresso cup,
but maybe two or three people if you have for more robust cup of coffee. So the pot consists
of three main elements, there's a base into which you put cold water, the funnel that holds
the ground coffee, and there's a top piece, which in which the coffee moves is as the
water boils. There's a gasket and a metal filter on the underside of the top part to keep the
grounds out of the coffee. This device, most common version of this is called a, comes from a
company called Bieletti, and it's called the Bieletti mocker express. I've got pictures in the
show notes of this particular device. So what I'm doing is there's quite a lot of show notes,
well, pictures, anyway, not a lot of text showing you the stages and making coffee in one of
these, at least the way I do it. And what I'm going to do is to actually make some coffee
and try and get an ambient recording using the sense of clip. I should have, well, this is going
to go. And you'll be able to hear the process and look at the pictures if you really want to. So
the show notes contain several links to the various Wikipedia entries about this particular device,
and also to the website for the manufacturer. It's not me trying to sell you anything just for your
interest. So over to the ambient recording. Okay, I'm going to try and see whether I can
record a process of making coffee in the Bieletti mocker express. Excuse my floorboards,
they're a bit creepy. Right, taking the base and adding water to it. There's a ring just close to the top,
which sits in which sits the emergency escape valve, whatever you call it. So it should just be
below that. Here's stories of these things blowing up. I'm not sure that's true. I was doing
really dark, however, cause them to explode. So here's the funnel. It's now going into the top.
Now, my coffee's kept in a vacuum jar, so listen to this. That's the vacuum being released.
And here goes one little scoop. And another one. So that's pretty much enough. I think the
surface of the coffee in the funnel is level with the top. Now I'm being very careful and
removing any coffee on the actual screw threads because I found that if you leave anything there,
the gasket doesn't seal properly and then you get hot water and coffee and stuff going on
over the place. So here I am screwing the top on. Making sure it's nice and tight and feel it.
Tightening against the gasket, the rubber gasket. There's my metal trivet going on the gas ring,
positioning the pot carefully so you don't get gas flame going up the side and potentially melting
the handle. Being in there done that, this thing. That's the gasket on. Turn the heat reasonably
low so we're not getting a lot of flame outside the base and just wait for the water to heat up.
I mean while I'm going to put the lid back on the coffee vacuum thing and it's got a little
pump that you pump the air out of. There we go, completely pumped and
deserving coffee for the next time. Now the way I make my coffee is in a very big cup, which is
I love tea on it because they seem to run out of the eye, I love coffee, once I've bought it.
I'm not sure what the best it is but I find that the amount of coffee I make
covers about feels it to about the third. So then add maybe another third of milk and top it up with
boiling water so I'm going to put the kettle on while I'm doing this.
Why is it that kettle is weak? That's spectacular noise. This kettle was fairly silent whenever
I don't know what's in it. How many more? It's already fairly hot so I'm going to put it on.
So here you can hear the start of the, the bubbly phase of the coffee. I hope anyway I just
lifted the lid to look inside and it's nearly full and they say you shouldn't let it do
this bubbly very long. So I'm now turning it off and it's not going to stop with this steam in
the bottom but you want to minimize the amount of time that steam comes through the coffee
because it's heating it up it'll be super heating it above boiling point so it's not ideal.
Over here the coffee causes changes in the fatty element or something of that sort
and tends to make it taste rather unpleasant. So you can hear the bubbling subsiding so
it's actually ready to pour now. That's very quick. Never quick when you're waiting
you of course but there we go into the cup. Not a lot, three as best of cups is a smaller
amount. Bung some milk in over similar amounts. Very nice, nice brown color not. I like
milk in the coffee you might not because let's get that kettle really hot again.
And when goes for water to top it up. I suppose there's a bit like an Americano
Joe was surprised to find people in America drink as well. So that was a piece of ambient
recording of coffee being made in the jolly old Bieletti mokka express you've been listening to
heck of public radio and heck of public radio dot org. We are a community podcast network
that release the shows every weekday Monday through Friday. Today's show like all our shows
was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself. If you ever thought of recording a podcast
and click on our contributing to find out how easy it really is. Heck, a public radio was found
by the digital dot pound and the informomicon computer club and it's part of the binary revolution
at bmf.com. If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly. Leave a
comment on the website or record a follow up episode yourself. On this otherwise status, today's show
is released on the creative comments, attribution, share a like, to the dot org license.