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I used sound waves to make espresso
- janpmz 4mo agoDon't show this to the EU, or they will force us drink only ultrasound espresso from now on.
- amelius 4mo agoMonopoly/duopoly is more a US thing.
- pbkompasz 4mo agohahahahahahahhahahahahahha
- amarant 4mo agoMore likely they will ban it to protect the Italian heritage of the traditional espresso.
- fredoliveira 4mo agois there prior art to the EU banning a new technology to protect an old one?
- Retric 4mo agoGMO etc is arguable but there’s limits around what you can call some things based around how they are made.
- milkshakeyeah 4mo agoNot really I think, but it’s not uncommon to protect product by restricting production methods or ingredients to traditional ones. So name espresso could be legally restricted to only when it’s brewed in traditional way.
- fc417fc802 4mo agoBlack bean drink (compare to es×r××so).
- ninalanyon 4mo agoI suppose it's plausible that labelling might be required but what makes you think the EU would ban it?
- FrustratedMonky 4mo agoIs power consumption really the issue. Or just more consistent flavor?
- Normal_gaussian 4mo agoFor industrial production, power use. For home use I'm much more interested in being able to add it to cold drinks and desserts.
- youngprogrammer 4mo agoAt a 3 minute shot, I’d rather use the same time to do a pour over
- hallway_monitor 4mo agoAfter the last one of these posts talking about cold brew coffee I attempted to replicate the results by just throwing some water and coffee into an ultrasonic jewelry cleaner. Results were not satisfactory. I wonder if extracting the transducer from the jewelry cleaner and attaching it to my Portafilter would work.
- hylaride 4mo agoIt'd be a learning experience to find the right settings. Coffee usually goes in two directions. Under-extracted (sour) or over-extracted (bitter). Things that will affect the extraction are temperature (hotter usually means more extraction), time (longer = more), grind size (more surface area in smaller grinds = more), pressure (higher = more) etc. Roast levels also matter.
- criddell 4mo agoI often produce espresso that is bitter and sour. The best coffee that I've drank for the past five years have all been pour overs (my favorite was at a place called The Library in Toronto). I sometimes wonder if all the time, effort, and money I've dumped into espresso has been a huge mistake and maybe I should just buy a pour over setup...
- gf263 4mo agoYou could get an OXO rapid brewer. It can make amazing espresso-intensity (TDS wise) drinks, and can be diluted to be as enjoyable as a pourover. Also shoutout the library. Great shop
- hackpelican 4mo agoWhat you’ve hit is uneven extraction. Parts of the puck were over extracted and other parts under extracted. Usually the cause is channeling, where some pathways in the coffee puck are easier for water to get through, so they get eroded first which leads to even more water going through these channels. Coffee around these channels then gets over extracted (bitter). Conversely, much less water is reaching the other parts of the puck, leading to those parts getting under extracted (sour) Better puck prep helps. Using a WDT tool (some acupuncture needles on a cork would do) or a blind shaker to break up the clumps leads to good results. Making sure the surface of the puck is level after tamping is a big one as well. What also helps is going coarser in the grind. The coarser the grind, the less puck prep matters and the less channeling occurs. Warning, you’ll no longer be getting the thick crema you may associate with espresso, or the instagram worthy beautiful rat tail extractions. But the coffee produced from coarse grind espresso is IMO much better. I was taught a lot of this by Lance Hedrick and I applied these learnings to achieve mostly consistent fruity and sweet espresso on most mornings.
- comrade1234 4mo agoMy dad was stationed on a submarine in the navy and he and a few others used to dump their laundry in the ultra-sonic cleaner normally used to clean engine parts. Said it did a great job....
- mandeepj 4mo agoMaybe there can be an ultra-sonic laundry machine
- ozim 4mo agoI guess a nuclear submarine doesn’t have the same power bill sensitivity as common household. ;)
- cyberax 4mo agoThere are! And you can buy them for a couple bucks. The biggest downside: rinsing. You have to do it manually. And no, just refreshing the water and letting the ultrasonic emitter run will do nothing. And doing it manually takes a surprising amount of time.
- mandeepj 4mo agoThanks! I googled after posting my comment here. No viable path with ultrasonic washers.
- cluckindan 4mo agoSubmarines didn’t always have laundry services. For a 90-day trip, the crew would bring six uniforms and rotate them daily. Shower was one minute of water once a week. Everyone smoked tobacco all the time, everywhere.
- aussieguy1234 4mo agoWow. In that environment you'd be getting the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes a day, even as a non smoker
- mybbor 4mo agoI tend to wake up before my partner, and I can only imagine the look on her face when the ritualistic grinder noise gets joined by a noisy brewer. In all seriousness, people tend to have a routine around coffee, but I think the Aeropress showed that people will change if the result is meaningfully better.
- stackghost 4mo agoI see the value for American-style "espresso-flavored" drinks, or similar bottled/packaged products. But, yuck, who on earth wants to drink actual espresso at room temperature?
- ericol 4mo agoIn the style of Benjamin Buford "Bubba" Blue: "You got your cold brew, your Japanese iced coffee, your iced americano. Then there's your mazagran, that's coffee with lemon juice, real refreshing. Your espresso tonic. Your iced latte, iced cappuccino, iced macchiato. You got your iced mocha, your frappuccino, your Greek frappé. Vietnamese iced coffee with the condensed milk dripping down real slow. Affogato, that's espresso poured right over ice cream. That's... that's about it."
- kruffalon 4mo agoI do! I think almost everything tastes better at room-ish temperature. (Some things need to be colder or hotter to keep their texture, but I can't think of anything that _tastes_ better outside of the 16~25°C range)
- zaat 4mo agoSparkling water (8-10C is the recommendation on the bottle in my hand). Bread (fresh from the oven, toast). Chicken Soup. And leaving aside examples, many things do taste better when they are hotter then 25, the heat helps more particles reach the olfactory receptors in your nose.
- kruffalon 4mo agoI'm sure that is correct for many people, but as I said: to _me_ things taste better at around room temperature. Even though I don't doubt your claim that some particles travel easier at higher degrees I suspect the difference is too small to notice before the rise in temperature becomes distracting to _me_.
- 4mo ago
- malux85 4mo ago"Most of us think of espresso as a hot, high-pressure ritual." - No, most of us dont care how the sausage is made, and just want the end product. Sure theres lots of individual coffee enthusiasts who cares, but in % terms thats not "most of us", most of us do not care, and nobody in my 40 years of life has ever complained about coffee energy usage. Extract with sound waves is an interesting idea, but dont romanticize demand that doesnt exist, it wrecks credibility, literally in the first sentence of the article
- davidkuhta 4mo agoGuessing you like your espresso bitter? “Saving up to 75% of energy by not heating the water is a minor benefit for home users or small coffee shops. But for companies making ready-to-drink coffee products at industrial scale…” The instant and dried coffee market is $35B-$50B. Cold Brew another $3B-$4B.
- kylehotchkiss 4mo agoAs I glance at my (checks notes) $200 power bill in San Diego apartment used entirely to run 3 ceiling fans and a box fan, I’m getting curious about all the ways power consumption can be reduced. No AC, LED lights, all gas appliances. I am going to switch over to a bunch of DC tower fans which claim to cut energy usage substantially. I wish more appliances would just switch to DC motors.
- SoftTalker 4mo agoLook into balcony solar, if you have a balcony with sun exposure. California energy prices are among the highest anywhere, so anything you can do to cut usage will have a bigger payoff there, and justify some investment to achieve it.
- zaat 4mo agoHow much do you pay for kWh?
- mh- 4mo ago(I'm not the person you're replying to, but I live in San Diego too.) We have the most expensive electricity rates in the country - both summer and winter are over $0.50/kWh.
- zaat 4mo agoI just checked my plan yesterday, I pay 0.13 Eur, summer and winter. I can commit to my provider for a year and lower it to 0.11, but with slightly higher fixed monthly cost (which is about 50 eur, regardless of consumption). With this prices you less likely to think about the efficiency of fans - it will probably will years to return the cost of fan replacement. I pay 0.45 Euro for public car charging, returning the cost of installing a charger at my (rented) house will probably take 2 years.
- pstuart 4mo agoYou may want to do a basic audit of your electrical usage -- it's not unheard of for apartments to have messed up circuits where one pays for usage by another. If you turn off all of your AC consuming devices is your meter still registering usage?
- erikgahner 4mo agoThis was also discussed on HN a few days ago.[1] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48552440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48552440
- embedding-shape 4mo agoI guess that might explain why they had it at such a low temperature (way to low I'd say), as they wanted to make a point about the lower energy consumption? If you wanted it hotter, then it might not actually save energy at all potentially?
- asdff 4mo agoProbably best suited for cold drinks where the heat is just purely wasted against the ice and diluting the drink.
- TheDong 4mo agoThe heat isn't wasted, it has a significant impact on flavor. Extraction of flavor etc from coffee grounds changes based on the water temperature. You can easily experiment with this by taking some coffee grounds and trying to brew with various temperatures, and noticing what flavors you get out. There's a reason cold-brew needs hours and hours to extract a good coffee flavor while regular espresso or pourover is done in a matter of minutes.
- SamBam 4mo ago> For the espresso samples, participants could not reliably tell the traditional and ultrasonic versions apart. There were no significant differences in aroma, flavour, bitterness or overall liking.
- appplication 4mo agoYeah, I don’t buy it. Just because you make some claims and say it was scientific doesn’t make it good science. It goes completely against a much wider body of knowledge about organic material extraction, well beyond just coffee.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- sublinear 4mo agoI don't know anyone who buys ready-to-drink coffee all that often. It's more of an impulse or convenience buy. Cutting costs does make sense for this type of product, but is it enough to keep up with declining demand?
- yCombLinks 4mo agoThere's probably 10 types of ready to drink coffee at Costco. Someone is drinking them, in bulk. Including my wife and daughter (different people)
- ltrg 4mo agoNot sure the parenthesis was required but I laughed.
- calebm 4mo agoWhat's the cost for the machine though?
- brian-m 4mo agoVery interesting for industrial use, that’s for sure. For domestic use, in the home of somebody whose coffee snobbery is dialled to 11, I need far more information. What beans were they using, freshness, etc? (Edit: Campos coffee… not on my shopping list that’s for sure…) How did they control for extraction method differences to maximise output quality for all brew methods? (Edit: TDS and EY) Were the “regular” coffee drinkers regular consumers of espresso? Most importantly, how long until Hoffman does a deep dive and much will it cost so I can allocate budget for yet another coffee making device?
- louthy 4mo ago> Did the espresso drinks have milk in them? I felt a great disturbance in Italy, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. Espresso does not have milk. Macchiato, is an espresso based drink with milk. Edit: it's bad form to change your message after-the-fact to remove the thing that was quoted.
- necovek 4mo agoEven if that quote was left in, "espresso drinkS" usually stands for drinks based on espresso, not espresso itself. You know, like cappucino or macchiato.
- brian-m 4mo agoCorrect. An espresso drink may have milk in it. An espresso does not. Edited to remove because the paper clarifies that it’s black coffee. But missed the (edit- found the clarification). Was quoted whilst in the process of fixing!
- shermantanktop 4mo agoThere are much greater sins against Italian coffee than dropping a word that doesn't change the meaning. "Espresso drink" vs. "Espresso-based drink"? come on. For those sensitive souls I'd think they'd be more worried about "Expresso","Frappacino", "Puppacino", Starbucks, and 20oz "venti" lattes.
- kowalej 4mo agoThis seems very interesting, at least from a pure coffee nerd standpoint and what it could mean for improving espresso brewing in general. However, I'm going through the research paper, and am a bit skeptical of the energy savings angle, especially considering the many variables with espresso machine in terms of how they heat and brew (single vs dual boilers, heat exchangers vs dippers, spring lever machines vs pump driven). I'm weary of how they are doing a baseline comparison here, especially because the paper states that the comparison was done between a modified Ascaso machine (with the ultrasound gizmo) vs an entirely different machine (Sanremo Cube); and also that they swapped the Ascaso machine's original brew pump and put in a seemingly expensive, but more efficient "positive displacement magnetic gear pump". They still use the pump to drive about 11 bar of pressure during brewing with it run on some sort of interval schedule throughout the 3 minute cycle. They did factor out the initial heat up times which I guess makes sense. However, another thing (on top of the obvious "room temperature espresso" problem) is that you'd still need steam / heat to produce milk based drinks (relevant for both home and especially cafes). Depending on the machine (including the Sanremo Cube they tested with) some of the "idle energy" usage is to support on demand steam generation. This doesn't seem to have been factored into their energy model which is pretty sketchy.
- kowalej 4mo agoOk, I just looked it up and the Ascaso Uno is a thermoblock design, while the Sanremo Cube is an HX machine with a full on steam boiler. Therefore, the Ascaso wouldn't even have instant on steaming and has basically no stand-by power usage. So yea... their comparison is bogus, unless I'm missing something from the paper.
- hdndjsbbs 4mo ago"room temperature espresso" was the first thing I thought of - espresso is meant to be drunk hot, right away. If you let a good shot cool off and compare it to a bad shot you're not going to notice the difference as much because you made them both worse by letting them sit and cool. For industrial processes it probably doesn't matter - look at how nescafe is manufactured.
- 4mo ago
- nailer 4mo agoI don't really care about the very small energy savings, but I'm excited about smaller espresso machines: - The taste is apparently the same "There were no significant differences in aroma, flavour, bitterness or overall liking." - That ultrasonic horn looks a lot smaller than both a modern espresso machine or a hand-cranked model like a Flair/Rok.
- neves 4mo agoThe guy is from Colombia, so I can believe it is a good method
- behnamoh 4mo agoIs it sarcasm? In any case, I think there are frauds in all ranks of universities. I've seen people in CMU steal someone else's research idea or even a whole paper and the university doesn't punish the professors who did this. It's the PhD students whose work and life gets destroyed by such things.
- danielvaughn 4mo agoI'm pretty sure the original comment is about Colombia's reputation for great coffee.
- awinter-py 4mo agosee also sonochemistry https://www.organic-chemistry.org/topics/sonochemistry.shtm https://www.organic-chemistry.org/topics/sonochemistry.shtm
- htx80nerd 4mo ago[flagged]
- Ar-Curunir 4mo agoPlease. Per capita energy usage of western countries is way higher than either India or china
- quickthrowman 4mo agoAn espresso machine is essentially a 1-2kW electric boiler, a compressor pump, some valves/actuators, and some PIDs, right? Even if it draws 1.5kW constant for 24h/day that’s only 36kWh. That’s about ~$5 to ~$15 of electricity, depending on how mismanaged your utility is. It costs less than an hour of labor to power an espresso machine for an entire day, the energy cost to pull a shot is negligible, pennies. The rooftop unit cooling and heating the coffee shop probably uses 2-3x more energy.
- IAmGraydon 4mo agoYou’re missing the real cash cow here: industrial scale production.
- quickthrowman 4mo agoThat’s a very good point, I’d wager that the energy input cost for industrial scale coffee brewing is a larger portion of the overall cost than it is for a shot pulled in a cafe. Reducing input energy by 75% in that case is huge, it’s like switching from resistive heating to a heat pump, any operator would jump at the chance to save that money if the process time is comparable and the ultrasonic brewing equipment plus lower energy costs has a lower amortized cost than the existing plant.
- queeshonda 4mo ago[dead]
- lawwantsin17 4mo ago[dead]
- Lucasoato 4mo agoCool, but does it taste like the one made by Bialetti Moka Express?
- nicechianti 4mo ago[dead]
- craftkiller 4mo agoIf you want to really save energy, then they've already made the ideal product: caffeine pills. It's all the wonderful drugs without any of the bullshit. You can have it at any temperature, with any drink or even without a drink at all. It doesn't get cold or give you coffee breath. They're ultra compact and don't require rituals or specialty restaurants. They're also incredibly cheap.
- mbrameld 4mo agoSuch an HN comment. I drink coffee for the taste, I’m sure I’m not the only one.
- nelox 4mo agoCan’t wait for the ultrasonic truck driving my coffee beans down the mountain to port, and the ultrasonic cargo ship bring my coffee beans from Colombia.
- crypto137 4mo agoYeah, if I drink an espresso and it's not hot, I'm fighting the barista.
- bot403 4mo agoIt's lose-lose. With this they won't even have a hot drink to throw in your face as you hop the counter.
- reactordev 4mo agoCan it do Black? :devilhorns: I like my coffee heavy metal.
- peteforde 4mo agoAbout 6-7 years ago I bought a machine that prepares single-shot cold brew with ultrasonic cavitation. I like my caffeine potent and chilled, so this has worked out extremely well for me. When I have a guest that wants a hot coffee, I just pour the shot into a mug and top it up with hot water to their taste, which works great. What this isn't is anything new. That doesn't make it bad, but it's not novel.
- stevage 4mo agoThat's very surprising. What's the model of machine?
- peteforde 4mo agoIt's called the Osma Pro. https://www.engadget.com/osma-pro-cold-brew-coffee-machine-review-131552500.html https://www.engadget.com/osma-pro-cold-brew-coffee-machine-r... Sadly, the company that made it flew a bit too close to the sun. I'd be genuinely sad if mine broke.
- jjk166 4mo agoA very similar process does a lot more than just coffee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlQT4ptwLKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlQT4ptwLKs I was inspired by the above video and have been playing around with ultrasonically aged drinks for quite some time now. It's quite fun. Still haven't brought myself to try ultrasonically aged milk yet though.
- zx8080 4mo ago> [...] that produces high-frequency high-frequency transducer attached t. Richard Freeman / UNSW. AI generated/hallucinated article? Or no one, author or editor, read it before publishing?
- dfxm12 4mo agoI've noticed a lot of people lend the name espresso to things that obviously aren't espresso. Is there any reason for this? I get the sense that these people think calling something espresso is a mark of quality, but it's just a brewing method like any other...
- crazygringo 4mo agoThis is fascinating from a food technology standpoint. But the framing of the article around espresso specifically is somewhat bizarre. Most people want their shot of espresso to be piping hot, not room temperature. And most iced coffee is very intentionally not made with espresso (although you certainly can use it if you want). The text of the article seems to suggest that this is more intended for "making ready-to-drink coffee products at industrial scale". But then that is not single-serve espresso shots that the article shows in several images. So is this about room-temperature espresso shots (not what most people want) or about industrial-scale concentrated coffee? And if it's the latter, what would those machines look like? It's one thing to use ultrasound at a small scale; but what about in gigantic basins? Does that work, or are there challenges? Is this tech that scales?
- stevage 4mo ago> And most iced coffee is very intentionally not made with espresso Really? How is it made?
- PoorlyNamed 4mo agoBy soaking regular ground coffee in water for 12 hours or so.
- tasercake 4mo agoYou may be thinking of cold brew, which is usually more expensive due to the higher coffee-to-water ratio. A standard ‘iced coffee’ at most coffee shops is espresso-based
- PoorlyNamed 4mo agoHuh. I never drink cold coffee so I always assumed they were one and the same. Thanks for the correction.
- crazygringo 4mo agoThis is not true. A standard iced coffee is just regular brewed coffee that is then put in the fridge. (Which is different from cold brew which is brewed in the fridge.) Absolutely not espresso-based.
- sgc 4mo agoThe actual research paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1350417724001330?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135041772...
- dvdyzag 4mo agoI want to meet the person that CAN distinguish between the espresso
- QuantumFunnel 4mo agoManual lever machines like the Flair use even less energy. This is silly.