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Making espresso with ultrasound
- uberex 4mo agoAwesome idea. I would love to try it. If that can also make my espresso routine easier I am up for it.
- david-gpu 4mo agoIf you are looking for an easier routine, have you tried the OXO rapid brewer to make "soup"? It is as easy to operate as an Aeropress, and it makes a really yummy concentrated cup. A typical recipe is something like 20g coffee and 80g water, yielding about 60g of concentrated coffee. Lance Hedrick has done a few videos on the subject. It is not espresso, obviously, but it takes no time to prepare, it tastes fantastic and it is very easy to dial-in.
- thomasoffinga 4mo agoSomeone get James Hoffmann on the line right now.
- mzitelli 4mo ago75% energy save to make a room temperature expresso. I am ok spending a bit more energy to have it warm.
- alansaber 4mo agoThink of how cool you'll look with an oscilloscope on top of your coffee machine, though.
- elil17 4mo agoIt is intended for manufacturing canned iced lattes and similar, as stated in the article.
- moodyScarf 4mo ago> The saving could be especially significant for companies who make coffee-based ready-to-drink products at industrial scale It's not for you
- weird-eye-issue 4mo agoCould be great for an iced Americano
- klausa 4mo agoI'm _very much_ a coffee nerd. There's a semi-famous, super hipster cafe near me in Tokyo, that I sometimes go to. Once, they had a special on the menu, when they give you a flat white, and a double shot of espresso on the side, with a thermometer hovering over the shot, with suggestions of tasting notes that you can get out from sips at different temperatures. Now, that's generally very much a thing — things definitely taste differently based on the temperature (or maybe _they_ don't, but we _perceive_ them differently? distinction without a difference, I guess.). The suggested temperature ranges were 51-40C; 40-30C, and 30-20C. 51-40 was great. 40-30 was getting weird, but still _interesting_, because you definitely got different notes. But the 30-20 was terrible. That is absolutely too cool to enjoy a shot of espresso. I'm all for experimentation and doing weird things, but that was no longer riding the line of "not great but interesting" and went straight into "why would you ever do this" territory.
- thenthenthen 4mo agoCool! I noticed most of my Chinese friends drink cold or iced coffee. Undrinkable imho but yeah, there is def. a market.
- alansaber 4mo agoNot even the baristas are safe. Technology really is coming for everyone.
- abujazar 4mo agoThe crema looks like terrible, more like Nespresso, and having the coffee warm is kinda important. But perhaps this can be used in the instant coffee industry or something.
- stbenjam 4mo agoI like my Nespresso thank you very much.
- abujazar 4mo agoAnd this is why you can't use "100 regular coffee drinkers" to judge the quality of the brewing method. Most people can't even taste (or care about) the difference between arabica and robusta beans or whether it's red or white wine.
- tjcvirage 4mo agoSure you can. You can absolutely use those 100 participants if your aim is to develop and market a process that can then be used to make a product for those same types of people. Samples generalise if your sample is representative, and in this case, for large commercial coffee extraction companies, third wave coffee aficionados are not in their target audience.
- abujazar 4mo agoThe product is moving into a different territory, though. I doubt these guys even know how to pull a proper espresso shot as a baseline for the test. I'm sure you can grind espresso coffee beans to a powder and just shake it until it achieves a flavor similar to espresso, but that doesn't mean the resulting drink can really compare to something that was brewed at the right temperature and pressure. Technically you can also buy a bottle of grape juice from the grocery store, let it sit on the kitchen sink with a yeast lock for a few weeks and call it wine, and technically it even is, but it's also going to taste quite shitty.
- fabian2k 4mo agoBut people want to drink coffee/espresso hot, not room-temperature. So you have to heat the water afterward anyway. I'm not seeing that much potential for energy savings here, unless you're comparing setups with large boilers inefficiently used for small amounts of coffee.
- tjcvirage 4mo agoThey explicitly mention large scale producers for mixed drinks as a massive target audience. E.g. iced coffee manufacturing will be heavily impacted, they would normally need to heat the liquid, extract the coffee and then cool it back down.
- fabian2k 4mo agoIf I read it correctly, they did espresso and filter taste tests at room temperature (thought they don't state the exact temperature, and how they managed to brew filter coffee with the described setup). Overall the press release is somewhat misleading in what the goal is until the part you mention. If the focus is industrial production of cold, mixed coffee drinks I'd have expected more quantitative measurements instead of taste tests. Testing how well your coffee is extracted is pretty trivial with the right equipment.
- klausa 4mo agoThere's plenty of TDS and other extraction charts in the actual paper.
- hultner 4mo agoAccording to the article they see the main use for industrial scale production of coffee/espresso based drinks, in that regard it does make sense. For home use not so much even if there could be some niche market for cold espresso drinks at home, using less ice would allow for less dilution and faster than prepping and then refrigerate the coffee. I sometimes put concentrated ice coffee into my whey/oat shakes, but this is indeed very niche use even for me.
- elAhmo 4mo agoWhen you thought that coffee snobs couldn't get any worse...
- defrost 4mo ago...you discover frackuccino with cat processed beans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqw09I-BTvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqw09I-BTvE
- thenthenthen 4mo agoCivet coffee is the best! The production method not so much sadly :( Maybe they can create an artificial cat stomach?
- ValentineC 4mo agoTrung Nguyen did that: https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-vietnamese-company-is-bringing-fake-kopi-luwak-to-the-kopi-luwak-loving-masses/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-vietnamese-company-is-brin... Seemingly as early as 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trung_Nguy%C3%AAn#Weasel_and_Legendee_coffee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trung_Nguy%C3%AAn#Weasel_and_L...
- thenthenthen 4mo agoOk i NEED to check this out. Thanks for the articles! (Wtf basically kopi luwak was created through colonialism? An even more cursed product now wow
- ValentineC 4mo agoI don't get kopi luwak though. I assume that such coffee is good because the civet cat has taste for good coffee cherries, not really because of the digestive enzymes or whatnot.
- nryoo 4mo ago[dead]
- erikgahner 4mo agoWhat exactly is the innovation here compared to the press release from two years ago?[1] [1]: https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2024/05/Ultrasonic_cold_brew_coffee_ready_under_three_minutes https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2024/05/Ultrasonic_col...
- klausa 4mo agoDifferent kind of coffee drink being prepared; espresso vs cold brew. (You might quibble whether it's actually espresso if there's not pressure and it's extracted cold; but it's closer to espresso in strength.)
- erikgahner 4mo agoGot it, thanks!
- swiftcoder 4mo agoDoes this work with cold water? Because if so, my iced espresso drinks are crying out for it Where's James Hoffmann when you need him?
- swiftcoder 4mo agoAlthough, tbf, I forgot he did a video on ultrasonic barrel aging[1] [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2meeYcxXoVs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2meeYcxXoVs
- jurf 4mo ago> Both espresso samples were served at 22 °C to ensure a fair like-for-like comparison […] > It is noted that espresso is normally consumed hot and has transient sensory attributes that are temperature- and time-dependent. Hence, serving espresso at 22 °C will alter its sensory characteristics. This is a weird test, coffee get’s so much worse when cold. So people can’t distinguish between two bad coffees.
- nickff 4mo ago"Good" (well-extracted) coffee is still relatively good when warm, especially compared to "bad" (over-extracted, or under-extracted) coffee. That said, many believe that the optimal temperature for serving coffee is 50-60 degrees celsius (122-140 degrees fahrenheit).
- jurf 4mo agoYes, but the test was at 22°C, which I wouldn’t consider warm. And it’s too cold for the differences to be even perceptible well, making the test flawed. Disregarding the fact that it’s also much colder than people use to drink coffee, making it even harder to distinguish for non-experts.
- hylaride 4mo ago> coffee get’s so much worse when cold Coldbrew is a thing and done right it brings out a refreshing sweetness. Also iced coffee. Bad coffee is bad hot or cold.
- jurf 4mo agoI love coffee on ice in summer, but I think that’s a different category, like ice cream. I would rather have room temperature coffee than a cold brew usually though. I just did not have good luck with it so far
- david-gpu 4mo ago"Cold brew" means that the coffee was brewed with "cold" water. Whether or not it is served cold is orthogonal -- iced coffee is usually brewed hot.
- supertroop 4mo agoThis sounds awful. I’m an espresso snob and caffeine isn’t even on my list of why I love it. It’s like they complete ignored what makes a good shot and focused on one element.
- ceejayoz 4mo ago> “And when we gave our ultrasonic espresso to 100 regular coffee drinkers in a randomised test, they could not tell it apart from a normal espresso.” I like the ritual of it, for sure, but I'm not sure that's what makes it a good shot?
- supertroop 4mo agoRegular coffee drinkers vs snobs are two vastly different categories. In the guy that ruins your fun. ;)
- slwvx 4mo agoI grow my own beans and harvest rain water from my roof to use in my coffee ritual and ... am happy to let others do their own thing
- wuliwong 4mo agoI actually capture free hydrogen and oxygen and make my own water.
- manarth 4mo agoIf you're not creating your own galaxy which can make free hydrogen, oxygen, and an environment to promote the evolution of a coffee plant over millions of years, you're consuming such an inferior product that you might as well drink instant coffee.
- supertroop 4mo agoI literally have a friend that roasts their own and has a rainwater collection system.
- emptybits 4mo agoOf all the objective and subjective metrics a home coffee drinker is trying to optimize, never once have I heard anyone care in the least about the watt-hours consumed during the brew process. "I really wish I could drink coffee at room temperature all the time and save a penny on electricity while doing it!" Someone will do the math, I'm sure it's not exactly a penny. TL;DR: Aiming for a high-volume industrial goal, tone-deaf to coffee enthusiasts.
- econ 4mo agoActually, heating and pressurizing is limited by how much juice your electrical installation can pour out.
- cush 4mo agoThis is really cool, I have so many questions! What's interesting to me is they only replaced the hot water part of the equation, and the system still requires high pressure. How does ultrasound affect flow rate? Do fines sink to the bottom of the puck and choke the shot? There is a new movement happening, especially in lighter roast coffees, where we're finding that more balanced extractions (less bitterness/acidity/acridity) are happening at lower pressures, even going so far as grinding so coarse that the puck offers zero resistance - effectively making the pump the limiting factor for flow rate. Light roast coffee is much less porous and more hydrophobic. I wonder if adding ultrasound would allow light roasts to yield more extraction in general, maybe even keeping the high temperature. Or, would adding ultrasound allow a finer grind size and more resistance without adding the harsh flavors of a high-temperature shot. So many experiments to be done!
- Febriss33 4mo agommm.. what about pressure? the real espresso need pressure... is not just hot water. is the pressure of the expanding water that pushes it... not sure it would be the same stuff lol
- cocodill 4mo agoIt immediately brings to mind that YouTube video where a guy was making whiskey out of vodka and oak chips in an ultrasonic bath.
- nusl 4mo agoWonder why they chose to stick with the portafilter form factor rather than something custom for the method. Perhaps it just fits the task well and they don't need to change, or they want to preserve the look of an espresso machine. Though, if the water is room temp, they only really need the pressure, which doesn't need the entire machine. Seems pretty cool. Edit: The article shows that they chose this method specifically to use the basket, and the basket allows for the vibrations they need. The other conveniences of the basket form factor also come into play; reloading, cleaning, etc. and don't need reinventing or retraining. Cool stuff. I wonder whether they'll remodel the machine around the basket and remove what's not needed if this becomes a product.
- The_President 4mo agoConsistency in output - this is a standard test model to replicate entire existing system and then apply changes components of the system to test a theory.
- m-p-3 4mo ago> For filter coffee, however, the ultrasound-brewed version performed even better: participants significantly preferred it overall, particularly rating its bitterness as more pleasant. I'm surprised by this, my assumption from hot coffee vs cold brew was that since the water isn't hot, there wouldn't be as much bitterness? Or maybe I'm reading it wrong and it's why they prefer it, because it's less bitter?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- petre 4mo agoThen just get a lighter roast and don't over extract? Also if it's espresso get rid of the crema. Looks geat, tastes awfully bitter.
- bicepjai 4mo agoI always find great podcast suggestions in HN threads about a topic. Here is me giving back to the community, coffee history and nerdy detail. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ologies-with-alie-ward/id1278815517?i=1000668222151 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ologies-with-alie-ward...
- a96 4mo agoIs this an actual hack on HN? Well, no. Not, really. But almost. Still, pretty cool.