Twin Peaks

It's been a while since I mentioned any new gadgets in What's Up, Chuck? That used to be one of its main features. We seem to have most of the gadgets we need.

Until recently we used only Rocky and Silvia for our coffee making. We have a French press but it doesn't get used much.

We got a new gadget. We now have a Bodum Santos vacuum coffee maker. We use it on weekend mornings when we have more time to brew and drink our coffees. It takes about 20 minutes to brew our coffee in it. Somehow, this brewer seems to extract a lot more caffeine than Silvia does. We both get rather buzzed from this coffee.

Jerry suggested that we have some vacuum brewed coffee this evening. As I was getting ready to make the coffee it occurred to me that this was a time-lapse movie opportunity.

I thought that there might be a problem. Usually, after all the water is in the upper chamber I take the pot off of the burner. There's a lot of residual heat in the stove's grate and I thought that it might keep the lower chamber from cooling and sucking the coffee back down quickly enough. There was going to be no way to move the pot off the burner in a way that could be followed smoothly by the camera. I set a fan to blow across the stovetop after I turned the flame off. I figured that the moving air and the heat diffuser would keep the heat in the grate from keeping the pot hot too long. Apparently that worked. After I gave the grounds a stir I turned off the heat and the coffee quickly got drawn down to the lower pot.

Here we see the brewing of coffee in the vacuum coffee maker. It took around 19 minutes. I shot one picture per second and play them back at 24 frames per second.



Damn good coffee!

Bubbles stay on the surface of the grounds after all the water is drawn back to the lower pot. After a long time there will still be bubbles there if I leave the lid on the top. Here's a picture of the grounds after we've enjoyed our coffee. You'll notice that there are still a few bubbles that haven't burst.