hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1636.txt

Episode: 1636
Title: HPR1636: How I make coffee
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1636/hpr1636.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 06:08:56

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It's Monday 10th of November 2014.
This is HBR Episode 1636 entitled How I Make Coffee.
It is hosted by Dave Morris and in about 16 minutes long.
Feedback can be sent to Dave.Morris at email.com or by leaving a comment on this episode.
The summary is, I'm a great lover 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.
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Hello Hacker 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 Klaatu, who's always
talked about coffee in his Gnu World order podcast and X1101, who has done an HBR episode
on how he makes coffee.
So 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,
a thing that boiled and made coffee, made water bubble up through coffee.
It always smelled really good, but obviously at the age I remember this, maybe five or
six or something, wasn't a very pleasant result.
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 pour hot water over it.
They seem to do a pretty reasonable job.
One time I owned a strange device called a Kona coffee maker, which was very fancy and
quite expensive, I seem to 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 do remember making it 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, and there's lots of good coffee available there.
If you ever ask for coffee in some of the lower-end eating places, which are vast numbers,
you end up with a usually strangely enough glass tanker into which they put maybe 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 did, end up
straining the ground through my teeth as I was drinking it, who never knew when to stop,
so I wouldn't recommend that.
Then there was a fashion for the cafeteria or French press, and I've had a few of those
over the years, and pretty much, yeah, all of them up until recently have been glass, so
the thing about the glass thing is that it suffers from my clumsiness when I'm washing
up.
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 seem to break them with monotonous regularity.
So that's not a bad way of making coffee, I still do use it and have an all-metal
cafeteria, but I have an alternative, which I much prefer nowadays, which is using the Mocha
pot, so I bought one of these a few years ago, never, I'd never actually heard of these before,
my son, who's also a keen coffee drinker, had bought one himself, and recommended that I should
get one, so I did, I had to go two, one's a three cup, that's three 50 milliliters espresso cups,
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 little espresso cups, 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, into which the coffee moves 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, the most common version of this is called, it comes from a company called BLetti,
and it's called the BLetti Mocha 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 of 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
Sansa clip, I'm not sure how 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 BLetti Mocha
Express, which gives my floorboards a bit creaky, 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, you hear stories of these things blowing
up, I'm not sure that's true, they must have been really daft, however, caused 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 a vacuum being released, and in goes one level scoop,
and another one, so that's pretty much enough, I think the surface of the coffee in the funnel
is the level with the top, now I'm being very careful in 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, so here I am screwing the top on,
making sure it's nice and tight, I can feel it tightening against the gasket, the rubber gasket,
there's my metal trivet going on the gas ring, positioning the pot carefully, so
don't get gas flame going up the side and gently melting the handle, being there done that,
as they say, that's the gas going 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,
meanwhile I'm going to put the lid back on the coffee vacuum thing, and it's got a little pump,
but you pump the air out, there we go, completely pumped and
preserving 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 at the eye, I love coffee when I bought it, and I'm not sure what
capacity it is, but I find that the amount of coffee I make covers about, fills it to about the
third, so I 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 the kettle has been spectacular noise? This kettle is fairly silent when I've
heard about it, but how many more, it's already fairly hot, so I need to get one.
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 in the
but it's nearly full. Now they say you shouldn't let it do this bubbly for very long, so I'm now turning the
heat off, and I'm not going to stop with the steam in the bottom, but you want to minimise the
amount of time that the steam comes through the coffee, because it's heating it, it'll be super
heating it above boiling point, so it's not ideal. Overheating 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
the bubbling subsiding, so it's actually ready to pour now, it's very quick, never quick when you're
waiting of course, but here we go into the cup, not a lot, three spread of cups is a small amount
and bung some milk in, over a similar amount, that's very nice, nice brown colour, not
I like milk in my coffee, you might not of course, let's get that kettle really hot again,
and in goes for water to top it up, so I suppose this is a bit like a maricano, which I was
surprised to find people in America drink as well, there you go, so that was a piece of ambient
recording of coffee being made in jolly old beer letty mocha express.
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