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Archive for the ‘caffeine’ tag

Roasting Your Own Coffee: 7 Reasons

Mmmm.... fresh, home-roasted coffee!

Did you know that you can actually roast your own coffee? You can. I’ve been roasting all of my own coffee beans for about a year and a half now, and I have loved it. Here are 7 of my reasons for roasting your own coffee beans.

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Written by Andy

September 24th, 2010 at 9:00 am

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Espresso: Coffee’s Delicious Cyborg Cousin

Espresso machines brew at enormous pressure – about 13 atmospheres. That means the pressure in your espresso machine is 13 times the pressure of our current atmosphere. To give you a sense of just how much pressure we’re talking about, your car tires are at about 2.4 atmospheres.

Prior to the industrial revolution, it’s was never practical to mass-produce a machine with such high pressure, so the idea of espresso never really occurred to anybody. Once steam powered machines became more prevalent, however, people discovered that brewing coffee under such high pressure extracted more oils from the grounds.

Now coffee itself has been around for thousands of years. So, relative to the whole history of coffee itself, espresso is quite a recent innovation in coffee technology. That’s why I call it “Coffee’s Delicious Cyborg Cousin”.

Written by Andy

August 28th, 2010 at 12:01 pm

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