Today’s Coffee Tip

Posted on October 27, 2009 by Mark Urbin

I found this interesting post on cleaning your coffee grinder.

If you aren’t drinking freshly ground coffee, you should be.

Ok, here is the tip from weeklyroast.com’s coffee blog, uncooked white rice.

A really great way to clean out your grinder is to use uncooked, white rice. If you use a blade grinder (and we highly recommend upgrading to a burr grinder!), fill it with white rice up to the blades. If you use a burr grinder, put about 2-3 teaspoons worth of white rice and set the burr grinder to a fine grind (espresso) setting and start grinding.

After you’ve finished grinding, you’ll notice immediately that large clumps of previously ground coffee are now clinging to the powdered, ground white rice and after dumping the grounds out, you should see spots you could never clean before coffee-ground free. The inside of the grinder should also be a lot cleaner than before as most of the old, rancid coffee oils also attached themselves to the white rice (they’re attracted to the starch in the rice – that’s why this technique works so well).

Repeat this process until the ground rice no longer has any black particles in it.

I was cleaning out my grinder fairly regularly, but this clearly did pick up some coffee particles that my regular cleaning didn’t get.

Originally posted at the Urbin Report.

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Biofuel from Coffee grounds

Posted on December 8, 2008 by Mark Urbin

Amazing stuff coffee. In addtion to it’s other amazing properties, including being good for the roses, the grounds can be used to produce biofuel.

The estimates are the coffee ground biodiesel industry could generate as much as $8,000,000 in profits annually using waste from Starbucks stores here in the United States  alone.  Ok, probably less given falling crude oil prices, but I’m still a big fan of any domestic fuel souces. 

To add to the overall awesomeness of coffee, at the end of the biodiesel extraction and conversion process, the leftover grounds can be turned into fuel pellets for wood stoves and boilers.

Not only does coffee keep you moving, it can keep your car moving and heats your home!

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Simple is good

Posted on August 6, 2008 by Mark Urbin

A gadget doesn’t have to be high tech and fancy to be good.  It doesn’t hurt, but it’s not critical. 🙂

Example, the simple coffee press.  I’ve used different coffee makers over the years and have settled on a basic coffee press for home use.

Why? It makes damn good coffee quickly and easily.  I’m not tied into buying a particular type of prepackaged, pre-ground stuff that the one shot machines require.

The trick is start with good coffee, whole beans, and fresh roasted.  I get mind from Armeno Coffee Roasters, a local establishment in Northborough, MA, that actually roasts their own beans on site.  They also carry Hawaiian beans.  Which in addition to “buying American” is damn good coffee.

A course grind on the beans, hot but not boiling water, wait a few minutes, and my coffee fix is taken care of.

You may ask, “A discussion on coffee in a tech blog?” If you do, you haven’t worked in High Tech.  The business runs on coffee.  According to Bandit Six, so does the US Army, but I digress.

The latest issue of Wired had an article on a high tech coffee machine that Starbucks paid a lot money for. Perhaps it will help hide the fact that they over roast.

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