MMM! You'll like it!
We create a wave by disturbing the surface of the water.
I'm still hearing that click from the speaker
Oh, it's bursting with ultrasonic.
Hi, welcome to today's episode of Weird Coffee Science.
The sort of intermittent show
where I dress like a grownup
and pretend to know what I'm doing.
Today it starts with Kickstarter, I suppose.
I was sent a link to an ultrasonic cold brew coffee maker
that people are trying to get funded.
And I shared that link with my Patreon and I said
would you be interested in me backing this?
Do you want to see a review of this?
Is this interesting to you?
And broadly they said, yes
but several people sent me emails separately.
And the common theme of those was
that you can just buy a cheap ultrasonic bath.
Like this one, this is a jewelry cleaner
but it is a heated ultrasonic bath.
And they said, you could do it yourself.
You could do that whole thing for cheap.
Someone else sent me a link
to a video on ultrasonic barrel-aging.
And so I thought, yeah, let's do that.
Let's look at ultrasonic coffee brewing
and ultrasonic rapid barrel-aging of coffee.
That seems perfectly sensible.
First thing I want to do is have a quick look
at the impact of ultrasonics on an infusion brew.
So here's the test.
I'm going to make two kinds of French presses.
I'm going to brew 15 grams to 200 grams,
75 grams per liter kind of ratio.
I'm going to grind and steep for four minutes
before breaking and cleaning and doing all that good stuff.
One, we'll sit in an ultrasonic bath
with the ultrasonics running for the entire brew.
And the next one will sit in the heated ultrasonic bath
without the ultrasonics brewing, as our kind of control.
Because these things are heated or can be heated,
at least, I wanted to see what the actual impact
of the ultrasonics is outside of the impact
of additional heating on extraction.
We'll just filter those out through paper
and then have a little look
a little taste and see what's changed.
So we'll put this into the bath now and I will turn it on.
So we're all done.
And interestingly the crust is still there
still fully formed, though as I lifted up now,
it is starting to fall.
We'll give it the traditional break and clean.
What I'll do now is I'll just strain it
through a V 60 filter.
Now, just looking at this is really interesting.
This is a very, very cloudy cup of coffee right now.
Much cloudier than I would have expected,
especially post filtration
which suggests that anything that suspended in there
for whatever reason is so fine
that it's made it through a paper filter.
That's really, that's really interesting.
It's really taking a long time to draw down as well.
Now I was curious if there would be
any obvious agitation of the grounds.
If there had been that crust would have been
knocked down much earlier on in the brew.
The crust survived pretty much intact on that French press
for the entire four minutes that was in the bath.
But while this is draining, let's go on with the second,
the control, where it goes in the same bath
at the same temperature, but, but no ultrasonic waves.
I think we're done there.
Looks much less cloudy
and it's draining through, just looking at, it way quicker.
And that liquid is so much clearer.
Now I got so impatient
with the ultrasonic brew draining
that I actually grabbed an arrow press,
put a couple of paper filters in there
to make sure that they did a good job of filtering
and I pressed the last bit through
because it was just taking so long to drain.
The resulting brew is incredibly muddy and cloudy
which is going to present a bit of a challenge
for what I want to do next.
When this has finished draining, before I taste them
I'm going to have a little look with my refractometer
to see if there's much difference
in the strength of the two brews.
The challenge here is that suspended material
will give me a funny reading on a refractometer.
You need clarified liquid because really refractometers
are checking the speed of light passing through coffee.
What you want is a kind of clear path.
So it's only the dissolved stuff in the coffee,
stuff that you're measuring,
that is interfering with lights passage through coffee,
changing the refractive index.
That may not be the case here, but I'll have a look.
See what kind of results we get
and then of course I'll taste it.
Because that's kind of the point of these things.
I'm too curious. I'm going to taste first.
I'm going to taste first.
It shouldn't interrupt or change too much.
Let's start with the ultrasonic brew.
Sorry for the slurps.
Interesting. Very full, tons of texture.
Let's try this one.
Interesting. Obviously much cleaner tasting.
A little crisper in that regards.
I don't know if we're going to get good data out of this,
to be honest, but we'll try.
Let's get a little tiny droplet of our control on first.
Interesting. And let's try it a little droplet
of our very cloudy other brew.
Now this shows a much higher reading.
But you could argue that's because the suspended material
in this brew is changing the refractive index
and giving us a false reading.
I don't know if the taste corresponds
to the notable jump that this is suggesting.
So in this case, I don't think this is a great measure.
I have tried filtering this a couple more times
and whatever paper filters I have here in the studio
can't really clarify this adequately, which is interesting.
From a taste perspective, I would say there is a difference.
There is a jump in extraction.
Now, a lot of people are pitching this kind of technology
not for hot coffee, but for cold brewing of coffee
to increase your extraction
in an environment where you don't have heat energy
from hot water to do that extraction work.
I would say that there is probably
some credibility to that idea.
I don't think that's going to be a huge impact
unless you know, your sound waves are creating some sort
of agitation alongside it.
This doesn't create much agitation if any, at all
with the ultrasonic sound waves.
So it's an interesting idea for cold brew.
I'm not going to talk about cold brew today.
I will at some point probably, maybe, I don't know.
But, there's maybe something here.
There's maybe something interesting
in increasing your extraction
using ultrasonics alongside using the hot water,
jacketing the brew during the extraction too.
But this isn't where we want it to end today.
No, no, no.
This is, this is stage one.
There is a part two to this.
But first there's two things to talk about.
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So let's talk barrel-aging.
That's maybe why you clicked the thumbnail
in the first place.
Now barrel-aging is an interesting thing.
A while ago, I got to spend some time
in some whiskey distilleries talking to distillers
and food scientists, and they categorized
the impact of barrel aging
as having sort of three groups of reactions
on the thing that you're aging.
Now, in this case, they were talking about whiskey
and whiskey was then aged in these oak barrels
typically that have been charred on the inside.
So group one, they called additive.
Which is flavors from the wood leech into the spirit.
And those are the most obvious ones, I think.
That kind of oakiness, the woodiness that you get
in barrel-aged things.
And then you have the subtractive.
Now, when you char the inside of a barrel
you create carbon. And that carbon is active carbon I guess,
similar to the active carbon found in most water filters
that mop up negative tastes.
So having that carbon inside there does take away
some unpleasant flavors typically
which is also interesting.
And then you had a third category
that was kind of transformative
where there was interactions to create new compounds.
It wasn't just existing compounds
from the wood leaching into the liquid.
They were working together to create something new
in terms of flavor.
And in some cases, oxygen may be playing a role as well.
We're not going to get all of those three groups
in this particular experiment.
And the reason is that I went out
and I bought some Oak chips for flavoring stuff.
This little bag here is full of just wood chipped,
Oak barrel.
It's been toasted. It has had some heat applied to it
but there's no active carbon here.
There's no burn to bits.
So we won't get any subtractive reactions.
We will get some additive stuff
and we will get some transformative stuff potentially
I guess, but that's likely what's going to happen here.
Now, these little American Oak chips suggested
that they needed to be soaked
in hot water for 15 minutes before using
and you've maybe noticed them over here the entire time.
So here's what we're going to do.
We're going to brew just like a V 60
and I'll brew a little bit over half a liter of coffee.
We'll then divide that into three separate experiments.
One will be a pure control
where it will just be left on the side here.
Ambient temperatures
just to see what kind of infusion happens that way.
One will be heated in the bath and infused that way.
And another will be heated in the bath
alongside the ultrasonics running
to see exactly what kind of an impact
each of those things is having.
Can we add flavor? Is it good? Is it recommended?
I've strained my Oak chips, they are now ready.
I have half a liter of coffee ready to go
and we'll be doing a four minute infusion
to match brew times
for reasons we'll come back to at the end
I'm going to use a about 1% weight of these damp chips
which means about a gram and a half of these things
which is not very much to 150 mils of coffee.
What I will say as they start to infuse
is that these are incredibly aromatic.
And in many cases I'm not a huge fan of Oak flavor.
In wines, this is just a personal thing,
I don't really like very heavily oaked wines
because it doesn't really taste of the grapes
or where they're from. It just tastes of oak.
It's rarely used with a delicate touch
in a lot of wine making,
but a lot of people like that kind of quality,
it's just not me.
These smell pretty great.
And I could understand how these aromas
could work pretty well with coffee.
So I'll be interested to see how they combine,
how they work together.
But that is one of the reasons that I'm using
only a one and a half grams to 150 mils.
I did look at another YouTube video
where they were doing this with spirits, cream,
apple cider, a bunch of different stuff.
They were using a much, much, much higher dose
and had some pretty transformative results.
But I think they really liked the results
cause they really liked the flavors of oak and that's okay.
I just don't like it as much.
I want to see if you can use it in a more subtle,
delicate way where it's a sort of piece of the puzzle
not an overriding flavor across the whole thing.
Got my three cupping bowls ready so I can start to strain.
So ambient control
our heated control
And into the bath that goes on, goes the ultrasonics.
So the last one is done
and I will add one more control of just the coffee itself
without any Oak to see how that is.
So let's taste, let's start with nothing
tastes like a nice cup of coffee. Good.
Let's start with some oak chips
just left a hangout, ambient temperature,
very subtle very little flavor there from the oak.
There, but it's not particularly strong.
Well, that's interesting having a sort
of warmer jacket around the brew
really made no difference to the extraction there.
Ultrasonic.
Yeah, much stronger.
It's there almost in the finish.
It's this kind of warming, quite pleasant addition.
I would say, if you wanted to do this
you could probably wrap it all up into one single moment.
I would go very slightly heavier
on the Oak chips if you like that.
But there is a pleasant addition, even at a 1% ratio.
You could therefore put your ground coffee
in with some Oak chips and some hot water, and then brew it
in an ultrasonic bath and end up
with kind of an interesting
zero to barrel-aged coffee experience in four minutes.
And that's kind of cool.
Now these things, while this is cheap-ish.
They're not cheap cheap.
I'm not going to leave links to this cause
I'm not, you know, hugely in love with this particular bath
but any cheap jewelry cleaning one will work
similarly, I presume. Anything that basically
does ultrasonics will work.
It's an interesting way to get barrel-aging
without having to use a long time
and our likely exposure to oxygen
which would create a lot of oxidized kind of flavors
that are just less delicious to me anyway.
So you can have your cake and eat it.
You can have those heavier richer
kind of whiskey like qualities in your coffee if you want to
but you will begin to mask where the coffee is from,
its variety, its process, all that kind of stuff.
So it's one that has an ethical, aesthetic,
kind of quandary to it, whether it's good or bad to do
but it is still interesting to see how quickly you can get
you know, extraction of flavor using ultrasonics.
What did I miss? What didn't I try?
What do you want me to see me do with this potentially?
Maybe I'll post some extra videos
to Instagram or somewhere.
If you have some good ideas.
Have you tried something that you thought was interesting
and worth sharing?
I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Was this weird enough?
It felt pretty weird. But was it weird enough?
You let me know.
But for now I'll say thank you so much for watching
and I hope you have a great day.