Making coffee cooler

February 11, 2015February 11, 2015 / thievinsteven / Leave a comment

You’ve probably heard of cold brewed coffee if you live in a bit more of an urban area or hang out in a lot of coffee shops. It’s become popular recently although there are only a few coffee shops serving it in Raleigh that I know of. Not to be confused with iced coffee which is brewed hot and then chilled, cold brewed coffee is steeped in chilled or room temperature water for many hours.

In general, heat speeds up chemical reactions so hot brewed coffee leeches the flavor and properties of the coffee bean very fast. By using lower temperatures for a longer time we can produce a smoother, less acidic beverage. This is fantastic for me because I have acid reflux and drinking regular coffee every day doesn’t agree with me. With cold brew I can still get my coffee fix and it’s much gentler on my stomach.

Buying a cup in a coffee shop can run you several dollars, but on a grad student salary that is an uncommon luxury. Here’s how to make your own cold brew concentrate at home that you can then dilute with cold or hot water depending on your preference. I often drink it cold and use almond milk to dilute it for a deliciously smooth drink.

We use the Toddy Cold Brew System which we got on Amazon for around $30 I think. You could rig up your own setup easily too. All you need is a coffee grinder, a container around 2 quarts for brewing, a filter to drain our the coffee grinds after brewing and another container to drain the coffee into.

The Toddy system is convenient because the brewing pitcher has reusable fabric filters and a drain plug on the bottom. They recommend replacing the filter every 4 brews or so but by rinsing the filter well after each brew and allowing it to dry I’ve made them last indefinitely.

After placing the filter in the bottom (and making sure the cork is securely in place!) Poor about 2 inches (5 cm) of water into the container. This is important because the coffee will float near the top of the water instead of resting on the filter which makes the draining process very slow.

As poor college students, we haven’t gone out and bought a coffee grinder since we already had a Magic Bullet. This works reasonable well for grinding the coffee. Cold brew requires a coarse grind so it’s important to buy whole bean coffee and grind it yourself. If you happen to be using a Magic Bullet too then fill the smaller container about halfway full and use the grinder attachment with the two flat blades for best results.

Grind the coffee for around 5-7 seconds. Once I stop seeing whole beans being sucked down into the coffee vortex I stop and take a look. The coffee should look something like this:

Grind and dump about half a can of coffee into the brewing pitcher on top of the water. Then pour water over top of the coffee to saturate it all with water. Pour slowly and be sure to wet all of the coffee.

Do not stir! The coffee will settle to the bottom making draining difficult. Once the coffee is all wet, grind the other half of the can of coffee, add it to the brewing pitcher and pour water over it again being sure to saturate all the coffee. In this step you should nearly fill the brewing pitcher. Leave about a quarter inch or half cm at the top or you run the risk of overflowing the Toddy pitcher when you drain it. Nothing like walking into the kitchen and finding your dog lapping up coffee that is slowly flowing over the counter down onto the floor. When you’re finished, it should look like a big pot of mud 🙂

Now let the coffee brew. I typically let it sit at room temperature for 12-13 hours before draining. I’ve been meaning to try refrigerating it and trying longer brew times but I haven’t gotten around to it. Obviously the longer it brews the stronger (and more acidic) it will be. Experiment and find your sweet spot. Most people recommend brewing between 12 and 18 hours. After you finish brewing, drain the coffee into another pitcher to remove all the coffee grounds. Cold brew coffee will last a couple weeks in the fridge. We usually go through a pitcher/week with two of us drinking it.

Remember this is a concentrate! Dilute the coffee before drinking unless you need a serious caffeine infusion. I usually do 1/2 cup of the concentrate and 1 cup of a diluent, either water or almond milk. If I want a smaller cup then 1/3 cup to 2/3 cups is a good ratio for me but you can experiment to find your sweet spot.

Mmmm! I wasn’t able to enjoy coffee for so long because it would bother my stomach. Now it’s one of my favorite parts of waking up!

What gets you going in the morning?

I made cookies!

February 4, 2015February 4, 2015 / thievinsteven / Leave a comment

Well it’s been a while since I posted, things have been a little crazy. Let’s see if we can sum up what’s been going on. I’ve been continuing on my half marathon training and have upped my running schedule from 3 to 4 days a week. Amanda has been running too and also spent some time on her bike trainer.

We went to see the Imitation Game about Alan Turing on Friday.

It was really good and helped remind me that I like being a scientist. With my newly rediscovered inspiration and motivation I got back in the lab this week and made some good progress. More on that later.

On Sunday we went to a Superbowl party with some friends. We made sweet vanilla butter cookies (recipe below) and a delicious Thug Kitchen black bean and cilantro dip (after the turmoil of grocery shopping on Superbowl Sunday afternoon (which I will never recommend for anyone without a serious masochistic streak) in a store with NO FREAKIN CILANTRO! How does that even happen?

We also took tequila shots for some reason.

Anyway, this week I’ve been pretty productive in the lab. I took a bunch of measurements and made some nice pretty graphs and it’s a good thing too because today I was asked to present my recent work to a new industry partner for our Research Center. I got a good 90 minute notice that my adviser wouldn’t be attending and I would be presenting. Do you see why I sometimes hate grad school?

Anyway, race training! It’s going well so far. My long run this week is 5 miles and then I have an easy week before increasing again. Week after next when I do 6 miles it will have been my longest run ever! I still haven’t cried any (well, maybe a little on that damn foam roller) and my legs don’t feel like they’re going to fall off despite how much I might like them to. I’ve been making great use of my GPS watch Christmas gift (thank you baby!) and logging my runs on Garmin connect. Even though I was a little off this week and my short runs were a little tough (read: made me want to barf), it’s nice to see my progress 🙂

Are you training for anything??

Sweet Vanilla Butter Cookie

2 1/2 cups unbleached, all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter, cubed at 300K (room temperature)
1 1/2 cup confectioners sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons pure vanilla extract (get the real stuff, trust me)
1 vanilla bean, seeds scraped*
1 large egg

Preheat oven to 350 F
Put flour and salt in small mixing bowl, whisk to combine
In large mixing bowl, combine butter and sugar with a mixer until light and creamy. Add vanilla, vanilla bean seeds (discard pod) and egg. Mix until combined. Add flour/salt mixture and mix on low until just combined.
Make your cookies! We used a Cuisinart Electric Cookie Press to make nice shapes but you can do it however you like. They were pretty small, maybe the size of a half dollar and a quarter inch thick.
Bake for 12-15 minutes or until lightly golden around the edges. Keep a close eye on them since your cookie size may influence the cooking time.
Cool before removing from pan (I didn’t do this, I just started eating them. I burnt my fingers a little)

* to get the seeds out of the pod, cut it in half lengthwise with a sharp knife, flatten it out and scrape the seeds out with the knife edge/tip

Indiana Bones and the World of Doom

January 29, 2015January 29, 2015 / thievinsteven / Leave a comment

So here I am, shamelessly exploiting our dog for blog content. I figured you could use some background though. I got Indy when she was about 11 weeks old.

Obligatory naked shot

Here she is napping with her first toy, the octopus.

She was already traumatized although I didn’t realize the extent of it until I got her home. She was scared of life and everything in it. When she was a puppy lots of things would quite literally scare the shit out of her including but not limited too small children (can’t blame her there), skateboards, any and all people, most things that made noise, doorways, stray leaves, suspicious looking toys and even me if I had been away for more than a few minutes. She seemed to think I might have changed and was suddenly out to get her. Her oldest friend Xiao Bao helps her learn how to be a real dog.

Here’s a good shot where she looks totally normal. No hint of the neurotic dog that darts through doorways, hides under the big table or accidentally craps themselves. She was very comfortable in my parents backyard in this pic although she did pee in the car on the way up there.

I spent a lot of time researching how to raise a dog and train them to be good. Indy’s disposition helped a lot too. She was too scared to misbehave. I took a beginner training class at pet smart which helped us get the basics down.

Eventually she got the whole potty training thing and I moved to a new apartment because I like carpets that haven’t been peed on… whatever, I’m picky like that.

Since then we’ve had a lot of great adventures. I’m always working on pushing her out of her comfort zone

Then we met Amanda and she had ideas for even more great adventures. We took her swimming and mountain climbing

and she bonded with Amanda in no time flat. I was suddenly second best when it came to getting pets, I’m pretty sure it’s mainly the fingernails though 😉 In fact, she was out there cheering Amanda on in her most recent marathon

When we moved in together Indy faced a new challenge. Molly, the guardian of the wench house, is a sassy and very dominant corgi. Indy’s baseline of mild panic increased to constant fear as she adjusted to living with new people and a bossy dog who felt like her territory had been invaded. After a while the friction between the two decreased and they are a little more tolerant of each other.

She still get’s to have play dates with the dogs she like though. She loves her friends and knows them all by name. If we ask her if she wants to go see Xiao Bao or Copper then she starts jumping and whining until we go.

We’ve also recently relaxed rules about being on the bed. It took some time for Indy to be ok with being up on a people bed but now she loves it.

We’ve become a really nice little family ❤

Meeting Meb

January 26, 2015January 26, 2015 / thievinsteven / Leave a comment

So I keep almost forgetting to go to class. No, scratch that. I keep forgetting to go to class and my friends keep reminding me. Thanks Francisco! Today class was actually useful. We learned a bunch of stuff we should have in the first week and that would have been really helpful working on our project. After a very productive morning, a nearly missed class and an afternoon of no motivation we went to a new running store downtown called Runologie for a social run led by Meb Keflezighi!

The crowd at Runologie

Meb won the Boston marathon last year, the year after the horrible bombing. He was also the first American to win the race in over 30 years and is the only person to have won the Boston Marathon, the New York marathon and an Olympic marathon medal. Basically he’s a pretty big deal for runners. I learned all this today and we got pictures and signed running t-shirts along with the free beer and pizza that Runologie provided. They were only serving an IPA, typically Amanda’s least favorite beer style and my most favorite. I may have been smugly satisfied when she said she enjoyed it 😀

The run was three miles and my ankle/foot bothered me a little bit but I’m icing it now and I hope it will be fine. I got a good look at the Rock ‘n’ Roll marathon and half marathon courses on a poster up at Runologie and then got really scared remembered that I signed up to run the half. I’m in week two of my 12 week training program and haven’t spent any time crying so I’ll take that as a good sign.

That’s it for tonight. Signing off to graph some data from today’s experiments and watch some Dr. Who. Season 4 was incredible and we’re a couple episodes into season 5!

End of the longest short week ever

January 24, 2015January 24, 2015 / thievinsteven / Leave a comment

What a week! My first project for the embedded systems class I’m taking was due yesterday at 6:00. This was challenging because my C programming skills are rusty and I never took a “prerequisite” undergraduate microcontroller class before this graduate class. I do have some self taught microcontroller experience that is helping but our instructor is less than helpful. He spent the first week of class reading the syllabus, forcing horrible analogies in an attempt to teach us about corporate culture of programmers instead of useful info about the board and project and explaining why it’s bad to wait until the last minute to start on said project. Seriously, he spent 15 minutes talking about why we shouldn’t wait until the last minute. The class is almost unbearable and is only made worse by the shit eating grin he flashes eleventy billion times per class.

Anyway, this would all have been fine if not for Wednesday. I had planned to work on the project all day and then enjoy a fancyish date night with dinner and Wicked at DPAC.

Instead, a clogged water filter exploded flooding my lab with nasty dirty water and I spent the day taking apart tools, mopping and putting them back together. Here are a few pics of the nasty residue and peeling up floor tiles.

After cleaning all day with a short break to sit in the Dr. Shiteatinggrin’s class we also had to make an appearance for an NSF big wig who was visiting our engineering research center. This amounted to standing around until 6:30 pm with relatively no interaction with said big wig while I lamented missing out on dressing up nice, having dinner and letting Indy out before rushing to Durham. Fortunately our roommate was home and kind enough to walk the dog and we ate cookout in the car on the way to the theater in our t-shirts. In the end it was ok though because Wicked was phenomenal and we had a great time once we got there despite the back of my brain occasionally whispering “You’re never going to finish your project on time!”

Spoiler: I did finish on time after a couple 12 hour stretches in front of the computer peppered with shouted and muttered obscenities with a 5 hour sleep break in there somewhere.

I went to work with a few friends also taking the class without the prerequisite knowledge so we enjoyed beating our heads against the monitors together. We had to set up LEDs to fade in and out based on input from a touch slider and a tilt sensor along with timers to time out the light and flash various signals and a low battery detector. In the end it was reasonably satisfying to finish. This is the board. It uses an ARM Cortex M0+ processor and is pretty cool despite the documentation being hard to find and spread out all over. Such seems to be the case with microcontrollers though.

We celebrated the end of a long week with margaritas and enchiladas at does taquitos.

The enchiladas are easily the best dish but I suggest substituting chorizo and spinach for chicken. Ignore your server’s questioning glance and his or her concerns about potatoes being in the chorizo mix (seriously, that’s a bonus!). They always seem confused and that makes me confused as to why this substitution hasn’t caught on because it’s freaking amazing.

On a side note, I’m starting training for my half marathon this week so hopefully my foot injury is now under control. Stay tuned for more exciting updates on swollen ankles and how hungry I am after running.

How was your week?

PhDeviants

Misadventures in grad school, running, and life

Author: thievinsteven