coffee straw
Sometimes you need a lie down on a Saturday or Sunday morning. The sun is out, the chez is calling, a half hour recline with a cup of coffee to start the day. Lovely.
But! You need to keep sitting up / tilting your head / straining your neck to sip the coffee. This ruins the whole affair and you’d be just as well sitting up. What a waste of a recline opportunity.
Introducing reclaffeine - the reclining caffeine system
An insulated coffee straw for laying and drinking on a sofa. Two models. One is simply an insulated straw with a clever valve to minimise effort for sipping, you dip it in your coffee cup using a small clip.
The second is more ingenious. It comes with a coffee puck to insert into the straw - so you pull hot water through the straw to brew as you drink. How fresh is that coffee? Well it brewed 12mm from my tongue!
Not available as a baseball cap mounted version!
Popularity: 9% [?]
coffee auto plunger
Sometimes it’s okay to compromise while at work. I wouldn’t normally eat bad mayonaise drenched tuna between two slices of cheap white bread, but somehow it becomes acceptable at work.
However, sometimes it’s not okay to compromise. And those times usually involve Coffee.
A freshly brewed cup of Ethiopian or Vietnamese just makes the day better. A badly prepared mug of instant makes life slightly less worth living. So real coffee it has to be.
The one thing that lets me down is the timing of the plunge on my cafetiere. Leave it too long and you get that overly caffienated bitterness pulling you away from the fresh, lively joyous place you were aiming for. Not as bad as instant, but life diminishing none the less. Espresso makers are self regulating but less convenient for the office.
An over engineered solution is needed. Here we go.
The basics
The plunger in most if not all cafetieres is made of steel. Steel can be pulled by magnets.
The base of most cafetieres can be replaced without effecting the function of the vessel / plunger combination.
Replacement bases could contain electromagnets and timers. You see where I’m going?
A temperature sensor in the base triggers when it feels the boiling water hit the jug. This then triggers the plunge magnets after a set amount of time. A simple training mechanism, driven by a series of manual plunges when the coffee ‘looks right’ should replace an actual timer - timers are too rigid - this thing should feel organic to use.
Refinements
I always pre heat the cafetiere, so it should know the difference in temp profile between a ‘heat‘ and a ‘fill‘. This should be easy to achieve by plotting the temperature over time.
Two simple buttons, ‘too long‘ and ‘not long enough‘ allow for further life long training of the device. There may be an issue here where different coffees enjoy slightly different brewing times, this could be overcome with a squooshy override button - push it to the left for less time, to the right for more time. At the end of each brew it resets. Squooshy buttons also make the device look cool. Trust me, squooshy buttons are the future.
On the retail side, the two main options are to have an add on or a full cafetiere. I’d assume the full cafetiere would be the way to go. Add ons would have to accommodate different sizes, manufacturers etc… Economies of scale would likely make the all in one unit cheaper. It would also be easier to fine tune the magnetic force requirement.
Health benefits
The amount of caffeine in a cup of coffee is dependent on a number of factors. Among them the temperature of the brewing water / steam and the length of time the grounds are in contact with it. A long plunge is therefore bad for my health. This device could save my life. And it would add some technogeekery to the humble cafetiere, long lagging behind the espresso machine in this respect.
Someone make one. Please.
Popularity: 18% [?]
coffee intake automonitor
Sometimes I drink too much coffee. Not as often as I used to, but it still happens. I always kick off my day with a cup. Cafetiere (french press) coffee, freshly made. If I start my day too early, and say ‘yeah why not’ a couple of extra times during the morning I can easily hit 5 or 6 cups by noon. Bad news.
I need help to cut down. The basic idea is as follows:
Attach an RFID to your Cafetiere. Install a proximity reader in the kitchen. Every time the cafetiere comes into range PING! that’s another cup of coffee. The proximity reader sends a message to the ‘watchyourcaffiene.com‘ website - ran by the people who sold you the rfid kit.
Obviously the rfid reader would have to look cool, or be small enough to hide behind the kettle. A glowing coffee bean would be nice. With a tiny led growing deep inside its resiny shell. Or coffee makers could partner with watchyourcaffiene.com to sell units with built in monitors.
You can see your profile online, you can let other people see your profile online (sig. other for example). You can set alerts to hit your Phone / Twitter / Jaiku when you exceed your limit - or when the cafetiere enters the kitchen just as you are ABOUT to hit your limit. You are reaching for the kettle and suddenly “I’m sorry dave, you can’t have another cup”.
Taking this a step further, an RFID in your cup would track your personal consumption if you shared a cafetiere. If you had two cups you could have a Coffee and a Green Tea cup. Try to keep them in balance! “turn it into a game” as Seymour would say. You are reaching for the kettle and suddenly “I’m sorry dave, green tea this time”.
The company could milk the cash by offering smaller cups - which count less. If you were allowed 2 mugs a day, that could be 4 cups, or 6 minicups. They could sell you a mug, then when you drink more than 2 a day along with the “I’m sorry Dave…” message could suggest you buy a smaller cup.
Another revenue earner could be a SMS reply to the “Sorry Dave…” message saying “I’m having a decaff” or “I spilled it - honest” to lower your daily count. (btw did you know the caff from decaff goes into soft drinks - I never thought about where soft drink caffeine came from)
I like my current coffee cup though, so they would have to sell an add on monitor. This would actually look quite cool as a big tag for the handle - like when things in supermarkets are tagged with huge lumps of plastic to set off the alarms. A public symbol of your dependency. And they’d have to be dishwasher safe. A sophisticated mini sticker for underneath the cup would also work - more subtle.
And of course the league table of coffee drinkers could allow caffeine heads to show off their intake. “Dude I had like 3 mugs and 7 espresso cups this morning“. Blog chicklets to let you post your current daily and weekly count would promote the site.
Popularity: 17% [?]
-
Find It
-
About Steve
Steve invents things while travelling to work on the train. He sketches them in his moleskine notebooks. Instead of actually making them (and becoming a billionaire overnight) he posts them here for the good of mankind.
-
Recently Written
-
Get in touch
-
Categories
-
Blogroll
