coffee straight from the spigot

sometimes I find break room behavior amusing.
for example, in our break room, I think we have a pretty good group. most of the time when folks take the last cup from a pot, they take a few seconds to brew another pot before going, out of courtesy for the next person. but we don’t have all kinds of signage like they do downstairs, where I’m not kidding you, every freaking drawer and cabinet has a sign on it telling you what’s in there, and there’s a few extra signs over the coffee thermoses telling you what to do and what not to do, with cute clip art and everything.
get a life.
but from time to time I do go to the break room to grab a cup of coffee, and some selfish prick took the last cup and didn’t brew another pot before leaving.
so, of course I brew a pot for myself. most of the time I kick it off and go back to my office to return later, but sometimes I just can’t wait, so I tip the thermos over a little bit and drop my cup under the brew trickling out of the basket.
I do that less frequently here than I had to at a previous job, where they used the old fashioned glass carafes, that had to be changed more frequently, and anyway the bottom half of the pot was just crap after sitting on the warmer and boiling off. at that time, I considered that the temperature of the warmer had to be adjusted to keep a full pot warm, but that as people took cups out of the pot, the warmer was way too warm for the remaining brew, and so burned it, and in my mind I drew a little graph of coffee-yuckiness over time. whenever the pot was less than half-full I’d dump it and make another brew, and such were my thoughts as I did so.
then when the fresh brew started to drip, I’d stick my cup under the basket to quit wasting anymore time in there, so I could get back to work. I guess I enjoy my job, because I usually can’t wait to get back at it, at least as long as I’m in the building.
I thought I had noticed that if I took the first bit of coffee out of the brew it was quite a bit stronger than average, while if I waited, and took the last bit, it would be weaker.
these are the kinds of things coffee drinkers think about.
now years passed, and one day my office mate walks in and says “I couldn’t wait for the coffee to brew, so I took a cup right from the drip. I waited until the end, so it would be stronger.”
ha. I had to laugh.
so there ensued a discussion over whether it was stronger at the beginning or at the end of the brew cycle, and we analyzed it any number of ways. the variables seemed to be the nature of the grind, correlating with the amount and kind of particulate available for suspension, the fineness of the grind, correlating with available surface area, the temperature of the water, the amount of time the grinds brewed in the water, etc.
it was amusing, because clearly here is someone who thinks like I do. so I’m not such a weirdo after all. or well maybe, but at least I’m not the only one. seriously, I felt just a little less lonely in the world.
as we talked, in my mind I had a picture of an equation drawing itself, like chalk on a chalkboard (in fact it was pale green, blue, red and tan colored chalk lines drawing themselves on a black background like in some scenes from disney’s fantasia…, as usual)
the equation was a polynomial with constant weights and parameters corresponding for these variables, with the result being something like strength = k1 * fineness + k2 * brew time + k3 * proportion of time in cycle + …
my thinking was the last one followed a curve of some sort, like a nonlinear decay graph, or whatever.
so much for the analytical method. he actually tried to google it, but without any decent results. we came to the conclusion that the only way to know for sure would be to run a test.
which I did today 🙂
turns out the empirical data show that the coffee is significantly darker and more flavorful at the beginning of the cycle than at the end.