One of the most delicious cups of coffee I ever had was cold-brewed -- the coffee flavor slowly diffused into cold water. No bitter, acid taste, just sweet and aromatic awesomeness. I have no idea if Hammacher Schlemmer's cold-brewer makes a decent cup of joe, but you get the idea.

The hourglass does not require any electricity; simply combine 2 1/4 cups of coarsely ground coffee beans with 3 1/2 cups of water in the brewing chamber and allow the coffee to infuse with the water for 12 to 24 hours. When the infusion process is complete, turn the hourglass over and 16 oz. of extract instantly drains through a reusable stainless steel filter and into the extract chamber. Combine some of the extract with hot water for traditional coffee or cold water for iced coffee. The extract can be kept in the included carafe and stored in a refrigerator for up to two weeks.

So, I don't know about that two week business. All those aromatics are, by definition, volatile. Calling food chemists -- that can't be right, can it?

The Acid Reducing Flavor Enhancing Coffee Hourglass. (via Red Ferret)

Last night my friend Colin and I went to Meltdown Comics & Collectibles in Los Angeles to listen to comic book historian Craig Yoe's (center) presentation on the weird, sad life of Superman co-creator Joe Shuster.

Here's my glossed over summary of Yoe's fascinating presentation (which included lots of great slides that you can't see here but are in the pages of Yoe's fantastic book, Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-creator Joe Shuster):

Boyhood friends Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel created the Superman character in the late 1930s. They sold a 13-page story about the superhero to DC comics, which bought the story and all rights to the character for $130, which Shuster and Siegel split. The story appeared in Action Comics #1 (1938).

Superman immediately became a huge success. Issue #7 of Action Comics sold a half-million copies, and soon Action was selling a million copies a month. This irked Shuster and Siegel, but the publishers soothed their tempers by giving them the lion's share of the Superman newspaper strip syndication revenue. Thanks to this, the young men each made today's equivalent of $750,000 a year.

This went on for about seven or eight years, with the boys riding high, but then they met a sleazy lawyer, Albert "Zuggy" Zugmsith, who told them he would sue DC to get them back the rights to Superman. The trial ended in 1948, and it was a devastating loss for Shuster and Siegel. DC stopped paying them, and they were blackballed from the entire comic book industry.

Shuster had to scrape by sweeping floors and doing other odd jobs, but finally found work doing fetish illustrations for a cheaply produced sado-masochistic fetish magazine called Nights of Horror. Many of the characters in his fetish illustrations for these booklets bore a striking resemblance to Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and Lex Luthor.

In 1954, the Brooklyn Thrill Killers, a gang of Jewish neo-Nazi teenagers who sported Hitler mustaches, were arrested for killing homeless men and horsewhipping girls. They told the court that they were acting out scenes from Nights of Horror. The publisher and dealer of the magazine were imprisoned, as were the members of the Brooklyn Thrill Killers. Joe Shuster was able to stay hidden from the media furor because he hadn't signed the work and no one recognized his style. Shuster went back to performing menial jobs and died poor.

This story might never had come to light if it weren't for Craig Yoe's ability to recognize cartoonists by looking at their work. In his book he writes that when he came across a copy of Nights of Horror by chance several years ago "in a dusty old cardboard box in a used bookseller's stall, these words leaped in a single bound to my mind: "Oh, my God, Joe Shuster!" That was the beginning of a multi-year-long research project that took Yoe all over the world, and led to the writing of Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-creator Joe Shuster. The full story in the book is even more bizarre, and there's even a movie deal in the works.

After the presentation the Suicide Girls (above) acted out several of the scenes from illustrations in the book. I've uploaded photos to my Flickr account, but they should be viewed by adult intellectuals only.

Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-creator Joe Shuster

I've mentioned my beloved Kitchen Aid espresso machine here before, but I need to mention it again. Last week, I noticed that the enamel had started to flake off, peeling away in big strips the size of business-cards. Dreading a bureaucratic runaround, I dug out my Amazon receipt, then called up Kitchen Aid's warranty number. Apart from a small problem getting the correct number (the number listed on their site is out of service), it went amazingly.

The operator asked for my serial number, asked me to describe the problem, then asked if I could be at some address the next day to receive my replacement unit and ship back the defective one. I gave her my office address, and yesterday at around 2PM, a DHL guy showed up with a brand new espresso machine in its package. I lifted it out, replaced it with the defective one, watched as the DHL guy slapped a return sticker on it, and then he left, leaving me a shiny new coffee machine that I brought home in a cab (two people on the street and the cabbie all stopped me and asked me about this beautiful coffee machine and whether it worked as good as it looked and where they could get one of their own). This morning, I enjoyed a perfect cappuccino with breakfast, and ruminated on just how damned good the customer service from Kitchen Aid had been, and I figured, man, that deserves some public approbation.

Update: Canadians beware! Multiple commenters to this post have weighed in to describe nightmarish treatment from the Canadian Kitchen Aid service department, who seem well and truly awful. My experience recounted above was with Kitchen Aid UK.

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Steven reviews the MyPressi TWIST, a portable espresso maker powered by nitrous oxide cannisters.

A typical regulator might be two inches in diameter. Much too large for the TWIST. The task of shrinking the apparatus down without losing efficiency and safety went to Gecko, a firm that collaborated on the Herman Miller Leaf Lamp and has built pneumatic devices on cruise control missiles for defense industry contractors (really).

Their creation: a regulator that's about the size of half a grown man's pinky nail. Once the pod develops its own pressure, the regulator in the handle shuts off the pressure. And there's also a secondary safety valve, in case you put in too much coffee. In time, too, their small, main regulator could be applied or licensed out to other hardware.

For now, O'Brien is focused on the TWIST. And as we continue to chat, all I'm focused on is the taste. He takes a preloaded cup, gets some hot water from the cafe, puts in 3.5 oz., pulls the trigger to release the gas (it's cold, but expands rapidly from the hot water), and begins the pour...

Hands-On With A Whippit-Powered Travel Espresso Maker

Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Filmmaker Robert Greenwald's documentary about sleazy unionbusting at Starbucks debuted the same day as Starbucks new Twitter campaign, so he hijacked the campaign to spread information about Starbucks' bad labor practices.

On a blog post published at the anti-Starbucks website Brave New Films created, people were encouraged to take pictures of themselves in front of Starbucks stores holding signs targeted at the company's "anti-labor practices." These users are then told to upload these photos onto Twitpic and tweet them out to their followers using the hashtags #top3percent and #starbucks. According to the post, these are the official hashtags that were designated by Starbucks itself for those who wanted to enter its contest. Within hours, several people had followed these guidelines and there were dozens of Twitpics in front of stores across the country.

As of this writing, the anti-Starbucks YouTube video has amassed over 30,000 views and was featured on the front page of social news site Digg. Greenwald said that Brave New Films is not done with its offensive against the coffee company, but he was hesitant to reveal his next steps.

Anti-Starbucks filmmakers hijack the coffee company's own Twitter marketing campaign (Thanks, Simon!)

Becky Stern sez, "I made this cafe tablecloth using packets of Splenda, Equal, and Sweet'n Low, plus packing tape. I gathered the packets while getting coffees. I still need help coming up with a title for the piece, though."

Artificial Sweetener Tablecloth (Thanks, Becky!)

Another installment in our "faves from 2008" BoingBoing tv retrospective -- this two-parter in which Mark Frauenfelder gets an exclusive tour of Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea. Above, part one, below, part two, and MP4 links for download here:

* A Morning at Intelligentsia Part 1
* A Morning at Intelligentsia Coffee Part 2

Snip from the original post:

Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea is based out of Chicago, Illinois and has recently opened up a new store in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Kyle Glanville, head of research and development at Intelligentsia and winner of the 2008 US Barista Championship shows Mark how they acquire and roast some of the finest coffee in the world.

The word intelligentsia derives from the Latin word intelligentia, meaning a group of people engaged in complex mental and creative labor directed to the development and dissemination of culture. Kyle Glanville has been laboring to promulgate a new coffee culture with Intelligentsia to combat the "get up and go" mentality, and Mark is along for the ride to learn the careful art of roasting coffee.

Intelligentsia is located at 3922 West Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90029 and is open 7 days a week.

And see also this related BBtv episode: Looking for the Perfect Bean: Kyle Glanville's World Coffee Tour, part 1 - Brazil (direct MP4 Link).

Boing Boing tv's global coffee correspondent Kyle Glanville is looking for the perfect bean, and you're invited along for the ride. You may recall his earlier appearances on the show when the 2008 US World Barista Champion introduced us to coffee roasting and espresso brewing at Intelligentsia.

Today, we debut a series of episode featuring Kyle on a world coffee tour, and we join him as he visits plantations to learn about the growing, harvesting, and processing techniques of Intelligentsia suppliers around the globe.

In this first episode, Kyle visits the Fazenda Conquista plantation in Minas Gerais, Brazil where Ipanema Coffees grows, dries, and roasts their goods, with lots of weird agro-gadgets and machines you probably haven't seen before -- some low-tech, some high-tech, but all really cool to watch. This plantation is one of the largest in Brazil, with 12 million coffee plants spread out over about 25 square miles of varying terrain.

One of the most fun things about producing BBtv is working with people like Kyle, who share their expertise and life experiences with us in video through their own eyes. I learned so much watching this first installment with the BBtv team -- I especially loved the giant machines that look like AT-AT walkers, lumbering through the neatly trimmed rows of coffee plants. Also, for someone who drinks as much espresso as I do -- how did I never know that coffee beans are surrounded by an edible, sweet fruit, that when dried intact with the bean, make the flavor richer?

Oh, and you have to check out the aerial tour of the plantation, which you can do in Google Maps or Google Earth: Link to Fazenda Conquista / Ipanema Coffees .kmz.

Get ready for more of these java adventures with Kyle -- we're working on more, as he wanders the planet, looking for the perfect bean.

Previous BBtv episodes featuring Kyle Glanville's Coffee explorations:

* A Morning at Intelligentsia Coffee Part 2
* A Morning at Intelligentsia Part 1

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Link to Boing Boing tv blog post with downloadable video and daily podcast subscription instructions.

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On the Home Barista Forum, user Matadero210 is posting running progress reports from an heroic effort to machine and construct the perfect espresso machine:

The design itself: take a Pavoni head, build an adaptor to connect to normal plumbing. Add a machined plate with water inlet (this is a plumb-in system), thermometer, and heater. Mount all in a brazed steel base.

Robo-Pavoni ; learning to make espresso machine from scratch (via Make)

Salim sez, "Professor Mark Miodownik of Kings College Materials Research Group teaches us how to process raw beans to a perfect cup of coffee using every day using a collection of household & DIY implements." This was amazing -- I've always wondered about the chemistry of espresso and coffee roasting -- I've become a total coffee bore since I got serious about my home apparatus, and this has armed me with many useful factoids for understanding the imperfections in the shots I pull. Also, he uses Monmouth beans, which are all we use at home. They are superb. Dr Mark Miodownik - How to Make The Perfect Cup Of Coffee (Thanks, Salim!)

The headline says it all, doesn't it?

A Chicago Police officer has been suspended and ordered into counseling after she was found guilty of demanding free Starbucks coffee from five different stores on the North Side from 2001 to 2004, sometimes flashing her badge, displaying her gun and screaming at employees.

Officer Barbara Nevers of the Belmont police district was suspended for more than 15 months, according to records the Chicago Police Board released today.

Cop demands free coffee, but not at this Starbucks (via Starbucks Gossip)

If you own a Jura F90 Coffee Maker, you can also buy a Jura Internet Connection Kit, which lets you program and set your coffee prefs via the network: however, its got a bunch of vulnerabilities that allow for remote denial-of-coffee attacks:

Guess what - it can not be patched as far as I can tell ;) It also has a few software vulnerabilities.

Fun things you can do with a Jura coffee maker:
1. Change the preset coffee settings (make weak or strong coffee)
2. Change the amount of water per cup (say 300ml for a short black) and make a puddle
3. Break it by engineering settings that are not compatible (and making it require a service)

Link (via /.)