Dusting off this account with a coffee project

2023-05-20T17:02:13Z

Testing this place again with a post from my weekend project, though the lack of support for photo uploads makes these less clear here.

One of last weekend’s projects was building the enclosure for an upgrade to my vacuum pump for making my vacuum-extracted cold brew ultracoffee. I found a “quiet vacuum pump” component online for under $30, and decided to test it. On my setup, it gets down to a vacuum pressure of -25 in hg, which is about 2.5x what my previous inexpensive pump could manage without hand-pumping, and is about what the ones I use for filtration at work can pull. The downside is that as sold, it was very loud, so I put together a case for it aimed at muffling the sound, and got it down to something close to the noise level of the glorified aquarium pump that I’d been using before this.

Since I have a stash of random wood and electronics on hand, all I had to buy was the cooling fan and vibration mats underneath, making my cost for the whole thing come to around $60. Not bad at all since the ones I use at work to get this level of vacuum are in the $600 range, and are very loud. This probably has a much shorter overall lifespan on the pump, but at $30 to replace that part, that’s more than acceptable.

That makes a single stage extraction where I add all the grounds at once much more doable, instead of the three-stage one I’d been doing - the higher the ratio of grounds to water, the more work it is to pull that water back out, unless you want to throw out a lot of your potential coffee with the damp grounds. Eventually, I’ll also want to upgrade the filtration glassware to something with a wider mouth and larger filtration surface area, but that’s a significantly more expensive upgrade. Lab glassware is always pricey, and you don’t want to get used labware for working with food, you never know what residues might be on it.

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professionalhenchman

Dusting off this account with a coffee project