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      A ‘heathenish liquor’? A cure for cancer? The history of coffee is full of surprises | Jonathan Morris

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Tuesday, 2 April - 15:00

    A new study suggests coffee could prevent bowel cancer reoccurring – but claims for its healing properties have abounded since the 15th century

    Last week a study was published showing that people with bowel cancer who drink coffee – quite a lot of coffee, two to four cups a day – were less likely to suffer a return of the disease. Experts have said that if the results hold in further studies, coffee could be prescribed to cancer patients on the NHS. That coffee does have an effect on human function is beyond dispute – but whether that impact is beneficial or detrimental has been the subject of contention since Sufi mystics began consuming the beverage some time in the mid-15th century.

    The Indigenous peoples of the forests of Kaffa in south-west Ethiopia foraged berries from wild coffee plants that were shipped across the Red Sea to prepare the decoction known as qahwa, which Yemeni Sufis incorporated into their night-time religious ceremonies to reduce their desire for sleep. Once mainstream Islamic courts ruled coffee was not intoxicating, consumption became widespread among the Muslim populations in the Middle East and the Ottoman empire.

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      Gears Technica: Favorite coffee-making setups from the Ars Technica staff

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 8 September, 2023 - 18:45 · 1 minute

    kevin_coffee4-scaled.jpg

    (credit: Kevin Purdy)

    If you're like our staff, you'll understand that good cup of brewed coffee is a requirement every morning. Whether it's a simple French-pressed brew or an espresso-based drink with complex flavors and aromas, coffee has not only provided the fuel to get the Ars Technica stuff through our daily tasks but it's become a ritual that helps us start the day anew and grounds us—pun intended—amid the chaos of the world.

    We asked the Ars staff to show off their coffee-making setups and tips below—they range from low to high tech, from hand-cranked grinders to automatic machines and all points in between, but all these methods have one thing in common: They make awesome coffee.

    John Timmer's setup: Flavorful French press method

    Buy The John Timmer French Press setup

    (Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs .)

    What I want from coffee-making equipment is purely a function of what I'm looking for from coffee. And that is as much flavor as you can possibly extract from beans that are roasted so dark that they risk absorbing all light and becoming a black hole. I want a thin sheen of random organic molecules floating on top of an explosion of bitter, complex flavors.

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      Open source espresso machine is one delicious rabbit hole inside another

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 28 March, 2023 - 17:41 · 1 minute

    Opened-up espresso maker on a kitchen counter

    Enlarge / How far is too far to go for the perfect shot of espresso? Here's at least one trail marker for you. (credit: Norm Sohl)

    Making espresso at home involves a conundrum familiar to many activities: It can be great, cheap, or easy to figure out, but you can only pick, at most, two of those. You can spend an infinite amount of time and money tweaking and upgrading your gear, chasing shots that taste like the best café offerings, always wondering what else you could modify.

    Or you could do what Norm Sohl did and build a highly configurable machine out of open source hardware plans and the thermal guts of an Espresso Gaggia . Here's what Sohl did, and some further responses from the retired programmer and technical writer, now that his project has circulated in both open hardware and espresso-head circles.

    Like many home espresso enthusiasts, Sohl had seen that his preferred machine, the Gaggia Classic Pro, could be modified in several ways, including adding a proportional–integral–derivative (PID) controller and other modifications to better control temperature, pressure, and shot volumes. Most intriguing to Sohl was Gaggiuino , a project that adds those things with the help of an Arduino Nano or STM32 Blackpill , a good deal of electrical work, and open software.

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