So you love coffee and have been drinking it for years, but let’s be honest, you don’t really need to know anything about your beverage or understand it. Good thing you don’t have to in order to love and appreciate it. Simply order it the way you like and then just enjoy, really that’s all there is to it. However, you may sometimes be wondering to yourself,
What the heck is an Espresso and how is it different from coffee?
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Sometimes I drink coffee at home and think it is a little off compared to when I purchase a specialized cup at a great coffee shop. Perhaps it is just psychological because I want to believe that something made at home can’t possibly taste as good anyway and then just deal with it.
However, there may be a legit reason why your coffee made at home tastes off. Let’s dive into all the ways that could be making your coffee taste like plastic or just weird in general. A coffee made at home can most certainly be up to par with the outside world.
There are a lot of factors that could contribute to the funky taste, but really it comes down to 3 major categories.
- Coffee Beans / Gounds
- Machinery used
- Your water source
On May 3rd 2015, Italian Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti then made history by drinking the first-ever espresso made in space. The development of this machine paves the way for a bright future of how people can actually start enjoying the food they consume in space.
Why can’t they use a regular espresso or coffee machine?
Pretty much everything the astronauts do and use in space has to be customized because nothing really works the same without gravity. Think of the brewing process, hot water drips or pushes down through the grinds and the gorgeous coffee falls into the waiting cup.
With no gravity, the coffee would just go everywhere or might not even make it through the grinds to begin with. A whole new system has to be engineered with good knowledge of how liquids behave in this environment (called fluid capillary dynamics).
Mark Weislogel who invented the special space espresso cups says that no system on earth that manipulates fluids will work in space. It has to be completely re-engineered to account for the physics of space where the fluid reacts much more to surface tension rather than gravity. This means that water for example will crawl along the sides of objects rather than fall or even float away.
