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27 Sep 08:50

If Jonathan Ive ever designed a coffee machine…

by Sarang Sheth

Look at the Morning Machine and tell me that isn’t something you would see Tim Cook unveiling, claiming it makes the “best coffee experience you’ve ever had”. The Morning Machine is a technological step above your Keurig and Nespresso, and a convenience step above having your own Barista in your kitchen. Designed to brew coffee ‘with purpose’, the Morning Machine has the ability to analyze the coffee pod you put in it and configure the exact way to brew it. Different beans come from different places, and require different techniques – the Morning Machine recognizes these nuances and applies bean-specific brewing mechanisms to make sure the coffee tastes exactly how it was intended to be consumed.

The Morning Machine comes with three areas of hardware that give it a superior edge over your standard pod-based coffee machine. This slick, matte-black hunk of beautiful metal comes with the ability to precisely control temperature, pressure, and quantity (weight) of the water required in the brewing process. While the Morning Machine itself comes with thousands of profiles for brewing different styles of coffee, you can create your own profiles too, adjusting the blend through a smartphone app to create your own ‘recipe’. The device works with Nespresso OriginalLine capsules among others, and can even be used with cold-shot capsules, tea-capsules, or even with single-use drip bags. You can either control the machine via its slick, intuitive, Nest thermostat-inspired jog-dial, or even via the app. The machine is even capable of sensing when your cup’s near the outlet or not, immediately cutting the flow once you lift your cup off the machine. The level of sensibility, sensitivity, and sleekness remains unrivaled, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the guys behind the design cited Apple as a reference.

Developed by passionate caffeine-heads Leon and Andre, the Morning Machine comes at a pretty unique time, especially considering how more people are consuming their coffee at home rather than going to the nearby barista, or having to deal with their local café shutting down due to the pandemic and economic aftermath. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the Morning Machine is a barista replacement, for starters it probably can’t smile at you and ask you how your day’s been (yet), but if you’re the kind of person who just craves that perfect cup of coffee in the morning (without the chit-chat or waiting in line), the Morning Machine is a pretty incredible alternative. Moreover, it’s more than just a slick looking machine… it’s a marketplace too. Partnering with some of the best coffee roasters across UK, EU, Australia, and South East Asia, the Morning Machine brings world-class beans and roasts to your doorstep, your cup, and finally your tastebuds. Yeah Tim Cook, it could easily be “best coffee experience you’ve ever had”.

Designer: STUCK DESIGN

Click Here to Buy Now: $330 $495 ($33% off). Hurry, only 1/115 left! Raised over $125,000.

The Morning Machine. Brew Coffee With Intention

The Morning Machine is the world’s first coffee capsule machine with barista-approved controls.

By pairing a growing variety of high-quality coffee capsules with customizable recipes, the Morning Machine allows you to explore new flavors and roasts from the comfort of home, while enjoying it just how the roaster intended it.

Key Features

The Morning Machine has a built-in scale that helps provide you with consistent brews. There are also two thermal sensors coupled with a PID (Proportional Integral Derivative) controller, allowing you to set your brew temperature to highlight each coffee’s nuances. Lastly, you can control the brew pressure via the Intermittent Wave Brewing System (patent pending) to enhance your coffee’s mouthfeel and texture.

Weight-based Brewing

There has been a shift in coffee brewing with the use of scales. Compared to simply relying on volumetric measurements (from a flow meter), scales provide you with accuracy, which leads to repeatability and room for experimentation. Instead of simply eyeballing the liquid espresso and crema, a scale provides weight-based brewing, where the output is instantly measured and displayed. This allows you to brew to more consistent-tasting cups of coffee.

Temperature Precision

Another factor that affects the coffee’s flavor is its brew temperature. According to the Specialty Coffee Association’s The Coffee Brewing Handbook by Ted Lingle, various coffee flavor components such as malic acids, citric acids and sucrose, each require different temperatures for a balanced cup. To prove this, they did a blind taste-test with seasoned coffee professional, Adryll Lin, from Mercanta Coffee Hunters.

They took the same coffee and brewed with three varying temperatures on the Morning Machine.

After revealing to Adryll that he was drinking the same coffee brewed in different temperatures, he was pleasantly surprised that his chosen cup, Cup C, was the one brewed with the lowest temperature, as he felt that it was the one that had the most balanced flavors. Hotter coffee does not always equate to better coffee; and while coffee preference remains very subjective, exploring how temperature can affect its flavors is just the tip of the iceberg.

Pressure Profile

Many coffee professionals debate the effect of pressure profiling on the cup. Some say that a slow ramp-up would even out the extraction process, while some prefer to lower the pressure at the end of the brew to mute out some of the bitter and astringent qualities of coffee.

A quick experiment on Total Dissolved Solids.

The third key feature of the Morning Machine is the Intermittent Wave Brewing System, which is used to control pressure. This system affects the coffee’s Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) and allows exploration of how pressure can affect your coffee’s taste.

One of the Morning Machine’s capabilities is the Bloom & Brew, which uses the Intermittent Wave Brewing System. In this process, the coffee is pre-wet, followed by a short pause, and then the brew finishes with a low pressure.

For the full breakdown of the process, coffee capsules were punctured with the lowest pressure setting, then the brewing was paused for 20 seconds. Then, the Morning Machine automatically kicked in to half the brew pressure capacity of the pump (about 10 bars) for the remainder of the brew, as it hit 25 grams of output for the coffee.

The result was a noticeably different and stronger cup of coffee. They tried the Bloom & Brew method across various capsules with different roasts (from light to dark), with consistent results in the increase in TDS—and that’s only the beginning.

The Morning Machine is Purposefully Connected

Create your own custom pressure profiles (via the Morning mobile app).

Going back to the ritual and the home brewer in mind, the Morning Machine is purposefully connected to allow you to get the most of your brewing and tasting experience.

Less mess with the “Cup Detection” feature.

Designed for the Home Brewer

Interactive OLED Dial Interface – Select your favorite recipes via the dial interface and watch the progress of your brew.

Works with Nespresso® OriginalLine Capsules – The Morning Machine works with the most popular single-serve coffee format.

A Compact Design for Your Home –  The Morning Machine sports a sleek and compact design with a multitude of coffee brewing features built-in.

Brew Modes

Quick-Brew – Brew coffee recipes on the machine or via the Morning mobile app with one-touch brewing. You can use our pre-set recipes or browse through our partner roasters’ recipes.

Brew Your Coffee, Your Way – Tweak the coffee output, brew temperature and pressure profile to achieve your desired coffee flavor profile.

Brewing a “Cold-shot” Espresso.

Brewing with Single-serve Drip Bags.

Brewing with Tea Capsules.

Click Here to Buy Now: $330 $495 ($30% off). Hurry, only 2/115 left! Raised over $127,000.

15 Mar 19:53

Aerial Photographs Explore the Unique Geometric Patterns of Coastal Barcelona

by Kate Sierzputowski

Márton Mogyorósy explores the coastal city of Barcelona from above, creating geometric images of the Spanish city’s buildings, shore, and sea. Mogyorósy browses the city via Google Earth to get an idea of the natural and manmade shapes he would like to capture, and then finds these areas with the assistance of a drone. The Hungarian photographer photographs lesser known areas of Barcelona, finding structures and buildings that are attractively shaped from the sky, rather than famous tourist attractions from the ground. His second series of drone images of his hometown of Budapest will be published soon. You can keep updated on his aerial photography on Behance and Instagram. (via My Modern Met)

10 Aug 18:42

The Milky Way Reflected Onto the Largest Salt Flat in the World

by Kate Sierzputowski
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All images via Daniel Kordan

Determined to find a destination where he could photograph a completely dark sky, Russian photographer Daniel Kordan traveled to the Altiplano region of west-central South America, an area known for its absolute darkness, and which rises 12,300 feet above sea level. While here, Kordan captured the Uyuni salt flat with a special astrophotography camera. This type of camera unlocks the colors found in the sky, opening up the barriers between earth and space and casting the Milky Way onto the reflective flats.

Kordan’s next voyage is to the Faroe Islands and Greenland to lead several photography workshops and explorations. You can see more of his photography on Instagram and Facebook. (via My Modern Met)

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06 Feb 12:29

El album fotográfico definitivo de la Segunda Guerra Mundial

by Miguel
Soviéticos frente a una Ural con sidecar... y a lo que quedaba de la Puerta de Brandemburgo. Foto The Atlantic
Hace tiempo el periódico The Atlantic (gracias por la corrección Astrohúngaro) publicó una serie de entradas a modo de archivo fotográfico de la Segunda Guerra Mundial que me dejaron boquiabierto. Considero que esas entradas son una joya y ya que no las he visto por ahí me permito el lujo de compartirlas con vosotros ya que seguro que muchos, conociéndoos, vais a disfrutar de lo lindo con el. Espero que las disfrutéis:
  • Antes de la guerra (AQUÍ).
  • La conquista de Polonia y la Guerra de Invierno (AQUÍ).
  • Blitzkrieg en el frente occidental y la caída de Francia (AQUÍ).
  • Batalla de Inglaterra (AQUÍ).
  • El conflicto se convierte en una guerra mundial (AQUÍ).
  • "Operación Barbarroja" (AQUÍ).
  • El ataque a Pearl Harbor (AQUÍ).
  • Retaguardia americana en color (AQUÍ).
  • Incursiones y batallas (AQUÍ).
  • Internamiento de japoneses en los Estados Unidos (AQUÍ).
  • Batalla de Midway y la operación de las Aleutianas (AQUÍ).
  • La Campaña del Norte de África (AQUÍ).
  • Mujeres en la guerra (AQUÍ).
  • La Guerra en el Pacífico (AQUÍ).
  • La invasión aliada de Europa (AQUÍ).
  • La caída de la Alemania nazi (AQUÍ).
  • La caída del Japón imperial (AQUÍ).

No está mal ¿eh?
30 Nov 21:39

Photo

Linmer

Por el retorno de los comentarios #viva