It’s summer in Taiwan, with the accompanying heat and humidity so it’s time for iced coffee.
It should be really easy. Simply use less water in the coffee pot, then add ice, right?
No. Of course not. I’m a master of overly complicated solutions to simple problems. I have the coffee ratio down pat for hot coffee, so I use that. Not preferring watery coffee, I can’t just dump ice into it. Another obvious solution would be to let cool down on it’s own for a while, but patience was never my forte.
So, the over-engineered solution. I put the coffee into a ceramic mug, then after a few minutes when it’s heated the mug, I transfer it to another mug and put cold water into the first to cool it off. Then in a few minutes, I pour the coffee into yet a third mug. By this time my original mug is cool, and putting the coffee into it give a room temperature, so adding ice doesn’t dilute it.
My wife [del]thinks[/del] knows I’m crazy, but has given up on trying to talk sense into me.
I make a pitcher of coffee, stronger than normal, add sweetener and cream, then chill it overnight. Next day I can add ice cubes, diluting it to normal. Perfect iced coffee.
The “Tell me about your overengineered solutions to simply problems” thread results in SDMBers helping solve the overengineered coffee dilemma posted by the OP. Such a SDMB thing to do.
One of my pecadillos is to overbuild a wall or hanging support device. For example, I needed to build a small wall mounted shelf for a 3 pound radio. Two triangluar gussets supporting the platform with a backplate. Each gusset used 6 wood screws to connect the backplate and platform. Four quarter-inch lag screws to attach the assembly to the wall. Gees, I could probably stand on this thing and it would hold me up.
We took delivery of a large oilfield truck that was going to sit in our yard for a couple weeks being outfitted with some extra equipment, then taken down to the Port of Houston and loaded on a ship to India. Thing is, the truck wasn’t licensed, so it couldn’t be driven down to the docks. Somehow I ended up being given the job of sorting this out, despite having no experience at this sort of thing. So, after thinking about it a while I arranged to hire a lowboy rig for the trip. We did this all the time to transport skid-mounted lab units, so I figured that was out best bet.
The first thing we found when the transport rig showed up was that we couldn’t just drive the oilfield truck up onto the trailer, and we had not planned for a crane lift like we do for the skid units. So, we ended building a rickety temporary ramp out of railroad ties and almost tipped the oilfield truck over getting it up the damn thing. Then we had to demount the front wheels of the oilfield truck to get it low enough for the vertical clearance to be acceptable. The whole process took more than eight hours and we (me and two other guys) were bone-tired at the end.
I was telling this story to someone else a few weeks later, and they looked at me oddly for a moment, then said. “Why didn’t you just hire a heavy-duty wrecker and have them tow it down to the dock?”
I had an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys holding my front door closed for a few years. The fool thing was warped and a carpenter’s door never latches. Anyway, all set to replace it and decided to take a little time and see if anything could be done to fix it in place. Took ten minutes and it’s worked fine every since.
I’m with your wife on this one, alternating coffee cups is just strange if you ask me.
Buy four Krugerrands. That’s four ounces of gold. Keep them in the freezer. Put them in your full cup of regular coffee, they will have the cooling energy of a half a cup of ice. There’s a high initial cost ($5,400), but the technology is simple.
Way back when, a warehouse guy towed into the lab a truck driver who was looking pretty scared until the sight of the White Coat calmed him down. White Coat = technical person = person likely to speak foreign languages. The warehouse guy needed me to explain to the truck driver that we were not, in fact, going to offload his truck, clean it and reload it: all that was needed was a change of papers. Why?
There was a product which in Europe was made exclusively at our Italian factory, but which could be distributed to other locations and forwarded to the customers from any of them. A customer had asked for that product but with the condition that it had to be from the Spanish location, “because we’ve had problems with the Italian product a few times, but never with the Spanish product”. So, the truck had loaded up in Italy… driven all the way to Spain… and then he’d get his new papers and drive on-but-back to the customer in Germany (who’d been charged extra, of course :p, our salesladies were nice but not stupid).
Someone proposed that if the issue happened again, maybe we could generate the paperwork in Spain and forward it to Italy. With the new computer system that we installed some time later, that wasn’t even needed: the Italian factory could send the product with Spanish papers. Hey, it is totally Spanish product, have you tried speaking with it? It speaks perfect Spanish! :halo:
In the future, you can simply pour it back and forth from mug to mug to cool it down rapidly. The higher you pour it from and the more frothy it gets in transit, the faster it cools down. It’s a pretty common practice in Asia so I’m surprised you’ve never encountered this.
