Friday, August 14, 2026

Hi, welcome back. How've you... bean?

Item 1: a link

Benjamin Stubbing & Oscar Sykes wrote this "brief" history of instant coffee, which I found interesting. It may not surprise you to learn that the first few attempts resulted in disgusting sludge:

In 1771, over two centuries after coffee reached Europe, Londoner John Dring filed a patent for a ‘coffee compound’. Dring’s method involved mixing ground coffee with butter and tallow, then heating the mixture on an iron plate until it thickened into a paste that could be shaped into cakes. These cakes were then dissolved in hot water to make coffee. The purpose of the animal fats isn’t entirely clear. They may have been intended to extract and carry soluble compounds from the coffee grounds or to preserve the ground coffee from oxidation. Whatever Dring’s aim, the method wasn’t commercially viable because the fats went rancid, causing the cakes to spoil quickly.

So yeah, points for trying but not a particularly promising effort. The good news is after a hundred years of innovation it was still terrible:

Another attempt came during the American Civil War. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson had replaced soldiers’ daily spirit rations with coffee beans and sugar. This created a heavy logistical burden for the army, with a 20-day supply for 100,000 troops weighing 250 tons, all needing transport by horse-drawn wagon. Roasting, grinding, and brewing coffee in the field was also time-consuming for soldiers.

In 1861, the Union Army began investigating instant coffee as a solution. They procured a coffee concentrate from the firm HA Tilden & Co, consisting of a mixture of thickened coffee and sweetened, condensed milk. This halved the weight and size of the coffee, but was unpopular with soldiers, who compared its consistency to axle grease.

Mankind's unceasing pursuit of war kept demand high over the decades and spurred continued efforts (the World Wars were a godsend for the instant coffee sector), and it did eventually get better when they stopped trying to combine the coffee with sticky gunk – but the truth is instant coffee remained pretty gross until quite recently, thanks to various improvements in the flash freezing process (and other techniques) that finally let people enjoy a decent cup of coffee without brewing it themselves (which, I'll note, is pretty easy to do and a lot less expensive).

Item 2: a list

Christopher Nolan Film Scores, Ranked:

1. Interstellar
2. The Dark Knight
3. Inception
4. Dunkirk
5. Tenet
6. The Odyssey
7. The Dark Knight Rises
8. The Prestige
9. Oppenheimer
10. Batman Begins
11. Memento
12. Following
13. Insomnia

Item 3: a media recommendation

Item 4: word of the week

Dado

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to see you're embracing all the details of your home remodel. I just think in ten years you might not still be so excited about a dining room with a leopard-print dado.

Item 5: an image

See ya!

Thanks for reading. See you again in a couple of weeks, unless I get groundsded.