ABBA CUPPA CUPPA JAVA

Jeff Green | Jul 15, 2010

Editorial by Jeff Green

Pour me another cup of coffee

As I sit back every week and consider what to write for the week's paper, one of the best ways to put the task off is to brew up a pot of morning coffee. Another way is to surf the web while that coffee is brewing.

I look at news sites, as if the latest concert by Lady Gaga in Toronto or the dirty tactics employed by the Netherlands in the World Cup final are important for me to know about before I begin writing.

But sometimes surfing the web aimlessly can be useful, in unexpected ways. Just this morning on the Guardian website (Guardian.co.uk) there was an article about how to pour the second cup of coffee. I've never thought about this too much, but if you use a drip filter coffee maker, as many of us do, the coffee at the bottom of the pot is stronger than the coffee at the top of the pot, so coffee drinkers cannot have two perfect cups in the morning. Apparently swishing the pot does not remedy the problem. So Robert M. Richmond, a retired chemistry professor, actually wrote an article called “Recursive Binary Sequences of Differences” in which he proposes a simple solution. Make enough coffee for two large mugs. Get two mugs out of the cupboard. Pour a half-cup into cup A and a half-cup into cup B. Pour another half-cup into cup B and the remaining coffee into cup A.

There you have it. By using the ABBA method, you get two identical, perfect cups of coffee. If you want to make an even better, more perfect, two cups of coffee, you can make more, smaller pours. That would be eight quarter-cup pours using the ABBABAAB pattern.

Apparently this system is not only good for coffee, it has applications for choosing sides in pick up sports games, being fairer than the ABABABAB system.

There is one problem with all this, not so much in the choosing sides part but in the coffee part.

My grandmother knew about coffee, and she loved hot coffee. So much so that she did not like drip filter coffee makers at all because the coffee never stayed hot the way it does in an old-style percolator.

When I use a drip filter coffee maker I think about how my grandmother would not find my coffee hot enough. I don't feel as strongly about this as she did, but I do think that unless I want an iced coffee, a cup of coffee should be a hot beverage.

The ABBA system requires pouring both cups at once. While it may mean that cup 2 is the same strength as cup 1, cup 2 will be colder than cup 1.

I poured my two cups and then began writing this. Now I have two cold cups of coffee.

I think it's time for my nap. Maybe there's an article on the web about the perfect nap, the Goldilocks nap, not too long, not too short ...