Blogs : Food Media

Now We Need a Single-Serve Meth Maker

Boing Boing on the AeroPress, a plastic piston that makes coffee.

Over at Boing Boing TV last week, writer Mark Frauenfelder, dressed in his mad professor get-up, posted a video how-to for the AeroPress, an ingeniously simple single-serve coffee maker thought up by the inventor of the Aerobie (you know, that Frisbee-like ring thing). The AeroPress has been out for over a year and already has a sizable following, especially on Chowhound, where there’s a lengthy ongoing discussion of the device—inventor Alan Adler has even stopped by to answer questions. A poster on the thread notes that “my wife found it difficult to put enough pressure on the machine to use it correctly (slowly but steadily)” and that’s what I wondered after watching Frauenfelder: The AeroPress works by plunging ground coffee and water through a filter, but on Boing Boing, the process seemed to involve some serious exertion—which is antithetical to the whole concept of coffee. Anyone with relevant thoughts on this?

A footnote: Frauenfelder mentions in passing that “I’ve heard that people make meth using the coffee makers in hotel rooms.” To which I said, wait—what? It turns out that earlier this year, Boing Boing linked to a story from a television station in Huntsville, Alabama, on this very subject:

Ask just about anyone in law enforcement, and they’ll tell you to be careful if you ever brew coffee in a hotel room.

‘I know enough now that whenever I go to a hotel, regardless of how nice it is, I’ll never use a coffee pot,’ said Marshall County District Attorney Steve Marshall.

The story also includes these tips for meth-spotting in hotel rooms: “[The coffee pot] will have a dark reddish-orange stain. You should also be skeptical if there’s a chemical odor when you walk in the room.” I suddenly feel really, really innocent.

Posted by Nicholas Day | Tuesday, October 23, 2007 at 4:19pm | 0 comments

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