Make a Better Cup of Coffee in Your Hotel Room

Many hotels have coffee makers right in the room, but dumping some grounds in and flipping the switch rarely makes a good cup of Joe. The Atlantic's Jerry Baldwin offers useful tips for improving the brew you make in your hotel room.

Photo by lepiaf.geo.

The first thing Baldwin does is grab a big bottle of water, preferring to use that over whatever city water happens to flow out of the tap; good water is a key component of great coffee, so he argues there's no reason to be beholden to the inconsistent taste and varying mineral content of tap water.

Don't feel like lugging bottled water all over the place while traveling? No problem:

If I've failed to purchase bottled water, I draw the tap water the night before. This achieves two things: the chlorine will partially evaporate, and the temperature will rise to room temperature. The heaters in coffeemakers will raise the temperature a certain number of degrees. They don't have holding tanks like commercial machines. A twenty-degree difference between newly drawn tap water and room temperature will result in nearly a twenty degree increase in brewing temperature.

There's more to making fantastic hotel coffee than just using good water, so hit up the post for more tips on making good hotel coffee (including how to find a good coffee-to-water ratio). Got a suggestion of your own for making great coffee while you're away from your favorite coffee maker and beans? We'd love to hear them in the comments.

Artificial schnozzes have been sniffing foreign objects for years now, but rarely are they engineered to sniff out specific things. A team of researchers from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign have done just that, though, with a new snout that acts as a coffee analyzer. Reportedly, the device can “distinguish between ten well-known commercial brands of coffee and can also make a distinction between coffee beans that have been roasted at different temperatures or lengths of time.” The significance here is that this distinction is incredibly difficult to make, and it could one day help coffee growers determine whether batches are as good as prior batches on the cheap. More importantly, however, it could help the modern java hunter determine whether or not they're walking in a corporate Starbucks or one of those “branded” kiosks with two-fifths the menu. Brilliant, right?

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