Hasta La Gadget!

People around the world use ice every day to chill drinks of all sorts. It doesn’t matter what you’re drinking, be it a Dr Pepper, tea, or a glass of 20-year-old single malt, making the drink nice and cold often makes it taste better. The problem for a lot of people is that simply dropping ice cubes into your cup means that drink will soon be diluted if you don’t gulp it down quickly.

A project has turned up on Kickstarter that lets you make your drinks nice and cold without adding any additional water to change the taste. The project is called Pucs and they are simple little devices made of solid stainless steel. The idea is that you take the Pucs and place them into your freezer along with the little wooden holder.

Once those Pucs are nice and cold, you can then pull one out and drop it into your drink. The people behind the project say that the way the solid little chunks of stainless steel work one will add a little chill to your drink while adding additional pucs will drop the temperature of your drink even further allowing you to custom tune the temperature.

Another interesting use for these objects is in hot beverages. You don’t have to put these in the freezer to absorb heat from hot beverages such as coffee. You can drop one into a cup of coffee that’s too hot to absorb some of the heat allowing you to get your caffeine fix more quickly. The Pucs are machined from solid 304 stainless steel and are 100% inert. They are unable to change the flavor of your drink and will not absorb smells or flavors from the freezer. They’re designed to be cleaned with soap and water or in the dishwasher. A pledge of $35 more will get you six Pucs and a maple case to place them in. The project was seeking $2500 and has raised almost $14,000 so far with 44 days to go.

[via Kickstarter]

Pucs rechargeable ice won’t dilute your drink is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The days of mysterious espresso brewing behind hulking machines may be over, if one coffee startup, Modbar, has its way, burying all but the glamorous end of the process under the counter. Revealed today at the opening of the SCAA‘s (Speciality Coffee Association of America) annual expo, Modbar is a striking, modular series of espresso groups, pour-over taps, and steam arms which can be hooked up in multiple numbers and configurations, with the promise of greater temperature control, a cut in prep time, and even geek-friendly features like touchscreen operation and support for temperature monitoring in Kelvin.

Traditional espresso machines are sizable affairs, packing one or more boilers into a huge countertop appliance that effectively hides the brewing process from the customer, or alternatively forces the barista to turn their back to them. That, Spudge reports, isn’t something that affects the Modbar: by shifting the boilers and other components under the counter, there’s a clear viewing path to all parts of the drink preparation area.

Visibility isn’t much good if the hardware itself falls short, but it sounds like Modbar has thought about that too. The system supposedly goes from cold to operating temperature in just five minutes – figure on at the very least 30 minutes (but more like an hour) for a typical commercial machine, a time-consuming process that means many cafes simply leave them switched on 24/7, making them hardly eco-friendly – while an actively-heated stainless steel grouphead uses a thermoblock (to raise the temperature itself, rather than wait for hot water to do that) and special boiler controls to achieve 1-degree F temperature stability.

Everything is controlled by a 3.2-inch color touchscreen, a single panel operating all of the interconnected modules. As well as temperature, there’s control for volumetric dosing (i.e. where the machine pushes out a set quantity of water) and current espresso fashion pressure profiling, where the pressure of the water at the grouphead is varied during the roughly half-minute brew so as to adjust the overall extraction. A display on the espresso group itself shows volume, and everything has overrides for tinkering with the particular shot in progress.

As for the pour-over – something else that’s fashionable in coffee right now – that gets a sleekly designed dispensing wand with a choice of outlet heads with different hole patterns, to suit different brewing methods. A braided wand dispenses a set amount of either liquid volume or time.

The coffee world hasn’t been short on attempts at innovation, and not all of them have found success in the market. However, Modbar does have some notable support from an industry heavyweight: La Marzocco, founded in Italy in 1927, and a brand you’ll find on high-end coffee machines in cafes all over the world. The company’s portafilters (the bit where the ground coffee goes) are used by Modbar too, and production of the modular system has already begun, albeit in limited numbers.

As for pricing, a single espresso module will be $5,399, while the steam module will be $3,995, and the pour-over module $3,687. If that sounds expensive, then consider a Slayer – notable for being one of the few machines that supports pressure profiling – comes in at around $18,000 for the three-group model.

Modbar coffee machine: third wave espresso’s new poster-child is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

You’re a multitasker, so why not have a kitchen gadget that can juggle a plethora of delicious projects? Breville’s All-In-One is up to the task—it’s an immersion blender and a food processor. But it’s a whole lot more. More »

This parmesan grater is delicious. It has a single, perforated blade that lets you grate your cheese in any direction. Best of all, there’s funnel on the end of this $25 grater with a removable cover so you can direct just the right amount of cheese onto your plate of fettuccine or salad. But we suggest directing that perfectly shredded parm directly into your mouth. [WMF via Appliancist] More »

So, you are one who is noted to know how to prepare for any eventualities in the future, according to the best of your ability? Surely you have summer plans all lined up for you and the family by now, knowing just where you will go, with resort bookings made and all. Well, summer time is fun with the long days and all, but it also takes a toll on the body because of the sweltering heat. Good to know that you have the £54.95 Snow Cone Maker in mind, as you know what is going into your own snow cones, without having to worry about the non-organic sugar that they slather all over when you purchase it from somewhere else.

Forget about ice cream, especially when you have this Snow Cone Maker, letting you enjoy something that is altogether more chillin’. This fantastic machine will let you create your very own snow cones in under a minute, where it will result in perfect sized shaved ice that are able to soak up any juice or syrup that you want to add to it. Heck, go nuts by making your fair share of slushies and cocktails, you deserve it!

[ Snow Cone Maker copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]