Drying Coffee Grounds And A Soldering Iron

Not a lot of news about it, but Natwest bank is closing branches and reducing their staff as they promote on line banking. My sister is likely to be moved from the branch she is at if she is not made redundant in this wave or the next wave which is rumoured to be aimed at around Christmas, isn't that going to be a nice Christmas present for the staff affected?

Each day she treats herself to a coffee from the coffee shop opposite her branch, and once a week she comes round to my house for a drink and evening meal. I pick her up behind the coffee shop and she arranges for me to collect a sack or two of coffee, as I need it.

As she may not be there for much longer I have taken to collecting every week and I'm building up stocks of coffee. The problem is drying and storage. The large gravel trays below were moved around the garden following the sun and the grounds moved around every half an hour for a couple, of days. 

 

I have small trays of coffee in the Spacesaver greenhouse at home. I have bought some metal loaf backing trays as metal trays dry the coffee out faster as they metal warms up.

I also have some coffee drying in the greenhouse on plot 1A and the blow-a-way grow house on plot 23B is full of drying coffee.

I was thinking about perhaps having a dalek just filled with coffee ground but coffee grounds goes mouldy if left damp and in the sacks for very long so I'm not sure that is a viable solution to the storage problem

Hamid the owner of our local Pizza Shop provides me with 10L Heinz Mayonnaise Buckets with Lids when he has them which I use for storage of seed sowing compost as well as coffee grounds but I need more than he can supply.


So I have had to become a little inventive, my first thought was to use the dried coffee to fill plastic milk bottles. As you will know if you have read my blog I use these full of sand or stones as soft bricks to weigh down nets and the weed membrane on the allotment. I use the top of a plastic bottle as a funnel as the neck if the bottle fits nicely into the milk bottle   

Again if you read my blog you will also know that I have a thing about re purposing pop bottles and attacking plastic items with the soldering iron. I've made shed loads of slug traps and pop bottle propagators and at the moment I'm just crashing and putting in the recycle bin. 

Suddenly a light bulb lit up above my head !.

I placed two caps top to top and melted a hole in them and in the process sealed them together so that I could join two pop bottles cap to cap, so now I have a pop bottle funnel that can be screwed to the top of a pop bottle and the excess coffee can be stored in the 2 Litre pop bottles.







I have left the caps off and placed a couple of coffee filled pop bottle in the greenhouse as the coffee is dry but not bone dry and there is bound to be some condensation and moisture that is going to want to get out of the bottle. But until I can get some more 10 Litre buckets with lids, I have a storage solution.