…when senses interact, in sometimes surprising ways. Some fun examples:

Coffee tastes better when you don’t have a loud coffee machine near you, and it also tastes more intense and less sweet if the mug is white.

In the atmosphere of a pressurised cabin when flying, with decreased humidity and air pressure and significant background noise, things taste less sweet or salty.

If you can’t hear the crunch of, say a Pringles potato chip, then it tastes less fresh.

You might enjoy Nicola Twilley’s super New Yorker article, The Illusion of Taste, which has more of the science and plenty more examples.

Crossmodal perception

A word from the Sami people of Northern Norway, Finland or Sweden, from ‘coffee’ and ‘boil’, used as a measure of distance for how far you can go before you need a cup of coffee.

Kaffikok

These large bottles are seriously impressive to see. They also have neat names from biblical kings for reasons I don’t know. There are a few more gradations, and some sizes and names are only for sparkling wines like champagne and some not. And there are some that even get significantly larger than the 20 bottles in a nebuchadnezzar, though I’ve never seen one.

Party bottle sizes

I first had a santo libre in Belize and, given how popular cuba libres are, I was surprised I’d never heard of it. Basically, it’s rum + Sprite or lemonade + a little lime juice. I am hereby spreading the word of this excellent drink.

Santo libre, cuba libre

With just a few deft cuts of a cork, you too can make a nifty pourer perfect for a straight pour while mixing your drink with air.

A speciality to use with sidra from the Asturian region of Spain.

Make a cork pourer.

Essentially it’s the order of adding your water to your espresso — an americano - or adding your espresso to your water — a long black. If you’re making your own at home, you may notice that a long black seems to make a more satisfyingly luxurious looking coffee.

Other coffee-related sketchplanations: Vietnamese coffee, Irish coffee, half-caff coffee, espresso, filter, americano and the redeye.

Perhaps I should speak to someone about this…

An americano and a long black: the difference

The bloody mary (vodka), ruddy mary (gin), virgin mary (alcohol-free) and the bull shot (beef broth instead of tomato). Has the added advantage of almost seeming like it’s something healthy to get. I always seem to end up ordering them on flights. Happy days.

Bloody marys

A microlife is thirty minutes of your life expectancy. You can use it up by chilling for 30 minutes or you could start to speed through them by smoking a few cigarettes or having a few drinks.

A simple way to bring difficult-to-grasp long-term, slow-burn risks into a unit that can motivate you and a handy way to compare risks.

Even better, you gain a microlife with 2-3 cups of coffee. Win!

Interesting? See Microlives: A lesson in risk taking, by Cambridge University Professor of risk David Spiegelhalter. Or see his 15 min TED talk: Motorbikes, Terrorism, Heart Attacks, Sausages: Professor David Spiegelhalter at TEDxOxbridge, or the full paper.

Microlife: The unit of life

Turns out a bunch of substances have the power to make you sleepy - tryptophan, vitamin B6, calcium, glycine, lactucarium and carbohydrates are some of the major ones. Some even interact with each other for maximum sleepiness. A few common foods with these compounds in good measure include:

turkey, walnuts - tryptophan
tuna, pistachios - vitamin B6
dairy - calcium
chamomile - glycine
lettuce - lactucarium

So an evening turkey or tuna, walnut, cheese and lettuce sandwich with a glass of milk and a side of pistachios or walnuts and you’ll be set for a good night.

Sleepy foods

How to make Irish coffee

Technique for draining a bottle quickly. Also see give air a pathway.

Sink a strawpedo

Vinaigrette, rehydration mixture and Pimms.

Useful mixtures and their proportions

Espresso: steam forced through coffee grounds

Filter coffee: water dripped through coffee grounds and a filter

Redeye coffee: espresso topped up with filter coffee

Clear the fog with a redeye

Disclaimer: I have not actually drunk this, nor do I recommend anyone to try it, but when I heard about it I thought it sounded pretty fun.

Drink porn fizz

The data vary, but for a medium-sized adult you can probably expect half of the caffeine from that 3pm cup of coffee to still be doing half of its thing about 7pm, 4 hours later. Apparently smokers deal with caffeine quicker and caffeine sticks around in children much longer.

You can expect about 10 minutes before it first kicks-in which, I suppose, is why if you’re feeling tired while driving it’s a decent plan to take a break and drink a coffee, then have a 15 minute nap. See tiredness can kill sketchplanation. Once it starts to kick-in you might hit peak caffeine any time from 45 minutes to 2 hours later.

Caveat: that chart visualisation is extrapolated from reported data, so the shape is approximate only.

Some references say longer, and some say, from 3-9 hours or so. My source which seemed pretty comprehensive was:

Bertil B. Fredholm, Karl Bättig, Janet Holmén, Astrid Nehlig and Edwin E. Zvartau, Actions of Caffeine in the Brain with Special Reference to Factors That Contribute to Its Widespread Use, Pharmacological Reviews March 1999, 51 (1) 83-133;

Tiredness can kill. Take a break

I regularly make half-caf coffee. I think there’s a gap in the market. Why is coffee so binary?

Adjust your daily caffeine intake

Make Vietnamese coffee

First gave this a go at the International Sports Bar, San Francisco. Be careful.

Make a Statue of Liberty sambuca

Tia Maria + orange juice. Surprising resemblance.

Sketchplanations tagged with drink