A long coffee break

I've been taking a long coffee break. Continuation of Seriously Buzzed is pending, as the fall semester is over and other duties call. If you have coffee news or experiences you'd like to add, please contact me about becoming a contributor. Thanks for your patience!

Used coffee grounds help the environment

Today is Earth Day. Celebrated since 1970, Earth Day was created to encourage environmental awareness and create new goals to protect our planet.

If you haven't all ready seen the comic strips in your newspaper or online today, take a look. Comic strip cartoonists are in on the effort, publishing a comic in celebration of Earth Day.

They are many ways to take part in Earth Day efforts, today and every day. One way is to reuse your old coffee grounds.

What's so good about spent coffee grounds? They are especially good as a "green" material for composting. When composted with other "green" and "brown" materials, spent coffee grounds help keep organic waste out of landfills and act as a great natural fertilizer. They provide a good source of nitrogen, magnesium, zinc and amino acids. They attract more earthworms to loosen and balance the pH of soil and help retain water. According to testimonials, adding used coffee grounds to compost makes it rich with nutrients, producing lush and healthy plants.

There are many other uses for spent coffee grounds, including a bunch of fun uses from hair and skin care to clothing dye.

If you brew yours at home or the office, don't throw away those used coffee grounds! If you get your daily fix from a Starbucks or a local coffee shop, ask them for some old coffee grounds. Not all shops offer used grounds to their customers, but Starbucks' "Grounds for Your Garden," an initiative to reuse coffee grounds, offers free bags of the stuff to customers for composting.

So make your own fertilizer from spent coffee grounds, instead of using a product like Miracle Gro, a chemical fertilizer that harms soil. Be sure to add some lime to lower the coffee grounds' acidity level. If you'd rather buy some than make your own, Grow Joe is a natural fertilizer made with used coffee grounds.

Dunkin' Donuts offers Tax Day treat

You may have rushed to get your taxes filed and to the post office today. Now begins the 6- to 8-week wait to get your refund.

Dunkin' Donuts, however, wants to give us a little gratification right now.

Dunkin' Donuts are offering a free doughnut with the purchase of any size Dunkin' Donuts hot coffee at participating locations across the nation. Whether you filed taxes or not, the offer only stands today - April 15, Tax Day.

Dunkin' Donuts serves almost 1 billion cups of coffee every year. That's almost 2.7 million cups a day!

Starbucks lets customers pour their own coffee

The Clover single-cup coffee
brewer uses a vacuum-press
filter process to produce
results in 40 seconds.

In one of many efforts Starbucks is testing to create a better customer experience, Starbucks is letting customers pour their own drip coffee in some stores. Customers pay before or after serving themselves from the brewer placed near the condiment station. This decision was made in part to curb the decline in sales.

I have mixed feelings about this effort. On one hand, I'd be a content barista to have less questions to ask each time a customer orders coffee. Questions like "Would you like mild, bold, flavored or decaf roast?" and "Would you like room for milk or cream?" would be omitted if customers could just serve themselves. No more handing customers their coffee only to be asked to fill it up a little more or pour out some.

On the other hand, it would be a hassle to keep refilling and changing out the brewer(s) with ground beans when located on the opposite side of the store. And self-serve stations tend to get messy with spills no matter how often they are wiped down.

As a customer, I'd be happy to fill my cup with just the right amount of coffee to go with cream. While no one likes waiting in line, how about possibly waiting in 2 lines? Provided you get your cup 'o' joe at the busiest business hours, you would have to wait in one line to pay for coffee. OK. Then, you would have to wait in another line to pour your own cup, and from a coffee pot everyone has put their hands on (shutters at the thought).

Unless Starbucks are using what Cinda Chavich calls the "$11,000 hot java love machine": the Clover, a commercial-grade, single-cup coffee brewer. Starbucks tested the machine out for the first time in February, selling a fresh-pressed, 12-oz. coffee for $2.50. For my own personalized cup of coffee at the press of a button, it would be worth the wait and expense.

Coffee may lower risk of Alzheimer's

That's right: Just one daily cup of coffee may cut the risk of Alzheimer's disease, the most common kind of dementia, new research suggests.

Caffeine blocks the bad effects of high cholesterol found linked to dementia.

The University of North Dakota scientists' published report in the Journal of Neuroinflammation is based on research conducted on rabbits fed a high cholesterol food diet.

The rabbits given caffeine had a better blood brain barrier than those that did not ingest caffeine. This study confirms earlier research that caffeine intake protects against memory loss from aging and Alzheimer's disease.

And this is just one more good reason to love drinking coffee.

Wal-Mart to make coffee line

Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, will start selling six different coffees under the Sam's Choice brand in the US in April.

Wal-Mart will offer its customers the coffee experience in a 10- to 12-oz. bag for $5.88. By comparison, Starbucks 12-oz. bags of coffee costs between $7-$10 and Folgers Gourmet Selections 11-oz. bags of coffee cost between $8-$10.

The Sam's Choice brand of coffees will include an organic decaf coffee, fair trade certified and Rainforest Alliance certified coffees. Wal-Mart realizes that consumers are growing more and more environmentally and socially-conscious these days, so offering these coffees helps the consumers give back by purchasing sustainable products.

Touch sensitivity may affect taste

If given the choice between sipping your coffee out of a ceramic mug or a paper/plastic cup, then which would you choose?

If you chose the paper/plastic cup for any other reason than portability and fitting in your car's cup holder, then please enlighten me.

If you chose a ceramic mug, then it's likely you prefer to have a hold on something heavy and sturdy, right?

There may another reason to choose a thick-walled cup over a thin one, marketing professors Aradhna Krishna and Maureen Morrin have found: taste.

In a study to be published in April's issue of Journal of Consumer Research, 1,000 college students were blind-folded and given water to drink from sturdy and flimsy cups. Many of them gave harsher evaluations of the taste of the water from flimsy cups. These harsh evaluators were students with a low sensitivity to touch. Students who a high sensitivity to touch weren't as likely to have taste be influenced by the kind of cup they sipped out of.

People with a high sensitivity to touch tend to be better evaluators of noting when touch is important or not, like when you're sipping coffee. Touch-sensitive people are those of us who get so much satisfaction out of feeling silk, leather or similarly textured items, can't stand itchy wool sweaters and cut out labels/tags from clothing.