coffee as a developer

[steve_nicholls1]

I read with interest a thread on coffee as a developer for film

and figured

even though April 1st had gone the authour wasn't serious, however I

have

just come from my darkroom which smells very strongly of Esspresso

coffee.

 

I went to a site where some info was posted on why coffee might work

as a

developer but the dev times were very long and I'm an impatient

person. I

looked at the idea and created my own formula as a two bath

developer.

 

I had a 100 asa film I had shot with nothing important on it so

mixed up the

brew. My wife and I had made a pot of coffee so the first

ingredient was at

hand. I added a small amount of Metol to the coffee [no milk or

sugar] and

that was the first part done. The second bath was the alkali and

for this I

used Potassium Hydroxide.

 

I didn't think I would get anything at all from this brew but

when I lifted

the lid after the fixer there were images on the film, very faint but

images. The negs appeared to have very little infomation. I dried

them and

put a grade 4 filter in my Beseler and did a print. Amazing.

 

The tone range was superb very good black, very good white and

everything

in between. The thing that really amazed me was the grain

structure. APX 100

looked almost as fine as APX25

 

Formula:

 

Coffee Strong black as you get from the Esspresso machine that sits

on the

gas ring.

 

Bath one

 

300mls of coffee to 300mls water

a quarter teaspoon of Metol

 

Bath two

600 mls water

one and a half teaspoons Potassium Hydroxide flakes.

 

Temp about 26 - 28c

 

Bath one 10 mins

 

Bath two 5 mins

 

Do not rinse or stop bath between bath 1 and 2

 

Gentle inversion of the tank once every minute.

 

My film had already been shot at 100 asa but I would overexpose by 1

stop

[50asa] to get better density.

 

I hope you have fun if you try this.

 

Steve Nicholls

[levin_haegele1]

Steve,

after the first and second baths, do you contiue using fix, hypo, water, or does the whole development process just call for those two baths and nothing else?

 

thanks...levin

[msitaraman]

Those prints must have a real edge to them (weak joke).

 

BTW, I'm curious, does the coffee stain the film base ?

 

I've read about this before, <a href=http://www.rit.edu/~andpph/text-coffee.html>over here</a>, I realized. But congratulations on an original effort nonetheless. Apparently, the development of XTOL proceeded from speculating about the use of ascorbic acid as a developer.

[rolland_elliott]

Don't you guys have anything better to do?

Peace Rolland

[dan_brown1]

Far out, man.

[squareframe]

hopefully a Starbuck's marketing guy won't read this, else we'll start seeing racks of Tri-X and TMax along side bags of Verona and Italian Espresso.

 

I can see it now .. photo.net debates on what the best brew is for Delta 3200. times, dilutions, and favourite bean. I have heard the tonal qualities of TMax 100, simmered in a soup of the North African coastal java bean is marvelous. cannot confirm this however.

[bcarlson]

Steve, I'm heading down to starbucks right now, do you recommend the SSumatra, or the Kenya? I'm partial to drinking the Sumatra, so I think I'll try my temperatures a little hotter than you did (and shorten the times)... or do you pour it back into a decanter for warming before drinking? also, I'm thinking from now on we should refer to the liquid quantities in 'cups' vs. mL's... (gets me confused when I'm brewing 10-12 cups, then have to convert to mL's...)

 

Also, does this mean I have to use stop bath, and fixer in stead of cream and sugar? I mean I like stop bath and cookies as much as the next guy, but I don't know if I could get by without sugar...

 

:-)

Thanks for posting this unique idea... I just couldn't help myself,

 

Ben

[jan_eerala1]

Don't want to be a party-pooper, but in some way this formula reminds

me of the good old D-23, where only ingredients are metol and natrium

sulphite as a preservator. If the doctor forbidden you to use coffee,

try to develop the film with just metol alone, I'll think you still

get some maybe exellent exposures.

[katie_weidenboerner]

obviously if you are all here you have some knowledge of using coffee as a developer. for school i am doing a project along those lines and was wondering what the concentration of stopbath you used. did you just mix like the package said to do under normal development conditions or did you dilute it because coffee isnt as strong as the normal developer. if you could write me a message as soon as possible it would be much appreciated. thank you!