Patent Application
20170325623
Sweet tea is sometimes referred to as “the house wine of the South.” And in the past decade, its popularity has been spreading across this thirsty country. Both traditional and fast food restaurants are making sweet tea available to their patrons from coast to coast. In the last ten years, sweet tea has gone from a regional favorite to a national staple. Southerners have been taking their tea cold and sweet for a long time. Some of the oldest recipes for sweet tea can be found in 19th-century Southern cookbooks, including an 1878 one from Housekeeping in Old Virginia by Marion Cabell Tyree, a granddaughter of Patrick Henry. The rest of the country caught on in the early 1900s, particularly after iced tea was popularized at the 1904 World's Fair in steamy St. Louis.
In the recent years, Americans have been cutting back on soda and instead drinking beverages such as smoothies, flavored water, specialty coffee drinks and iced tea. The NPD Group, a consumer research company, says iced tea sales at fast-food and casual dining restaurants have gone up about 12 percent since 2001, while soda consumption slipped 2 percent last year. According to the Tea Association of the United States, an industry trade group, Americans have been drinking tea at a record rate, especially the already-prepared kind. Ready-to-drink tea has dramatically increased in the last 15 years, where sales have jumped from $200 million to more than $3 billion last year, and iced tea makes up nearly 85 percent of the tea Americans consumed.
There are two basic techniques for making iced tea: hot-brewed and cold-brewed. Hot-brewed—pouring boiling water over tea leaves, letting it steep a few minutes, removing the tea leaves, stirring in sugar and cooling in the fridge—is more expedient. But many believe that the slower, cold-brewed method results in a smoother, more flavorful iced tea that doesn't turn cloudy. For cold-brewed, the tea is steeped for 30 minutes or more in cold water, or longer in the refrigerator. In the restaurant business, hot-brewed tea is the tea of choice because a batch of teach can be brewed more quickly, which allows the restaurant to meet the needs of the customers better.
Stations have been designed to brew tea for commercial establishments such as restaurants and fast food/convenience stores. These stations use pre-packaged tea packets or bags, and near boiling water is poured over the tea to allow the tea favor to be released. For sweet tea, once the tea is brewed a large quantity of granulated sugar is added to the tea for sweeting, but the tea must be stirred to dissolve the granulated sugar that collects at the bottom of the tank or reservoir. This stirring step is manually effected and can lead to inconsistent results, unsanitary conditions (the mixer's hand, sleeve, wrist watch, etc. can often get wetted as the tea is manually stirred), and this also adds time to the preparation of the tea. Restaurant owners want to avoid manual interaction of the tea brewing station, but thus far there have been no satisfactory stations for making sweet tea that fully automate the procedure and reliably produce a consistent batch of tea.
To produce an automated sweet tea brewing station, one must account for the tea brewing process, the dilution process to convert the one part concentrated tea into a four part diluted tea for drinking, and incorporate the sweeting process that eliminates the need for stirring of the tea after adding sweetener. The present invention seeks to address these objects with a fully automated sweet tea brewing station.
The present invention is a tea brewing station that injects liquid sweetener into the hot tea stream at a selected interval to blend the tea and sweetener over the course of the brewing operation. By intermittently introducing the sweetener into the hot concentrated tea, the sweetener is mixed and warmed by the hot tea to promote absorption of the sweetener into the tea. The sweetener is added using a feedback system utilizing a pressure switch and a gas driven pump that provides volumetric accuracy at any viscosity or syrup temperature. The pressure switch on the pump may include a bleed hole to count the pulse on the pressure switch and then immediately bleed off pressure.
By introducing the sweetener directly into the hot tea stream, the sweetener is dissolved into the tea to obviate a mixing step. By intermittently introducing the syrup, the dissolving can take place over the entire tea brewing operation rather than all at once. Moreover, the diluting stream is introduced at a high velocity and angled to promote turbulent mixing of the tea and sweetener as eddies agitate the fluid and circulate the sweetener throughout the tea. This diluting stream is selected so as to be of a chilled temperature so that the fully brewed tea is ready to serve when the brewing operation is complete, as opposed to requiring a cooling or icing stage before serving.
The sweetening step is driven by the UCM 100, and begins with a pair of sweetener bibs 30, in the form of liquid syrup in ready to transfer packaging. The bibs 30 are connected to sweetener pumps 32, which are manipulated by a right pump switch 34 and a left pump switch 36, and driven by a carbon dioxide canister 38. The CO2 canister 38 pushes the sweetener through the pumps 32 and through the right sweetener valve 40 and left sweetener valve 42. The sweetener passed through the sweetener valves 40,42 and the lines converge at a Y fitting 48 and injected into the tea stream into the urn 20. An important feature of the sweetener delivery system is that the pumps are designed to deliver a precise amount of sweetener regardless of the viscosity, temperature, or flow characteristics of the sweetener. This is achieved by pressure switches 34,36 which include a bleed hole that can be used to count pulses on the pressure switches. As pressure accumulates from the CO2 canisters, the pressure is bled off in response to the pulse count to automatically deliver a constant volume of liquid sweetener without respect to its temperature or viscosity.
The brew station brews sweet tea with the dump valve 16 and adds sweetener from two different sweetener pump circuits through the sweetener valves 40,42. After a fixed thirty second delay from the start, these sweetener circuits operate to, for example, forty-two counts, along with the dilution valve. At thirty seconds from the end of the drip mode a high flow (two GPM) blending valve 22 opens for approximately thirteen seconds to blend the complete brew by a vortex action. This requires that the nozzle for the blend valve be slightly askew and off-center to swirl the water in the urn 20, generating the mixing vortex.
The brew sequence will now be described. The brew starts with the UCM 100 instructing the dump valve 16 to open for between four and one half and nine minutes. After three hundred seconds from the brew start, the UCM opens the dilution valve 26. After a thirty second fixed delay from the brew start, the UCM 100 opens the left sweetener valve 42 (left is the default priority) and then the right sweetener valve 40. The sweetener valves stay open until the first of forty-two counts from the pressure switches 34,36, which must be done within ten seconds. As soon as one count is made the left sweetener valve 42 closes and waits for ten seconds until the total default of 42 is reached. The feedback count will happen at different time based upon sweetener temperature, which is programmable 39-45 with a forty-two count default.
Once a sweetener bib 30 is empty and there is no pulse count from that side within sixty seconds, the system will switch to the other side, display “SWEETENER EMPTY,” backlight flashing. The brewing operation continues to brew on the other bib side while monitoring the empty power switch for one pulse. This pulse will happen when a new bib 30 is connected and may be many hours later, and the SWEETENER EMPTY display will be cleared. The continue button may also be selected after the empty bib is replaced to clear the error message. During the empty bib scenario, the full side will only allow eight brews of sweet tea until the empty bib is replaced and the sweetener empty message is cleared. This prevents an incomplete batch from being brewed due to exhaustion of the sweetener supply. Once the empty bib is replaced, the one pulse will be seen and clear the display to keep brewing without restriction.
Once the dump valve 16 closes, the drip mode time begins. The UCM 100 allows between four and one half to nine minutes of drip brew time for a brew cycle. The blend mode begins where the blend valve 22 opens for thirty seconds before the drip mode time expires and is programmable from 0-30 seconds. At the end of the drip mode, the brew is complete and the program returns to “Ready to Brew.”
The sweetener delivery system is driven by the CO2 canister and the pressure switches 34,36 and injects sweetener in specific volumetric quantities that is independent of temperature or viscosity. The pressure switches include a bleed hole to count the pulse on the pressure switch and then immediately bleed off pressure. Moreover, the sweetener can be introduced directly into the hot tea stream by angling the jet so that the two streams coalesce. Where the tea is falling vertically downward, the sweetener jet may be angled downward at an angle of between negative 45 and negative seventy five degrees so that the two streams created a confluence of the two streams. The hot tea serves to heat the sweetener, making the dissolving of the sweetener into the tea more efficient. Without this feature, the cooler sweetener is more likely to collect at the bottom of the urn and either require some manual mixing or require some other mixing step. Thus, the heating and mixing of the sweetener by introducing it into the hot tea stream overcomes the issues found in the prior art systems. In addition, the pulsing of the sweetener using intermediate shots of sweetener rather than introducing all of the sweetener at once allows greater dissolving of the sweetener. In one example, the sweetener is introduced for one second in every ten seconds over the course of the entire brewing operation, and this allows the sweetener to be introduced throughout the entire brewing operation. That is, if the brewing operation is six minutes then the sweetener is injected at intervals evenly spaced over the six minutes from beginning to end (the same with four and one half or nine minute brewing cycles). When the brew cycle is complete, all of the sweetener is evenly distributed and the need for stirring is obviated.
To enhance the mixing, the blend valve 22 delivers water through a high velocity jet to agitate and stir the tea mixture. The high velocity jet is preferably offset from the tea stream to swirl and agitate the tea mixture and create a circulation flow inside urn 20. By using chilled water as the dilution supply, the final brewed tea product is both blended and at serving temperature, allowing the beverage to be served at the completion of the brewing cycle and allow any necessary ice in the cup to last significantly longer. In the fast food environment, the preservation of the ice is important to customers who do not want their iced tea to be just tea minutes later.
As the high temperature concentrated tea flows from the brew basket 122 to the dispensing bin 110, the time for the complete brew cycle (the time from beginning of the flow of water through the nozzle 124 to the end of the flow through the nozzle) is stored in the universal control module 100. This can be a setting that is entered or selected by a user, or a fixed interval depending upon the application. A concentrated, high fructose syrup 128 or other liquid sweetener is introduced during the brew cycle through nozzle 126. Nozzle 126 is aligned with the nozzle 124 and angled downwardly, between negative forty-five degrees and negative seventy-five degrees from the horizontal, and more preferably about negative sixty degrees from the horizontal (see
In a preferred embodiment, the sweetener 128 is introduced at intervals spaced over the complete brew cycle. That is, the UCM 100 causes the sweetener valves 40,42 to intermittently open for ten seconds and then shut for a period selected so that the sweetener can be introduced over the entire brewing cycle. This gradual introduction of the sweetener into the hot tea allows smaller quantities of tea to be entrained into the flow 125, favoring greater dissolving of the sweetener 128. For example, if the sweetener 128 requires sixty seconds to dispense for a full tea brew taking nine minutes, the UCM 100 can be programmed to open the sweetener valves for twelve seconds every minute and forty-eight seconds so that after nine minutes the entire sweetener component will be delivered into the tea. In this manner, more sweetener is combined with the tea and better dissolving is achieved.
A second factor in the mixing process is the introduction of the diluting water through nozzle 140. Nozzle 140 delivers chilled water that mixes with the concentrated tea to produce a beverage that is pleasing to the taste. In the present invention, the nozzle 140 is angled downward and to the rear 142 of the bin 110, and the chilled water is delivered at a high velocity. When the chilled water 144 enters the bin 110, the angle at which it enters the bin creates a turbulent back flow with many eddies and currents that promote mixing of the beverage. In a preferred embodiment, the velocity of the diluting flow 144 is at least twice the velocity of the flow of tea 125 exiting the nozzle 124. This high velocity, angled flow guarantees a high degree of mixing of the beverage in the bin and eliminates the need for a manual mixing step post-brew cycle.
The foregoing describes a one step tea brewing operation where brewed tea, diluting chilled water, and liquid sweetener are combined at multiple intervals to yield a fully mixed sweet tea beverage that is cold and ready to serve to customers. There is no need for workers to hand mix the tea after brewing, or chill the tea after brewing so that it can be served to patrons. Thus, the brewing station is more efficient, more sanitary (since no mixing utensils or hand-held objects are needed to stir the mixture), and more reliable (since precautions are in place to prevent partially brewed batches). The brewing station of the present invention represents significant advantages over prior art tea brewing stations, and these advantages improve both the performance and desirability of the present invention.
While the foregoing descriptions and depictions represent the inventor's best mode of making and using the present invention, it is recognized that there may be various modifications and substitutions that would be known to one of ordinary skill in the art. What's more, these modifications and substitutions do not depart from the scope of the present invention, and in fact these modifications and substitutions are intended to be included as part of the invention. Thus, the present invention should not be interpreted as being limited or confined by any of the exemplary embodiments described herein, and the scope of the invention is properly determined by the words of the appended claims, using the plain and ordinary meanings of the words therein, in light of the foregoing descriptions.
