[Avodah] Starbucks coffee and nosein ta'am

Zev Sero via Avodah avodah at lists.aishdas.org
Tue Sep 26 21:47:13 PDT 2017


On 26/09/17 14:54, Micha Berger via Avodah wrote:

> Personally, I doubt any Starbucks with an A rating from the health
> department actually puts dishes in hot water without soap with enough
> regularity that you have to worry about the possibility WRT kashrus.

They wash in soapy water first, and then in clear water.  The cRc's 
position is that soapy water, which is hotter than yad soledes bo but 
cooler than kashering temp, prevents the transmission of treife taam 
from one keli to another when they are washed together, but it does 
*not* render the treife keli permanently pagum.   The treife keli comes 
out just as treif as it was, so when it's then put into *clean* hot 
water together with the kosher keli the treife taam transfers.



> The one bit of kashrus I don't "get" is how grossly we overestimate
> the size of a taam of something. We require bitul beshishim of the
> volume, because this is the only way to guarantee bitul beshishim of the
> ta'am? Are we saying that a pot that gained so little taam basar so as
> to show the same weight on a food scale may have picked up so much meat
> that we should use the volume of the pot to guarantee bitul?

Halacha seems to take the position that taam has no physical substance 
at all, so it's not surprising that even if it permeates the keli's 
entire structure, which we assume it does, it doesn't add to its mass.

This is also why the bracha on coffee is shehakol, not ha'etz, because 
there is no substance of the coffee bean in the final product; only 
taam, smell, and colour are transferred in the brewing, all of which are 
assumed to have zero mass.  Which makes the existence of instant coffee 
a conundrum, and casts doubt on the practise of saying shehakol also on 
coffee made from instant.


-- 
Zev Sero                May 2017, with its *nine* days of Chanukah,
zev at sero.name           be a brilliant year for us all



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