A universal caffenol recipe

Maybe you have heard of “caffenol”, maybe you haven’t. Maybe you just want to develop your film in a totally different and crazy way. Coffee is one of the ways. A film developer needs three things - a phenol, an accelerator and an alkali. Other things are just the fine tuning.

My universal caffenol recipe is based upon the pioneering work of Scott Williams at the Rochester Institute of Technology, published in 1995. The internet is awash with pages and pages of explanations of this experiment - with out any of the persons posting it having any idea how a film developer really works. You will read that it has to be - has to be! - instant coffee, that no other coffee will work. Guess what - it’s wrong. Coffee is just the phenol solvent, it even works in decaff. You can use any coffee you want, I regularly use the left over morning coffee from the hotel buffet. And it works every time. Every single one.

So here’s the results:

Universal caffenol recipe. (1 liter developer)

To one litre of coffee (your choice) first add 8 tablespoons of wash soda. Check the pH with a pH strip to make sure it is above 9 - above 10 is even better. If it isn’t (coffee is in itself acidic) add one more tablespoon . Stir to ensure it is all dissolved

Then add 2 tablespoons of table salt. If you use iodized table salt (against all the myths on the internet) you reduce the fogging that these alternative developers can produce. The iodide in the salt works just like pottasium bromide in a commercial developer. Again stir.

Now - carefully - make sure you have a vessel that is large enough to allow foaming - add 4 tablespoons of Vitamin C . Stir and let the solution sit until the bubbles have all subsided .

You now have a universal caffenol developer.

Why do I call it universal? Because you can develop ANY black and white film in it with exactly the same temperature and time curve. You can even stand develop and cross develop C41 film in it. Develop, stop and fix your film exactly as you normally would, using the caffenol as a one shot developer. Because I hate to agitate film for long periods of time I develop my black and white caffenol film at 30 degrees C for 8 and one half minutes with 10 second agitation every minute and constant agitation for the first minute.

You can push and pull - using the SAME DEVELOPING TIME - meaning that you can literally change the ISO of your film mid-roll and still get good results when you develop the film. If you’ve got a large tank and develop more than one roll at a time you can put (for example) ADOX CHS on one roll and Ilford FP4 on the other and develop them both for the same time - and get good results.

Have fun with coffee