Caffenol Q (with Hydroquinone)

A brief search in internet, and I found nobody tallking about this combination of coffee and Hydroquinone, one of the standard developing agents used in many developers of several brands, Kodak, Agfa, Ilford and so on. Alone or combined with Metol, the more soft brother that lowers the contrasty pictures developed by Hydroquinone, which alone may be used only for paper or in lithography negatives where high contrast is desired.

Many people are convinced that coffee has a natural brother, this would be the Vit. C. The mix of coffee and Vit. C is indeed very good, it turns coffee in a decent developer, not so grainy and foggy.

Now, in a series of tests I undertook, I have found that Hidroquinone also is a good brother of coffee.

First of all, I prepared 10% solutions of coffee and hydroquine, the last one in a methanol solution. From each of them I prepared 250 ml bottles. Then I mixed 10% of the 10% sol. of hydroquinone with 90% of the 10% solution of coffee (in this solution I putted 0,5% sulfite for better conservation). I had then 50 ml of stock solution containing 1% of hydroquinone and 9% of coffee. To this stock solution I called Caffenol Q, Caffenol Hydroquinone.

Then I used a 5% solution of soda with 0,05% Potasssium Bromide as activator for the developer, using only 10ml/500ml to develop a Shangai 100 ISO film, during 1 hour at 20ºC, followed by normal wash and fixer baths.

Here is one of the photos:

Old typical house

Final note: very good negatives, good contrast and highlights, very little grain. Only one problem, I don't know if I live enough to use all that stuff. Maybe you can help me, besides I need to test other mixtures, Phenidone for instance.