The combination of dwarves and coffee is a dangerous one, particularly when machinery is then added to the mix. Despite this Blenkinsop's Aethergrid Coffee House is a successful pioneer of these combined forces of industry. Located in Camden near the market in a Warehouse converted for the purpose, the Aethergrid Coffee House is the brainchild of Isabella Blenkinsop and grew out of her own obsession. A Clacker (slang for a babbage engineer and programmer) of phenomenal ability, Blenkinsop had originally purchased the Warehouse as a private retreat for her own work on Babbage Engineering. Obsessionally working late into the night for days on a time took a toll on her constitution and she required a potent stimulant to keep working at such lengths, and it was about this time that the Stanley Coffee Company created the great coffee boom. Quickly becoming a coffee fiend herself, Blenkinsop ordered many sacks of coffee bean to keep her supplied and filled a large portion of the warehouse with the coffee, whilst installing a large coffee grinder and perculator to keep a "pot on the boil" constantly. Over the successive weeks Blenkinsop became quite adept at creating the perfectly blended cup of super-caffinated coffee, whilst her studies reached the limits of the technical capabilities of her lone babbage engine.

Realizing that she would have to upgrade to a more recent model of Babbage Engine, Blenkinsop worked on improvements to the coffee perculator whilst a dwarven engineer installed the second Engine. During occasional breaks for coffee, the dwarf discussed her work on Babbage Engineering and clacking and soon Blenkinsop noticed that he was spending more time drinking her coffee than working. In fact the engineer began calling round for more coffee even after he had installed the second machine. Soon Blenkinsop had reached the limits of the processing power of the second engine and of her funds. Unsure how to proceed with her project, she asked her dwarven companion his thoughts on the matter...thanking this prodigy for the honour of consulting him he remarked "Two heads are better than one" and Blenkinsop had an epiphany. Dusting off and repowering her old Babbage engine she began creating a series of connections between the this and her latest machine, her prototype connection being a logic gate style morse telegraphic system, which tapped out communication between the two machines. This rythmic clacking was soon a persistant sound throughout the warehouse. Thus she was able to combine the processing power of the two machines, allowing her to synchronise their operation and process two different problems symultaneously, cutting the length of time complex calculations took by half.

This still left the problem of funding however, but this was soon solved by the enterprising Miss Blenkinsop. Blenkinsop hit upon the scheme of turning an area of the warehouse over to serving her own blend of Super-caffinated coffee, and through word of mouth and the addicitive properties of caffine soon found herself with a regular clientelle. Mostly these were made up from the Dwarven community of London, either on their way to or from their workplaces, and this meant that the predominant discussion were around the subject of engineering, especially babbage engineering. As her profits increased, along with her network of contacts, Blenkinsop was able to lay her hands on cheaper calculation engines or broken ones easily repaired. Occasionaly Blenkinsop would repair Babbage engines for clients or sell ones that she had modified for specialist purposes herself.

Eventually, the coffee house expanded due to demand, and space in the rest of the warehouse was at a premium. Blenkinsop had amassed a large collection of calculation engines, and as her processing requires expanded she simply bolted another one onto the grid with her discursive modulators. She had since refined the qualities of the modulator to now react to a system of tones (developed by the famous musician Doctor Phibes), so that it was no longer a simple logic gate system but capable of fuzzy logic processing. These Morse-Phibes Tonal Clacking Discursive Modulators allowed for far greater volumes of complex information to be passed between machines and the Warehouse was filled with the Shouts of caffeine junky dwarves competing with the hiss of the perculator and the whistling orchestra of babbage engines.

Isabella was tired of the constant requests of the community of dwarven engines to spend time tinkering on the calculation engines behind the coffee shop and her business sense once more sped into work. Closing the shop for a week (during which times incidences of Dwarven related violence shot up according to Scotland Yard statistics) she set about a vast refurbishment of the Warehouse. Expanding the area of the coffee shop to include her babbage engineering workshop she installed workstations at each engine and created a business phenomenon. When her customers returned for the grand re-opening, it was remarked that this was the first ever recorded incident of a room full of dwarves crying. Combining the two passions of this section of the dwarven community, coffee and calculation engines with the eye of a business woman, Blenkinsop sold her coffee whilst leasing out calculation time on her engines. The engines themselves were linked to each other allowing Blenkinsop to use any spare processing power on her own projects and allowing dwarven engineering projects to flourish in this hothouse of ideas.

The coffee house is unusual in that it appears to have no closing time, for there is rarely a moment when each workstation is not occupied. Occasionally clockwork game tournaments are organised on special event weekends amongst her clientelle and Blenkinsop has been known to take on "special projects" when the vast processing power of her aethergrid is required for urgent and complex calculations.