Some Like It Hot

On a recent trip to my friend Norm's house, I enjoyed espresso from the super-duper espresso machine at his house. I sold my Jura espresso machine when I moved into an apartment and didn't have enough counter space. At Norm's, I was reminded how much I liked a well brewed cup of coffee at home. My inexpensive Braun drip coffee maker was fine as far as drip coffee goes. With some Peet's house blend, I managed to wake up most mornings.

On a post-Christmas shopping excursion, my friend Jim commented about about how vacuum coffee pots brew coffee at just the right temperature. That got me on an investigation of coffee technology and how I might upgrade my drip experience. Here's what I learned.

There are three basic steps in coffee preparation: 1) roasting the beans, 2) grinding the beans, and 3) brewing the coffee. I expect that I'll always depend on coffee stores to take care of the first step, although some intrepid coffee nuts even roast their beans at home.

In the second and third steps, home coffee brewers have to make trade-offs between expense, time to brew and clean up, complexity, and taste preferences. So, if you are happy with the coffee your drip maker produces, stick with it. It's the easiest and cheapest method. You might improve the brew by grinding the beans just before brewing, but you don't even need a fancy grinder to brew a good cup. An inexpensive grinder will do just fine.

If you want to spend a lot of money and you have a lot of counter space, the Jura mentioned above does about as good a job as possible automatically grinding and brewing espresso at the push of a button. But don't think that the high-end machines take no work. You have to fill them with water and clean them just like any other coffee system.

What is available in between a cheap drip system and an expensive automatic system? This page has a good summary of the options: drip, French press, vacuum, Moka-pot, pour over (manual drip), and Aeropress.

Based on my friend Jim's comments and my previous experience with French presses, I started my search with vacuum coffee pots. This page has a detailed history of the evolution of the vacuum coffee pot. It is a case study in incremental improvements in a technology. The magic of vacuum pots is that they introduce the water to the coffee grounds at about 200 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature deemed ideal for drawing out just the right coffee oils and chemicals. With manual vacuum pots, the brewer can steep the grounds as long as desired, so the brewer has great control over the strength of the resulting brew. Electric vacuum pots are easier than manual pots, but they lack brewing time controls. Much more on the trade-offs between manual and electric vacuum pots here.

Vacuum pots have three major drawbacks, though: 1) it takes time to make a pot, 2) it takes time to clean up, and 3) the parts break easily. The resulting coffee from vacuum pots is universally acclaimed, so vacuum pots are a great way to brew if you have time and you are careful. The current generation of vacuum pots incorporates a great deal of technology into very elegant designs.

Here's a beautiful old Sunbeam vacuum pot in action



I ended up buying the Aeropress, though. Why? Well, I don't have the Aeropress yet, so I can tell you only what I read. The Aeropress is a kind of upside-down French press that seems to avoid the thing I don't like about French presses, namely too many grounds left in the brew. Like the vacuum pot, the Aeropress receives universal acclaim for the resulting brew. Unlike the vacuum pot, the Aeropress is easy to use, easy to clean, and made out of plastic that won't break if you drop it. Both the manual vacuum pot and the Aeropress are portable, so you can take them camping and heat water on stoves or alcohol lamps. The Aeropress has an advantage that you can heat the water in a microwave, so it's simple at home and great for hotel travel.

After reading about how the vacuum pot brewed coffee at the ideal temperature, it was confusing that the Aeropress brews its best coffee at a temperature about 30 degrees cooler. The Aeropress people believe that the temperature difference may be a function of how the water cools as it flows through the grounds. My hunch is that different systems have different temperature and pressure points for optimal coffee extraction.

Oh, yes, and the Aeropress is about a third the price of a good vacuum press.

Having decided on a brewing system, I started learning about bean grinding. Or milling, as some would have it. The world of coffee grinders and coffee mills has the same trade-offs as the world of brewing systems. Coffee grinders that use blades are fine for drip coffee and may work okay for other brewing systems. The main advantage of the blade systems is price. The disadvantages are lack of consistency in fineness, and possible overheating and burning of the coffee during grinding.

The other way to grind, or mill, coffee uses burrs, and burr systems produce grounds of consistent fineness. Most burr systems available today use conical burrs. The first choice is a manual or an electric mill. In the electric mill world, the next choice is geared or non-geared. Non-geared electric mills are inexpensive, but can overheat like blade grinders do. Manual and geared electric burr mills avoid the overheating problem that blade grinders have. Manual has the disadvantage of longer grinding time, but the advantage of quietness. Geared electric mills are great, but usually noisy and always expensive. This Capresso grinder appears to be the same grinder as the one in the Jura above, and is currently the least expensive geared electric burr grinder I could find on the market.

I haven't figured out what coffee grinder to buy yet. I plan to try my blade grinder with the Aeropress to see what the results are. The next step is probably a manual grinder.

My surprise in the search for a good coffee brewing system was how hard it is to find a good solution, and how easy the solution I've found is. I'll follow-up after I've had a chance to try my Aeropress. Based on my reading, the best value coffee brewing system is an Aeropress using either a manual grinder or a Capresso geared electric grinder.

Here's how the Aeropress works.




Update: The Aeropress Espresso Maker is great. I noticed the difference when I upgraded from my blade grinder to the Capresso Infinity Burr Grinder. You can buy the more expensive silver version of the Capresso grinder, but the insides are exactly the same.