A Breathtaking Brew with the CoffeeMeister

by Erin Meister, Posted Oct 20th 2009 @ 3:00PM

A Japanese siphon pot in Portland. Photo: Erin Meister.

Erin Meister trains baristas for North Carolina-based Counter Culture Coffee and sporadically maintains the blog Meet the Press Pot from her home in New York City. This is part of a series for the caffeine-addicted.

If some of your favorite things are "Gossip Girl," health-care-reform debates and game 7 of the World Series, it sounds like you might be drawn to the dramatic -- which says to me that maybe you'd like to try brewing coffee in an über-theatrical Japanese siphon brewer.

Ah, yes: the blazing heat, the cauldron-like bubbling, the unpredictable drop of the finished java and the clean, dynamic coffee flavor. It couldn't be more dramatic if it were directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

How does it work? Find out after the jump.

Believe it or not, it's actually pretty simple: Water is heated in a base container that is connected to a top piece (where the ground coffee will go) by a tube, at the top of which is a filter. When the water is heated enough, it pressurizes and draws through the tube to mix with the grounds. Once taken off the heat, the now-brewed coffee passes back down through the filter, depositing a delicious elixir in the bottom and leaving the spent grounds up top.

If that's hard to picture, just check out this great time-lapse video of barista Chris Owens making a pot at Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea's newest café in Venice, Calif., taken by Flickr user tonx:

Vacuum technology has been used to brew coffee since the nineteenth century, with myriad glass and metal tools for the task being developed throughout Europe. The double-glass bowl Cory vacuum pot, for instance, was a familiar sight on stove tops everywhere from the 1930s until about the 1950s, when the last of the modern types was created. That is, until now.

Thanks to a strong and thriving coffee culture in the East, glassware companies like Hario are forever dreaming up new and impressive ways to make coffee -- not the least-impressive of which are the newest vacuum pots, which have created a bit of a renaissance for the method. The use of halogen lamps or even small butane burners ups the exhilaration quotient exponentially. The beautifully designed, delicate models are almost as stunning on their own as they are mid-brew. There are even annual siphon-coffee championships held in Japan -- and they're a real sight to behold, too. (Here's a video of a recent champ making siphoned coffee using halogen heat at a recent Specialty Coffee Association of America trade show.)

Do you like your coffee dramatic, or do you prefer a cup of something more, well, sedate? Tell us in the comments.

Filed Under: Drink Recipes
Tags: coffee, coffee brewing, coffeemeister, siphon, syphon, vacuum pot, VacuumPot

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Reader comments (Page 1 of 1)

10-20-2009 @6:03PM Peter said... I use a Bodum Santos vacuum pot and get the same results with no drama, but it's still interesting to perform and watch each time. :)

The goal, and it takes a bit of practice, is to get a perfect cone of spent coffee in the center of the top bowl after it finishes "sucking" the brewed coffee into the lower bowl... it's all in the stir!
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