"siphon" news and stories

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.

Forget your percolator: this is siphon coffee.

The newfangled machine looks more like it belongs in a chemistry lab than your local cafe, but that seems to be half its appeal. It's a siphon bar, it costs $20,000, and it lives at Blue Bottle Cafe in San Francisco, California. And it's certainly is fun to watch:

Essentially, there are several burners, each with a glass or metal bulb suspended above. You put your coffee grounds into one, and your water into the other. You light the burner, and as the water heats, it is pushed through a pipe into the coffee grounds. The coffee brews, and when it is finished, it is sucked back through the pipe to the first canister, where it waits patiently until it is consumed. The bar allows baristas to do this process several times simultaneously, like in the photo above.

Now, just to reiterate: this machine doesn't make espresso, or froth your milk, or contain storage containers for cocoa and cinnamon. It just makes plain ol' coffee. But fans of the machine say the taste is extraordinary, because the process keeps the water at just the right temperature when it mixes with the grounds, creating a heavenly cup.

If this sounds appealing to you, luckily, there are cheaper siphons (also called 'vacuum coffeemakers') currently on the market, like the Bodum Santos Vacuum Maker (from $55 to $80, depending on where you look) or the Yama 8-cup Vac Pot Siphon Brewer (about $50).

But if you want to get the true experience of the siphon bar, you'll have to head over to the Blue Bottle Cafe.

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