In the couple of decades since North America first started caring about its coffee, espresso has reigned as the king of the brews. If you wanted to make truly great home coffee, you had little choice but to spend upward of $1,000 on a brass-boilered espresso maker and specialty grinder.
But in the last 18 months or so, espresso has lost much of its lustre to cheaper, easier brewing methods that many in the coffee world say can make just as good a drink. High-end coffee shops and java geeks who once lived and died by pressure-brewed beans have rediscovered old-fashioned vacuum siphon pots, French presses, drip brewing (yes, drip!) and even a $30 specialty press-pot of sorts that was invented by the maker of the Aerobie, that Frisbee-like flying orange disc. Used properly, enthusiasts say, these brewers allow home-bound coffee hounds to do the near-impossible: to capture the complex smells and flavours of fresh-roasted coffee beans in liquid form in cup after consistently brilliant cup.
And so, for one progressively caffeine-jacked week, I holed up in my kitchen with a gram scale, a stopwatch, a thermometer, a “precision pour” water kettle, a hand-cranked ceramic burr grinder from Japan, plus five different coffee apparatuses and nearly $100 worth of freshly roasted, single-origin, micro-batch coffee beans that variously promised tastes of praline, orange, caramel, toasted nuts, tropical fruit, earth, cherry pie, citrus fruit, tarragon and crème brûlée.
I admit that I never did taste tarragon. But I did manage to make several of the best coffees of my life.
The Good
The first glass vacuum pot was patented in the late 1830s and the method hasn’t changed much since. Consisting of a large, lower glass bulb that you fill with water, an upper glass bulb that fits snugly on top of it and a glass siphon that connects the two, it’s an excellent party trick. As the water in the lower chamber boils, vapour pressure pushes it up the siphon into the upper compartment, where it mixes with coffee grounds. You stir, then let it steep for a minute, then remove the pot from the heat and the coffee gurgles and floods its way through a filter back into the lower bulb.
The vacuum pot I used, which is made by Bodum, was easily the most entertaining of the brewing methods I tried. Yet there are plenty of downsides: The siphon tubes, made from thin glass, are infinitely breakable, and between the careful heating, the requisite stirring and the precariousness of moving a pair of stacked glass orbs from the burner, the process is about as far as you can get from dump and brew.
After some fiddling, I managed to make a pot of crystal-clear brew that balanced nicely between earthy, caramel low tones and fruity highs. Which is to say that it was better than most of the non-espresso coffee I’d ever had. But getting there took a whole lot of bother. I moved on before too long.
The Not Bad
Since it appeared in Modernist Cuisine last year, there’s been a renewed interest in the Toddy, a cold-brewing system first introduced in the 1960s. The chief benefit of the method is its lack of acidity. (Toddy coffee has 67 per cent less acid than regular drip, the company says.) It’s simple, too: You dump most of a pound of ground coffee and two litres of cold water into a steeping chamber and then refrigerate it for between 12 and 18 hours. You then pull a cork from the bottom of the chamber and let it slowly filter into a jar, which you can store for two weeks. Whenever you want a cup, you mix the concentrate with boiling water, or cold water if you want to serve it iced. (You can even use cream or alcohol in place of the water, Modernist Cuisine’s authors enthused.)
