The baby of PourOver makers has a good style

Cafe Stal coffee maker

The Cafe Stal is a lovely little coffee maker and really good value too. It has almost 600ml capacity in the brewing and serving vessel which also features a stainless steel removable pourover filter. The heat resistant glassware is really simple and a delightful compact size. It has an acrylic neck for helping with your serving.

You simply add your ground coffee to the mesh filter which sits in the top section of the pourover vessel. Slowly wet the coffee grounds and let the coffee ‘bloom’ for 30s to 45s, then pour hot water very slowly in spiral or zig-zag motions over the ground coffee for a couple of minutes or so.

The coffee grounds will release their flavour as both aroma while your making the coffee and as the coffee itself which collects in the lower part of the vessel.

Once you’re done, remove the steel mesh, and sit down with a friend to enjoy your coffee – or on your own for a double dose of caffeine! You can later discard the grounds for compost, rinse the steel mesh and the vessel well and it’s ready for use again.

As an introduction to PourOver coffee making this device would serve really well – as it already has a steel mesh filter and is like a tiny version of a Chemex which feels like the granddaddy of pourover makers!

See more about the Café Stal from Rayware here.

Cafe Stal from Rayware
Cafe Stal showing mesh filter and glass chamber

A simple solution to having great coffee wherever you go.

Kalita Kantan

Do you ever go a way for a few days and get really disappointed with the quality of coffee that you can make for yourself to start your day? Our new stock of Kalita Kantan single cup filters could provide an answer!

There’s 30 in a pack and they’re easily transportable so you can have a way to rely on your coffee wherever you go. They come folded flat – you just pop them into the shape below and put them on top of your mug – scoop some ground coffee into the filter area and pour water slowly through the coffee grounds. They will fit most mugs, but not the very largest. Simple, quick and compact.

Perhaps you want a fun way for guests at and event to enjoy their coffee – how about a sample coffee pack and a Kantan filter to let them enjoy a bit of handbrew coffee making in their places.

Kalita Kantan on top of a mug
Ready for use – Kalita Kantan in situ atop a coffee mug

 

The Hario V60 Ceramic set a PourOver standard

Hario V60 Ceramic Dripper

To be fair, most of our products are favourite in some way or other – we love handbrew coffee techniques and like to keep trying all the different methods we can get our hands on.

One of the simple, relaxing, first ways that we embraced handbrew coffee was with the Hario V60 – it’s a ceramic conical device that sits atop a mug or jug. Into it you place a paper filter (which you can wet to remove any paper taste that you might otherwise detect). Into the paper filter you place ground coffee to a medium coarse grind.

Simply pour a small amount (perhaps 40g) of hot water onto the coffee grounds and let them swell, or ‘bloom’ for half a minute or so. This gives the coffee grounds the chance to wet through and ensures more coffee flavour is extracted.

Then in slow swirls continue pouring water onto the coffee and allow it to drip through to the mug or vessel below – take your time in this and enjoy the process.

You’ll achieve a more delicate flavour of coffee and slow down a little while you’re at it!

V60 from Hariohttp://www.artistrycoffee.co.uk/shop/proddetail.php?prod=D0021 is synonymous with handbrew coffee making and this simple well-designed piece of coffee making kit is a standard – literally setting the standard against which other pour-over devices have to measure up to gain worthy credentials.

Hario’s Drip In Server could be one of the best value handbrew coffee products

Hario Drip In Coffee Server

The Drip-In Server from Hario is a great combination item – it is a drip filter coffee maker, it is a coffee server too – stylishly serving up your favourite beverage! You can also use it for Cold Brew coffee.

If you’ve heard of the lovely classic Chemex pour-over coffee maker, we think of this as a value version – but it’s still quality as it’s made by Hario and has good pedigree as part of the V60 family of products.

As a glass serving jug with cup measures on the side, the Hario Drip-In Server looks good and sits well on a coffee or dining table.

This device can also make your coffee too – using the drip-filter method with ground coffee placed in V60 filters, of 02 size, in a plastic removable V60 frame which rests on the top of the glass server jug. Hot water is then poured-over the coffee grounds at a slow pace – first allowing the coffee to swell (or bloom) and then refilling the V60 frame and allowing the coffee to slowly drip through.

A plastic lid helps the brewing process and a stylish black handle robustly adorns the side of the server.

The Hario Drip-In Server is also great for pour-over-ice coffee making – to the process described above but with ice already placed in the jug – which the coffee pours over, cooling as it goes.

This device from the Hario V60 family is a really versatile coffee maker. If you also consider its the equivalent of a Range Server with a V60 drip filter in-built and it can serve 4 people easily you can see why we think it’s one of the best value handbrew coffee devices.

You can also find it featured as a key part of the Artistry Coffee The Drip Filter Kit.

The AeroPress :: One of our favourites for great coffee!!

AeroPress Series 5

One of our favourite products is the AeroPress that helped start our journey into handbrew coffee equipment and techniques.

It’s a straightforward easy to use product that creates great tasting coffee.

The AeroPress is possibly the simplest, most consistent, easy, and cost-effective way to make espresso-based drinks at home… without crazily expensive equipment!

The AeroPress is an amazing coffee maker – if you’re used to instant coffee the AeroPress will be an eye opener, as it barely takes more time than making instant coffee, yet tastes many, many, many times better!

The AeroPress is essentially two plastic tubes that fit together – one that you put the coffee and water into, and one that you use to push the water under pressure through the coffee. So the AeroPress creates the ability to get close to an espresso coffee with a simple, easy to use, portable, coffee-maker which is almost self-cleaning too.

(Of course espresso is used as the base for most coffee-shop coffees – so the AeroPress can also be a gateway to americanos – by adding more hot water, lattes or cappuccinos -by adding frothed milk (see our Cappuccino Kit including an AeroPress and a milk frother), and more…. )

The AeroPress is a great coffee maker and can fit with a very outdoors based life, as it’s so portable. It can be used on holiday, at the beach, on picnics, at work, as well as in the kitchen or at home.

There are increasingly opportunities to have your coffee shop coffee made with an AeroPress too. Many baristas do take this product really seriously – and World AeroPress Championships take place every year!

If you’d like to find out more about how the AeroPress was invented (by the guy who created the Frisbee!) then see here

The journey gets more serious? ….starting to discover pour-over coffee!

Hario Buono, and V60 Ceramic Dripper from Artistry Coffee

So for many of us coffee is a part of our life whether we think about it or not!

The question do you want a coffee has probably already been said to you or by you today, even if only in your mind to yourself!

However, to start to pay more attention to what your cup of coffee contains can be the beginnings of a journey that gradually increases in intensity.

There was a point when – rather than using drip-filter by accident (i.e. without realising) or french press because it sat there (thinking it was just a cafetiere: which of course it is!) – the idea of hand-brewing coffee became more than a means to an end, it became an enjoyment in itself!

This started with a V60 Ceramic pour-over: a cup-like thing with a conical shape and a hole in the bottom. You place a filter paper within it then add ground coffee and pour hot water over the coffee which then drips through to a mug sitting below.

This is a slow coffee making process to savour: not perhaps the best method to use if you’re in a rush!

But this is where a real enjoyment in coffee making started for me and my wife. The process of thinking about the coffee and what it was doing as you were making it became interesting, and the time taken in the pour-over coffee making started to be a relaxing routine.

Starting with the same ground coffee we were using from the supermarket, we enjoyed “blooming” the coffee by pouring a small amount of hot water for about 15 seconds to let the Coffee grounds swell; then pouring hot water gradually over the coffee for another 2 to 3 minutes whilst seeing gasses from the coffee bubble up a little.

Hario V60 Pour-Over Coffee Maker available from Artistry Coffee
A V60 Pour-Over Coffee Maker
Pour-Over Coffee Making Equipment available from Artistry Coffee
Making Pour-Over Coffee

The aroma from the coffee when making it, as the coffee interacts with the hot water and then drips though, adds to the pleasure – and this is heightened because of the slow process of the pour-over coffee making. We found that the coffee was much more pleasurable as black coffee than we had ever experienced before: which then took us to a new place in coffee appreciation.

Discovering pour-over coffee making was a great find, and we recommend it to all – when you have time to savour the process!

Water Temperature Experiments for Coffee (4):…

Buono Kettle with Thermometer

I started out looking at the temperature that boiled water reaches when it is left to cool – to think about having some guide for coffee making when just getting on with it rather than trying to measure every element, every time.

I quickly realized that it wasn’t as simple as that, and the water temperature depends on lots of things that can go on from the point of boiling.

So being in semi-scientific mode (a real scientist could probably tear my methods apart), I went off on an exploration of water temperature with some kitchen table experiments.

Having had a fairly simple start – by simply pouring boiling water into a jug and recording temperatures for 10 minutes. I then figured I needed to think about much more:

  1. If the water is held in vessels of different material
  2. If there is a smaller surface area, especially smaller top of the water, from which the water may lose heat.
  3. What happens when the water is not transferred from the water boiler (kettle).
  4. With those, I tried measurements in a ceramic mug rather than plastic jug which sort of covered 1 and 2 above. Nothing much to report there though.

    Measuring the water in the kettle itself was dramatically different (upto 15 degrees Celsius different at the same time since boiling in my observations).

    But still more to think about: The way I usually make coffee is either to pour first into a Buono kettle and then pour onto the coffee (either in one go into an AeroPress or over time as a drip filter). So I needed some other answers

  5. What happens to the water temperature in the Buono kettle?
  6. And perhaps most importantly, what is the temperature of the water as it actually hits the coffee?

To answer question 4 was relatively simple – simply pour the water straight from the kettle into the Buono and take the temperature readings from there. Answering 5 is a lot more complicated (that’s for next time).

The observations showed that there’s a cooling that goes very quickly, reducing the temperature by around 3 or 4 degrees Celcius, when the water is first poured into the Buono vessel – and that this temperature difference is then roughly maintained for the duration of the observations.

Darker line: observed temperature in boiling device (electric kettle), Lighter line: temperature in Buono Kettle (poured into from electric kettle)
Darker line: observed temperature in boiling device (electric kettle), Lighter line: temperature in Buono Kettle (poured into from electric kettle)

The observed temperatures from the Bouno kettle is the lower (lighter) line on the chart and you can see it approximately holds the relationship with the line above (the observed temperatures from the boiling kettle).

So this is logical, and in line with my first thoughts – that the initial pour into another vessel cools the water by a few degrees from boiling point (whether it be pouring into the plastic jug, the ceramic mug, or the Buono kettle). But the Buono clearly holds the temperature in slower rate of decine than an open topped vessel (this is science of some sort, but not really rocket science! Or perhaps it is!!!).

So I feel that this has all been helpful in coming to some greater understanding of what happens to the temperature of the boiled water, before it is poured onto coffee – but doesn’t get us to the answer of what is happening as the hot water it hits the coffee grounds (so that will be looked at next time….).

please note: boiling and hot water can be dangerous if not handled with care!
(despite the haphazardness of some of my approaches above, I did take some care and would suggest anyone else does the same: and children should be accompanied by an adult)

Gradually Piecing Coffee Learning Together…..

Coffee Making with Artistry

Through accident, experiment, and impediment it’s possible to gradually realise that there are better ways to make better coffee.

Realising not to pour on absolutely boiling water, realising that there are a wide variety of coffees available, realising that there are ways to become more consistent or methodical in your approach to coffee making, and that there is a choice of many ways of making coffee.

Piecing all this together brings an awareness that coffee making can be a bit of an art that you can enjoy for itself aswell as for the caffeine kick!

In fact each part can be made into a bit of an art. There’s the choosing of the coffee to buy, the decision about which way (brew method) to make your coffee, the process itself including the grinding of the beans, the pouring of the water, the timing of the process, and the method of delivery (which can be experimented with and varied to produce discernible, and perhaps sometimes not so discernible results), and of course the sitting down and savouring the result.

Basically you can take your coffee making as seriously as you want. If you know what you like and you know how to make it and don’t want to think any further than that, then fair enough. But if you want to you can explore the coffee and the coffee making process and even turn it into a new hobby! You can explore different tastes and simply enjoy learning the various processes that can be applied to the coffee to vary the flavour.

At Artistry Coffee we became fascinated by the old and new techniques that there are to create hand-brewed coffee: and have enjoyed exploring and collecting together some great products to make coffee with.

My main basic learning came about in the last decade through blundering around with various cafetieres and a simple one-cup drip filter maker. Gradually coming to some of the realisations above.

In the last couple of years I have:
– discovered the art of the pour-over method and greatly enjoyed taking time over the process of pouring and making the coffee
– discovered hand grinding, and explored various grind settings that affect the interaction of the water and the coffee grounds.
– and discovered that there really is so much to explore about coffee making. We have favoured exploring hand brewing options rather than anything with machines: as for us it feels closer to the coffee.
Experiencing the AeroPress coffee maker as a way to quickly make a cup of coffee that packs a punch was great, and it still remains a favourite.
As well as the ease and simplicity, and yes cleverness, of the Clever Dripper which has an innovative valve shut-off system to help serve the coffee.

I don’t think you ever end the learning about coffee beans and the growing methods though.

Enjoy making coffee, whether in straightforward ‘just get me the caffeine’ mode, or in ‘fascinated, artistic, exploration’ mode.