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!
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.
Ready for use – Kalita Kantan in situ atop a coffee mug
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.
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.
Great for lovers of coffee – the #Hario Mini Mill Slim Grinder is a compact hand coffee grinder.
It has adjustable burrs to enable you to control the grind size that you need – very fine grind for Espresso coffee makers, to coarse grind for Cafetiere or French Press coffee makers.
It’s easy to use – simply pop your choice of coffee beans in the top mini-hopper affix the lid and grind handle and turn the handle. The ground coffee gathers in the plastic chamber below – the Mini Mill has capacity for two cups worth of ground coffee.
It also has a bigger cousin: the Hario Skerton which is a coffee maker with more capacity in both the top hopper and the chamber below (this time made of glass): Find out more on our main website.
The ecoffee story could be one of colour, of design, of environmental concern, of practicality, of individuality. In fact it’s all of these.
The wide range of patterns and designs make the ecoffee cup a colourful attractive cup which can be a little expression of individuality every time you have a coffee.
The ecoffee cups available at artistrycoffee.co.uk are reusable takeaway coffee cups. They could give you a discount on your next takeaway coffee from your favourite coffee shop as increasing numbers are offering discounts if you use your own cup rather than a throwaway cup. So everytime you use your own cup you could be making a positive difference to both your wallet and the environment.
The problem with a lot of own cups is that they can affect the taste – giving a hint of plastic or metallic taste – or are heavy (ceramic cups). The ecoffee cup is light and durable, yet has none of these taste effects as it is naturally sterile bamboo fibre.
The problem of waste from takeaway cups has now reached the news headlines on more than one occasion and the government is considering a surcharge on their use, so the ecoffee cup can represent your own response to this issue. A thin plastic coating is present in most takeaway cups, which is very difficult to separate in normal recycling operations, so the sad story is that despite most of us thinking for many years that we were recycling – we weren’t! The cups have generally ended up in landfill. Using your own cup puts you in control and ensures you’re not contributing negatively to this issue.
The ecoffee cup is made from naturally organic bamboo fibre combined with a non-GMO corn starch and a resin binder. The lid and sleeve are food grade silicone. Bamboo is fast growing, quickly renewable and sustainable. It doesn’t require any pesticides or chemicals and absorbs a third more CO2 than an equivalent area of hardwood trees.
An ecoffee cup can last indefinitely if you take care of it, but the cup is naturally biodegradable at the end of its lifetime and the silicone lid and sleeve recyclable with kerbside recycling.
It’s not insulated, but will keep a drink warmer for longer than a takeaway cup.
The ecoffee cup is suitable for vegans as it contains no tallow or other animal products.
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!
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.
A V60 Pour-Over Coffee MakerMaking 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.
This series of posts started from a fairly simple question in my head – what is the rate of cooling of water from boiling – to have some sense of what temperature coffee making is conducted at when there are no thermometers to hand! It has turned into a rather more complex investigation than first thought – but has been at least a little fun along the way. Here, were close to the end of my write-ups!
We’ve already covered that when transferring water after boiling from an electric kettle into another vessel such as a Buono kettle (in order to achieve greater accuracy for pour over coffee making) there seems to be about a 3 or 4 degree Celcius loss of temperature straight away.
So this post is about the expectation that as the water is then poured from the Buono onto the coffee grounds themselves there is likely to be another (notable?)drop in temperature.
That was the expectation and indeed has been exactly what I observed in my experiments.
In order to attempt to measure this effect, I rigged up a set-up (imperfect, but trying to get close to something realistic) where I could pour water from the Buono spout directly onto the bulb of the thermometer. That’s the closest I’ve been able to construct to something reasonably meaningful.
I conducted most of my previous efforts over a 10 minute observation window – however the idea of pouring water from a Buono kettle for 10 minutes was never going to be achievable – I did try and control it well, and managed around 5 minutes each time, which I think was a good achievement (also meant my rate of pour should have been similar on each attempt).
Top Line (darker) : Observed Temperatures in Electric Kettle Next Line (mid-tone): After being poured into Buono Kettle Bottom Line (lightest): Temperatures of the Pour
The temperature within 30 seconds had dropped to 90 degrees Celcius, but took till almost 6 minutes to drop the next 5 degrees – by which point it was almost equal to the observations of the temperatures achieved in the Buono kettle itself(with no pouring).
That line on the chart that resulted did puzzle me at first – although the greater initial drop in temperature made sense, the slower rate of decline in the following minutes than observed in the kettles did seem odd ( I haven’t worked all the way through this yet, but I think one of Newton’s Laws does help – I need to look into that a bit more, and will try and write something in a few days).
What also seemed odd is that the water poured from the Bouno (having been poured in the Bouno from the electric kettle) was at a lower temperature in the earlier moments of observations than the water in the open-top vessels.
Top Line (darker): Temperatures in Electric Kettle Next Line (mid-tone): After being poured into Buono Kettle Bottom Line (lightest): Temperatures of the Pour Yellow Line: Temperature in open-top container
OK – only for 30 seconds, but that it crossed the line, then crossed back again made me think that this science lark was just far too complicated!
But here could perhaps be the most important thing to understand from these experiments – that the pour itself is where the temperature changes the most (pouring from the kettle used for boiling, into another vessel in the first place, and from the pouring vessel onto the coffee).
And therefore different styles of pour, durations of pour, or methods of dealing with the water will mean that the temperature, in effect, on the coffee is different.
This is where the water is coming into most contact with the air (or perhaps more importantly (scientifically) the much lower ambient temperature) and so is losing the most heat.
So I guess one of my biggest conclusions is that when we’re talking temperature we may or may not be talking the same thing – the temperature of the water can change greatly quite quickly depending on how it is transferred from the boiling vessel to the coffee.
Water that is the same temperature for 2 different coffee making techniques at the starting point could actually be at very different temperatures when hitting the coffee grounds seconds later.
This coffee making really is both an art and a science!!
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)
Instead of being one simple set of experiments to while away an afternoon and get the brain cells working – this little exploration has actually turned into a set of experiments and blog notes and pseudo scientific activity that has occupied rather more than the initial expectation!
Where we’ve travelled so far, I think, is that the temperature of the hot water as it hits the coffee could vary perhaps rather a lot – affected by all that can happen between the boiling of the water and the drips hitting the coffee.
What I seem to be able to conclude so far is that if the water remains in the kettle it retains its temperature much better than if poured into another vessel. If this other vessel is closed top (e.g. Buono kettle) the temperature will perhaps drop 3 to 4 degrees on the initial pour from the kettle, then hold at a slower rate of decline than if poured into an open-top vessel (where over a few minutes the temperature difference may easily be 10 to 15 degrees Celcius).
All of that fairly logical (and some would say obvious or a matter of common sense perhaps), but I’ve found it rather interesting to be able to place some (amateur) quantification on what’s going on, and helpful to think through what may be affecting the readings.
But the key issue is perhaps what temperature the water is as it hits the coffee. And for my own normal coffee making at home, this involves first pouring the boiling water from the electric kettle into the Buono, and then pouring from the Buono onto the coffee grounds themselves.
So the idea that there might be a second heat loss as poured from the Buono kettle seems to be a logical expectation, and that’s exactly what we get – but the results did puzzle me at first.
(I’ll write that up next post…..)
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)
