A sixty-centimetre counter, a boy of four, a boy of five weeks, and six brewers. I am keeping one. Which one, and why repetition matters more than equipment.
The counter in this kitchen is sixty centimetres wide, about the width of a bath towel folded once, and there are two children in the house now, a boy of four who can reach things and a boy of five weeks who was born in the first week of November, with the first snow, and who sleeps in a basket by the radiator like a loaf proving. I own six brewers, and a capsule machine that is no kind of brewer and that stays, because there is a five-week-old in the house and I made my peace with that last spring, and of the six brewers I am going to keep one.
This is the December I gave up on Plexflo, a decision I made in the autumn, in the hospital car park, and I have spent the weeks since doing what it required, which included a call to Bengaluru at an hour that was morning for them and night for me, in which I told a team of people I had hired, and liked, and asked to believe in something, that there would be no more salaries after the end of the year, and the line had that half-second delay that makes every sentence land twice. It was the hardest thing I have had to do in my working life, and I have nothing wise to say about it, and I am not going to try.
A few days before that call, a company in San Francisco put a chatbot called ChatGPT on the internet for anyone to talk to, and by the week I dialled Bengaluru the newspapers and the group chats were predicting the end of work, the clerks first and then the coders, and there I sat at the kitchen table ending a team's jobs by hand, with no machine involved at all, on a line that could barely carry a sentence across the ocean. I believe, more stubbornly this winter than before, that machines like that one will make far more work than they end, the way electricity put the lamplighters out of work and then went on to employ my father and me and millions more. The question I cannot put down, standing at the counter while the kettle ticks, is how it will change the way my sons learn, and what work and building will mean by the time they are grown, and I have no answer yet, only the question, which I carry about the house this winter in the same arms that carry a boy of five weeks.
On the shelf above the desk where I made that call there is an R&D 100 award and a row of company innovation plaques, polished and heavy and handsome, and during one of the silences on the line I looked up and did the arithmetic, and all of them together would not have made a single month of payroll in Bengaluru, and they have since found their true vocation as bookends.
Through all of it one thing held, which was that every morning I was grounded, quite literally, in coffee grounds, and the ten minutes at the counter, with the snow blue in the window and the baby breathing in his basket, were the only part of the day whose outcome I could still control, and I held on to them the way you hold a railing on an icy step.
So here are six brewers and one counter and the other question I am asked most often, which is simply: which one?
All of them work
The answer comes before the reasoning: every brewer in this note makes good coffee, and what predicts your coffee getting better is the number of mornings you have made it the same way and paid attention, the way a guitar player grows by playing the same three chords a thousand times on the same old guitar. So the right brewer is whichever one you will actually use, every day, followed by a year of buying no other, which nobody browsing a shop wants to hear, and which I least of all wanted to hear a few years ago.
Why there are so many
Coffee floats, and that single stubborn fact is the whole reason, because tea sinks, which is why a teapot can be a stout jug with a spout and nothing else, while ground coffee ebbs and swirls and clouds the water like silt in a river after rain, and every brewer ever invented is a different answer to one question, which is how to get the liquid away from the grounds, so that a shelf of gadgets is really a row of patient answers to the same floating silt.
Two families
Every brewer belongs to one of two families, and the real choice is between them.
Immersion. The coffee sits in the water for a time that you decide, and then you separate them, in the French press and the Clever dripper and the AeroPress and the cupping bowl and the cold brew jar, and immersion forgives like a slow cooker and gives a fuller body, and you control time directly, with a clock.
Percolation. Water flows through a bed of coffee and extracts as it passes, like rain through a flowerbed, in the pour-over cones and the flat-bottomed drippers and the moka pot and espresso, and in the steel filter that sits on kitchen counters all over Bengaluru and Chennai, two stacked cylinders and a pierced plate through which the decoction drips slowly into the morning (the note on Indian coffee has the method). Percolation is cleaner and more aromatic and more variable, and here grind and time and ratio are all tangled together, because the bed of coffee is itself the resistance the water has to get through.
One family is a bath and the other a shower, the soak and the rinse.
One brewer. A repeatable recipe.
The filter changes more than the shape
People argue about the shape of the cone, and all the while the material of the filter matters more.
Paper traps oils and the finest particles and gives the cleanest, clearest cup with the least body, coffee you can see the bottom of the mug through (rinse the paper with hot water first, or you will taste it, like licking an envelope). I respect paper the way I respect a well-kept ledger, and I have never loved it, because it takes the oils, and the oils are the part I want.
Cloth lets the oils through and holds the grit back, the body of a press without the mud, and it clogs and needs care and has to be kept wet in the fridge between uses like a sourdough starter (grind a little finer than for paper, because water runs through cloth faster).
Metal and nylon add no taste and make no waste, and their holes are large, so fines slip through and there is little resistance, and the fix runs against instinct: use more coffee, because a deeper bed slows the water down and saves you from grinding too fine. Metal keeps every drop of oil, and a dark roast through a metal filter, with that slick on the surface catching the kitchen light like petrol on a monsoon puddle, is my idea of a good morning.
Blooming, and what it is for
Wet the grounds with about twice their weight in water.
Wait half a minute.
Fresh coffee gives off gas, and the bed swells and bubbles and sighs like a sponge cake coming out of the oven, and that gas holds water away from the coffee, so letting it out first gives you an even bed and an even extraction. In immersion brewing, where you stir anyway, blooming does much less, and in a French press the stir and the long steep have already done its work, whatever habit says.
Starting recipes
These are starting points, tested at this counter over a year of mornings.
Weigh everything.
Let the cup cool four or five minutes before you judge it; hot coffee hides its taste the way a hairdryer hides a song.
The numbers below are water added, and the grounds keep some of it (see the extraction note), so the cup will be a little smaller.
Bloom 30 seconds, then pour in slow circles; finish in 2 to 3 minutes
Clever dripper
1 to 15
Medium-coarse
Pour, stir at 30 seconds, steep 90 seconds, stir, drain
AeroPress, upright
1 to 15
Medium
Pour, stir, seat the plunger to seal, steep 2 minutes, press gently for 20 seconds
Cloth, Tokyo style
1 to 12
Fine-medium
Bloom, then a slow spiral pour; finish in 1 to 2 minutes
Metal or nylon, big batch
1 to 15
Medium
Use more coffee than you think; bloom, pour, let it settle
Moka pot
1 to 5
Fine-medium
Hot water in the base to the line, grounds level and untamped, medium heat, off at the first bubbling
Cold brew
1 to 5
Coarse
Steep 12 to 24 hours, strain, keep for a week
Short opinions on each
French press. The most common home brewer in Europe, and unfairly maligned, because sludge comes from technique and technique can be fixed, and it keeps the oils, which is why I keep coming back to it, and the smallest pot you will actually use is the one to buy, since a big press half full cools like a bath left standing.
Skim the foam, plunge slowly, let it stand five minutes.
Pour a little into each cup, then top up, so the sediment shares out evenly.
Leave the last of the liquid in the pot.
The pointed cone. A wide opening and a fast flow, which you answer with a finer grind or more coffee, and it is the most rewarding of the pour-overs and the least forgiving, like a bicycle with no gears on a Boulder hill.
The flat-bottomed dripper. Ribbed sides and a slower drawdown make it the kinder choice for small doses that would otherwise rush through a cone.
The glass hourglass with the thick paper. It pours a cup of remarkable clarity and has sat in an art museum's collection and been a cult object for eighty years, and it also needs a lot of coffee to work well, and it strips a cup of its oils more thoroughly than anything else on this list, and a small counter does not love it.
The Clever dripper. A cone with a valve in the bottom, which gives you the control of immersion and the clarity of paper, and since you are steeping anyway you can skip the bloom; it is the best beginner brewer I know and it costs almost nothing.
The AeroPress. An accident, designed by a retired engineering lecturer who also invented a flying ring that holds the record for the farthest thrown object, and who was trying to make a cheap espresso alternative in his garage and made something else instead, the only brewer nearly indifferent to grind size and time, because it combines immersion and paper and a little pressure. There is a world championship for it, which began in Oslo with three competitors.
The moka pot. The single most misunderstood object in coffee and one of my favourites, a stovetop pot that makes a strong drink of its own kind, which people burn when they treat it as an espresso maker. Medium and dark roasts suit it, and a dark roast in a moka, thick and oily and almost sweet, is the cup I would take to a desert island, and I have written more about it in the note on espresso.
Fill the base to the line with hot water: less water means more headspace and a hotter, faster push, and hot water keeps the grounds from cooking while the pot heats.
Level the grounds; do not tamp.
Moderate heat, and watch it.
Off the flame at the first gurgle, that sound like the last of the bathwater going down.
Run cold water over the base to stop the brew.
The siphon. Theatre, and I enjoy the theatre, and it has one real technical advantage, which is that it is the only common brewer that holds a steady temperature through the brew, where a press cools throughout and a pour-over starts cool and climbs. It leans toward caramel and nut, and there is no room for it on this counter.
Cold brew. Different compounds come out cold, so the drink is low in acidity and keeps a week in the fridge, and the good trick is to bloom the grounds with a splash of hot water first and then finish cold, which brings some of the brightness back.
Prices I found for the common brewers in Indian retail. All of them make good coffee. The grinder in the previous post costs more than most of them, and matters more.
The paper filter has an inventor
She deserves her paragraph, and in it she is standing in a kitchen in Dresden in 1908, a housewife named Melitta Bentz who is tired of grit in her cup, and she tears a sheet of blotting paper from her son's school notebook and lays it in a brass pot with holes punched in the bottom and pours, and that summer the patent office in Berlin grants her a small utility protection, the modest cousin of a full patent, and by the end of the year she has registered a company with starting capital that would not today buy a cup of coffee. The cone shape came decades later, and every pour-over you have ever made descends from a raid on a child's stationery, and I think of her this month with a founder's envy, a woman who started a company for the price of a cup and whose company is still pouring more than a century on.
The actual answer
Choose by the morning you actually have, your honest constraint, and let the person you would like to be choose some other year.
One cup, want control, have three minutes: the AeroPress.
One cup, want clarity, willing to practise: the pointed cone.
Coffee for three people while doing something else: the Clever or the press.
Want it to taste like childhood, or Italy: the moka pot, done properly.
Coffee for eight: a metal filter and a big batch, or a good machine.
Boulder, November 2022
What I kept
I kept the Clever, because it is the one I reach for when I am tired, and this year tired has been most of the days and most of the nights, and the brewer you reach for when you are tired is the one that will actually make you better at this. The other five went into a box in the garage, next to the boxes of company letterhead, and one of them I gave to a neighbour, and the moka pot has already climbed back out of the box twice, because a man has to have some oils in his life.
Is a year really necessary? I cannot prove it, and I know that every time I bought a new brewer my coffee got worse for a month, because I had thrown away everything I had learned about the old one, like moving house and reaching in the dark for light switches that are no longer there, and a year is long enough to stop that happening.
One thing to do this morning:
Put every brewer you own except one in a cupboard.
Make coffee with the one that is left, tomorrow and the day after, and write one line each time.
The note on the grinder says where the money should go instead, and the note on water says what to put in the kettle, and the next one is about what happens when, with a company gone quiet and a baby asleep on your chest, you find yourself holding a bag of green beans on a free Saturday.
Questions this note answers
Which coffee brewer is best for a beginner?
The Clever dripper or a French press, because they are immersion brewers and forgive small mistakes. If you want one cup and have three minutes, the AeroPress. If you want the cleanest cup and are willing to practise, the V60.
What is a good French press recipe?
About 22 grams of coarse coffee to 330 grams of water just off the boil. Wait thirty seconds, skim the foam, plunge slowly, and let it stand five minutes before pouring. Leave the last of the liquid in the pot.
Is a moka pot an espresso machine?
No. It makes a strong, good drink of its own kind. Fill the base to capacity with hot water, use a medium-fine grind without tamping, keep the heat moderate, and take it off the flame at the first bubbling.
