Coffee Coffee Coffee!

I first started really drinking coffee when I was living in Melbourne, Australia.  I was 21 at the time, and had never been exposed to a place with so much coffee culture before.  During my nearly year long stay in the city, I was living in a hostel and cleaning the common areas to pay for my room.  Without fail, each day I would find enough money in the chairs and couches to pay for a latté and a muffin at my all-time favourite coffee house, Cafe No. 5.

Ever since then, I have truly enjoyed the beverage.  In my opinion, there is no better way to relax than with a good, high quality cup of coffee.  However, I have always been faced with a proper dilemma: I don’t have money to buy coffee every day, but I want to drink a good cup every day. So, lately I have been trying numerous different ways of making good coffee at home.

I own a terrible coffee maker which I no longer use for a few reasons.  Primarily, it doesn’t get the water hot enough to properly brew the coffee and accordingly, the coffee isn’t even hot enough to enjoy when it’s ready.  Additionally, it uses a glass carafe which sits on top of a heater.  Rather than keep the coffee “warm” it more just burns it, which is not exactly ideal.  Needless to say, I was looking for a better solution.  

The simplest solution I could conjure up was the standard pour-over method.  I’ve been using this method for quite some time now and I have achieved some great results.  

My super cheap solution

Basically, I put a bottomless cup lined with a paper coffee filter on top of my coffee mug and pour hot water, just off boil over top.  The brew drips down into the mug and the whole process takes about 7 or 8 minutes from the time I begin boiling the water.  Here is a wonderful video explaining the proper method and the intricate chemical processes that occur during:

 

Although the pour-over method has been effective for me, I’m not completely satisfied with it.  My main complaint is that I do not own either a high quality filter such as the Kone, or a proper pour-over kettle.  As much as The Kone filter is something I would like to own, it costs about the same as a week or two of groceries (depending on how thrifty I’m feeling.)  Similarly, a proper pour-over kettle - which would hopefully stop me from spilling everywhere - is well out of my price range.

To get myself out of this predicament, I am going to design and build a siphon coffee maker, as described on Wikipedia. These typically cost hundreds of dollars to buy new, but I am confident I can build one for less than ten.  Here is a video demonstrating your standard siphon brewing in action:  

The key points with siphon brewing are as follows:  The heated vessel needs to be air-tight, with only a path for the water to travel to the coffee grounds.  Once the water begins to boil, it is forced through the tube into the other vessel.  Once the coffee has brewed for a minute or so, the device is removed from the heat and the coffee will flow through a filter on the end of the tube, back into the original vessel, and you have your finished coffee.  My solution is going to be a variation of this using an erlenmeyer flask with some copper, or perhaps glass, tubing.  I threw together a quick model to give a better idea of what I mean:

Preliminary Siphon Brewer Concept

I’m in the process of finding a suitable flask so that I’ll be able to put this together.  I look forward to testing it and letting you know how it works out.  Updates to follow!