This little guy won the Best New Product award. Congrats to both companies! 

My take: the scale integration seems solid. Spinning the (usually stationary) outer conical burr really helps with grind retention (6g left when you close the hopper) and shortening the bean path; which is great news for cleanliness and efficiency. Here’s the view down the neck, without the centre burr:

Fancy lightbulb things and vacuum pump aside, there’s only one really important and interesting thing going on here: the coffee undergoes multiple extractions. The bed becomes dry between each cycle, which kicks the extraction yield up to around 26% and potentially 30%. This style of extraction is commonplace in chemistry when trying to extract the hell out of things, and it works. The brewer itself is still in super beta mode.

Kalle Freese of Sudden Coffee made me some instant coffee. If regular nice filter coffee is a 10, this stuff is a 7. A lot of the filter coffee I drank on the show floor was a 5, so this was pleasantly surprising. The video above is of Kalle steaming instant coffee in milk, aka Suddenccino™.

Think of a syphon brewer on steroids that’s been over-engineered to within an inch of its life. The above photo is also a video of the brewer draining. It’s really just a super-showy full immersion batch brewer that sucks the coffee down and has lights that make it look like cranberry juice.

Bunn doesn’t have this on their website, and I forgot the name (sorry), but it’s kinda cool. The paper roll feeds beneath the brewing chamber, the plastic funnel thing presses down onto it, fills with coffee and water, and it gets sucked through (2016: the year of the vacuum pump). The brewing mechanics looked solid, but the coffee being used was terrible, as per (all machine manufacturers are guilty of this, at every trade show, ever).

This guy was surprisingly ok. Not too sweet, great texture, a little weak on the coffee. Most importantly: punters will love it and they’re going to crush. Whoever did the recipe work on this nailed the mass market appeal factor. Well played. 

Back to normal schedule, and (really truly hopefully) a grinding paper will be published in a journal, that I will break down for you!

To the boundaries of coffee,

Matt Perger

Barista Hustle