Kevin Sinnott

It’s therefore not unusual, and in fact it’s considered desirable for a wine enthusiast to stock multiple wines for food matching or just plain variety. I’m not taking a side on this in this article, but let’s for the moment say that no one claims it’s a first choice, nor as good as fresh-roasted unfrozen coffee. The Coffee Freshness System, or CFS for short, is a mechanical storage system consisting of a method of sealing a canister, which you fill with beans. When you open the canister, up to a month or more later, to make coffee, the beans are still fresh, presumably as fresh to taste, smell and brew as when you sealed them.

Once the water is heated to nearly a boil, hot air in the lower bowl expands, forcing the near-boiling water up through the upper bowl’s tube, through a filter where it starts bubbling as if it’s boiling – it’s not. The siphon’s contact time between hot water and grounds is roughly two to three minutes, approximately half that of most drip brewers. This simplified method seemed to work, but I think the manual glass method used by Hario (and others) works best when the end user waits for the water to be mostly up in the upper bowl, adding the grounds and immediately stirring to make sure all the grounds are enrolled in the extraction process. I set it to 203°, my normal drip set temperature and used its gooseneck to carefully pour the near-boiling water into the lower syphon bowl.

But looks alone don’t warrant a mention in The Coffee Companion. I met Romain Gauthrot, designer, at Coffee Fest in Chicago this past June. Apparently, Mr Gauthrot was able to make two separate screens work together to accomplish this. Mr Gauthrot has promised a sample and I hope to be able to rigorously subject it to my kitchen in the future.

Frankly, other than having to measure grounds and grind the coffee separately, it’s as easy to use as a K-cup brewer. This brewer has a pre-infusion stage, which drips a few ounces of water over the grounds to saturate them before the majority of water is released and dripped over the grounds. If your grounds are older than this, or you use pre-ground coffee, you may skip this stage, although it won’t hurt, so if in doubt, use it. If there’s one area where manual drip still reigns supreme it is the end user’s manual water dispersion over the grounds and subsequent even extraction.