A few times a year we host Cafe Day at our Roastery. It’s an opportunity for our Roasty Team to down tools, come together and share some delicious coffee. We transform our Training bar into a space not too dissimilar to one of our thriving cafe partners. Each Cafe day, we set out to create some coffee-based beverages that are designed to push the boundaries and help our Team experience our coffee in a slightly different light. With this in mind, it was time to highlight a brew method not often seen in many venues in Australia but a brewing device I love, the Siphon.
Old School Cool: Bringing back the brew method flair
Part of the allure of the siphon is the aura of alchemy it brings to coffee brewing. The apparatus looks as though it would be more at home in a chemist’s lab rather than on a brew bar. Having owned and brewed one for some time now, I can attest that achieving a Walter White level of precision requires all of the care, attention to detail and measurement that you would expect, though putting in the work is well worth the effort.
The cup produced from a well brewed Siphon is exquisite. Complex, fragrant and delicate on the palate with a gratifyingly silky body that coats your mouth like butter, thanks to the cloth filters typically used. This allows for more of the suspended solids and oils into the final cup than usually allowed by paper filters.
Siphon Brewer origins
The Siphon brewer originated in the 1830s, first patented by Leoff of Berlin, a German scientist looking for a more efficient way of caffeinating his long hours of work. It was later in the 1840s that French courtesan Mme. Vassieux made improvements and design changes that made the brewer’s production at scale possible and leveraged her ties to the courts of French nobility to facilitate both manufacturing and marketing which ultimately lead to the commercial success of the Siphon.
Beneath the flair and showy theatrics of brewing a Siphon, there is actually quite a bit going on. This is by no means a set and forget style brew and due to both the pressure introduced by the vacuum and the constant introduction of heat during brewing, there are a few parallels to dialing for espresso, in that even small changes in recipe can have relatively exaggerated effects when compared to other manual brew methods.
Read What’s the perfect grind size for different brewing methods?
The recipe
The recipe used in our recent cafe Day was based on a Kono 3 cup brewer. We preferred the 3 cup over the 2 cup as we found the temperature stability much more consistent.
We used 350g water and 25g coffee ground a little finer than what we would usually use for a pourover.
Method
First, seat the filter in the top chamber and add pre-boiled water to the bottom chamber and set over your heat source. Rest the top chamber loosely in the bottom chamber so that the chain attached to the filter is fully submerged. This is important as the chain acts as a neucleating point for bubble formation, preventing the water in the smooth glass vessel from superheating.
Once there is a steady stream of small bubbles forming in the bottom chamber, the two chambers can be fully seated and sealed together. As the water in the sealed section boils, the increasing pressure will force the water up the tube and into the top. Shortly after the water has risen, there will be a brief flush of small bubbles in the top chamber, indicating the apparatus is now ready for brewing.
Reduce the heat under the brewer just enough so that the pressure holding the water in the top chamber is maintained but the key is to avoid overheating the brew water by continuously vigorously boiling the bottom.
Add the coffee to the brewing chamber and set a timer, stir the crust to submerge all the coffee. The idea here is gentle but deliberate movements, you want to get all of the coffee saturated as quickly as possible. Allow the coffee to steep, there is an old wives tale that suggests you can tell when the brew is ready by smelling the crust, it will change from a grassy or baggy aroma that we know as under extraction to very sweet and this is when you should initiate the draw down. For us, with our recipe, this was around the 45s mark.
Remove the brewer from the heat and give the top chamber 6 stirs. As the bottom chamber cools, the vacuum generated will suck the coffee back down through the filter and a final gasp of air through the filter and into the bottom chamber denotes the vacuum has equalised and the brewer can now be dismantled and coffee served.
About the coffee
During cafe Day we were brewing a washed red bourbon produced by Wilton Benitez in Piendamo, Colombia. Wilton's background is in Chemical engineering and approaches his coffee production and processing with extreme precision, paying close attention to cherry sugar content (ripeness) through to temperature and PH during fermentation.
This means he is able to achieve consistently high quality, complex coffees. We taste Cola lollies, Raspberry, Bergamot & Lemon.
It is sweet, bright and clean, a delightful example of a high quality washed Colombian coffee.
Recipe recap
- 350g water
- 25g coffee ground a touch finer than v60
- 45s steep, 45s drawdown - 1:30 total brew time
Feeling inspired to craft your own creations? Our Coffee Concentrates may be the perfect place to start.
