Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/10/13/bodum-pour-over-coffee-maker.html
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“ass-blown glass?”
This truly is a directory of wonderful things.
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Is it polished with yak fur by a bearded hipster in Portland? Does it include pretentious hand crafted iced coffee recipes? Is the glass responsibly sourced with recycled materials collected by trained crows?
I need to know these things.
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another orifice…do we want to know?
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Ittakesthreetofourminutestomakecoffeewiththat!Idon’thavethatkindoftime!
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I hear that cocaine works much faster
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Iuseitascreamerinmycoffee!
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Stainless steel, Chemex-compatible coffee filters are like 25 bucks and up on Amazon.
Also, keep in mind the paper filters absorb cholesterol out of your coffee while the metal ones do not. How much that matters in terms of taste or heath is up for debate; all I can tell you is that my permanent filter is going on 4 years old now and still works great.
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Cafestol, and I my understanding (though I could be wrong) is that it’s more unfiltered and emulsified coffees. Paper will have higher affinity for cafestol but then, so will the coffee grounds themselves. I did a quick search for scholarly sources, but that doesn’t appear to be researched. I am tempted to test this myself, but to get access to the equipment I’d have to pull some strings that are already pulled pretty taught.
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I was educated from the standpoint of selling coffee and coffee related products, so I’m never quite certain if my bias is capitalist rather than scientific but I believe I can tell the difference when I use something like a paper filter or a clean eggshell in my grounds.
But much like my delusional parasitosis, being aware of my bias does not negate it.
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Possibly. French press coffee does have a lot of terpenes, terpenoids, and aromatics flavoring the coffee that are held back by filtration. These substances are responsible for some of the aroma in addition to the taste, and how something smells can definitely affect taste. The eggshell is interesting to me, because it’s used to lower the acidity of the coffee and relieve some of the astringency, but you lose a lot of the brighter notes, too. But taste is so subjective and innate that it’s possible to take two people, and have one of them fool themselves that they’re tasting a difference, and the other legitimately taste a difference.
Cool Story Bro, Time: When I worked food service at a hospital, we surveyed and tried numerous coffees from numerous vendors before settling on one. The results from surveying the staff and the patients were 100% all over the place. There wasn’t any kind of clear preference at all. So we just picked the one with the fewest negative responses. It was funny to hear people complain about the coffee. “This coffee is really terrible, it’s undrinkable!” and then walk to see another patient saying, “This coffee is pretty good!” And it’s not like I could pick out the supposed snobs either. One patient claimed our coffee was crap and had their family bring in Folger’s Crystals because it was what they drank at home. Yet a bunch of my coworkers and I who had access to better coffee made from locally roasted beans really didn’t think it was half bad and would drink it if we were too busy to get better coffee. It was certainly better than most instant coffee I’ve tasted. It was made from a concentrate rather than freeze dried, which probably helped.
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I’ve been too lazy to do research on this. I am curious about the health effects. Right now all my coffee is un(paper)filtered. Maybe responses in this thread will help me consider a switch to paper?
The mentioned coffee maker looks really sexy but I think for now my french press is good enough. Although this filter does seems sturdier, and I always dislike the fact that the french press filters seal is never 100%, not that the 0.2% that gets around the filter bugs me in the end result, it’s just less satisfying.
And to save others googling for extra images, here is a video of the thing in action:
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There’s not much to say. Cafestol and possibly other compounds in coffee tend to increase LDL levels in men up to 8% and to a lesser degree women by some mechanism which is not altogether accounted for but is likely due to an agonistic effect on certain nuclear receptors (they tell your cell what genes to activate). It is unclear to me whether this effect persists or is harmful long term because I haven’t looked into it beyond the chemistry. Tests on coffee itself reveal that drip coffee with a paper filter removes most cafestol, with Moka Pots and French presses having much higher levels.
No one has tested reusable drip filters, but I suspect that the levels might be higher than with paper filters, but lower than French Press and Moka pots. (This is a hypothesis from someone with a year left to go on his chemistry degree, take with a grain of sodium chloride.)
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I’m kickstarting a coffee filter made of 24k gold that makes awesome coffee. It also gives a warmer drip sound.
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Literally owned one in 1989’ (Braun, cone shaped, 18k).
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I’ve read pretty much everything that has shown up in PubMed about this. The studies do indicate that the effect goes away if the subject stops drinking unfiltered coffee. FWIW, there is also an effect with espresso, apparently not as high as with press pot (but it is hard to get a direct comparison there), so the effect of the grounds filtering the highlighted components is questionable.
My issue with all the non-paper drip cones I’ve tried is that the water flow is too great and the extraction/taste is different. You can slow down the flow by grinding finer (but not too fine or it comes out from the filter) or using more coffee, but that too changes the nature of the drink.
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This actually convinces me further of my hypothesis. To a first approximation, a portafilter is a very short, pressurized, and inefficient liquid chromatography column. At the molecular scale I’m not thinking about size exclusion, what’s important is affinity. Coffee lipids are fairly hydrophobic, and are more highly attracted to the organic materials in the grounds (and cellulose in the paper in the filter) than the water itself. At higher pressures than drip coffee it’s going to push more lipid matter into the coffee. This is what you really want out of an espresso, “more coffee in your coffee.” So if there’s less lipid in espresso than a press pot (which is really good at emulsification) then I’d be surprised if it really comes through a simple drip filter, even without paper.
I really want to throw this past my separations professor. The question comes at an opportune time considering a lot of what we’ve been discussing lately.
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