INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Most mornings, after sifting through the night mail haul and skimming the headlines, I make myself a cup of coffee
I use a simple pour-over cone and paper filters, and (in what is perhaps my most tedious Seattleite affectation), I grind the beans by hand
I like the manual aspect of it all
Which is why this robotic pour-over machine is to me so perverse… and so tempting.
Called the Automatica, this gadget, currently raising
funds on Kickstarter but seemingly complete as far as development and testing, is basically a way to do pour-over coffee without holding the
kettle yourself.
You fill the kettle and place your mug and cone on the stand in front of it
The water is brought to a boil and the kettle tips automatically
Then the whole mug-and-cone portion spins slowly, distributing the water around the grounds, stopping after 11 ounces has been distributed
over the correct duration
You can use whatever cone and mug you want as long as they&re about the right size.
Of course, the whole point of pour-over coffee is that
it simple: you can do it at home, while on vacation, while hiking or indeed at a coffee shop with a bare minimum of apparatus
All you need is the coffee beans, the cone, a paper filter — although some cones omit even that — and of course a receptacle for the
(It not the simplest — that&d be Turkish, but that coffee for werewolves.)
Why should anyone want to disturb this simplicity Well, the
same reason we have the other 20 methods for making coffee: convenience
And in truth, pour-over is already automated in the form of drip machines
So the obvious next question is, why this dog and pony show of an open-air coffee bot
Aesthetics! Nothing wrong with that
What goes on in the obscure darkness of a drip machine No one knows
But this — this you can watch, audit, understand
Even if the machinery is complex, the result is simple: hot water swirls gently through the grounds
And although it fundamentally a bit absurd, it is a good-looking machine, with wood and brass accents and a tasteful kettle shape
(I do love a tasteful kettle.)
The creators say the machine is built to last &generations,& a promise which must of course be taken with a
Anything with electronics has the potential to short out, to develop a bug, to be troubled by humidity or water leaks
The heating element may fail
The motor might stutter or a hinge catch.
But all that is true of most coffee machines, and unlike those, this one appears to be made with
care and high-quality materials
The cracking and warping you can expect in thin molded plastic won''t happen to this thing, and if you take care of it, it should at least
last several years.
And it better, for the minimum pledge price that gets you a machine: $450
That quite a chunk of change
But like audiophiles, coffee people are kind of suckers for a nice piece of equipment.
There is of course the standard crowdfunding caveat
emptor; this isn''t a pre-order but a pledge to back this interesting hardware startup, and if it anything like the last five or six
campaigns I&ve backed, it&ll arrive late after facing unforeseen difficulties with machining, molds, leaks and so on.
