MAN VST ECH

Can tech – both digital and analogue – help our Man make bett er coffee, or does it take an expert’s touch to really make a difference?

Duncan Bell is pitted against the latest high-tech coffee machines and has the mother of all caffeine-comedowns.

Coffee, lovely coffee. How I love to drink you. My life changed when I splurged on a mega coffee machine. It was an extravagant purchase, and in the years since I’ve spent enough on beans to pay off the national debts of Columbia and Costa Rica. Yet I have a dirty secret: I really know very little about making coffee. So when T3 challenged me to test six of the finest coffee makers, I was dubious. Then they said, “We’re getting three-time UK Barista Championship winner Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood in; he knows all about coffee and will make you sound smart.” Then I was on board.

Bean there, done that

As Maxwell explains it, making coffee is a highly nuanced and scientific process. Since to encompass all its subtleties would take up this entire magazine, I have boiled it down (ho ho) to a few paragraphs.

Grind coffee beans till they’re fine enough for water to pass through in an espresso machine (drip machines and French presses need a coarser grind and more time), to extract the optimum flavour, and enough volume to fill an espresso cup. Too coarse and/or too short and it’ll be wrong. Too fine and/or too long? Yeah, that’ll also be wrong.

There are other factors: how much water you push through the coffee; the flavour profile of the bean and how it’s been roasted; what time of day it is... wait, what?

“Yes,” says Maxwell, a man who knows so much about coffee, he’s contributed to

actual scientific papers on the topic, “we found that the same beans were producing coffee that tasted different in the afternoon compared to the morning.”

So, using a Laser Particle Analyser, as you do, he concluded that beans actually shatter differently when they’re colder, “Because of course they’re more brittle, so you end up with a finer grind.”

Well, of course. So let’s start with a machine that claims to remove all the complexity from making coffee, replacing it with touchscreen simplicity: the Jura Z8. To my considerable relief – and possibly Maxwell’s slight irritation – it produces a perfectly acceptable espresso immediately.

I love coffee, and I want to make it as well as possible, but Maxwell really loves coffee. However, unlike some of his hardcore peers, he’s no technophobe. So where certain

artisan brew true-believers would have all but spat at me for asking them to try a Jura, Maxwell immediately roots around to change the grind settings and lengthen the extraction time – there are actually all sorts of manual settings in the Jura’s menus.

Impressively, with a slightly finer grind and a bit more water, he creates a cup that undeniably tastes even better.

The same’s true with De’Longhi’s much cheaper Dedica system. This natty combo of espresso machine and grinder is like a scaled-down version of what you’d find in a coffee shop. It needs more work than the Jura, really forcing you to experiment with the grind and extraction length, to get the best results. But it’s worth the effort.

Science or appliance?

Sage’s preposterously named The Oracle is the ultimate machine, and not just because I shelled out 1,700 big ones for it. The built-in burr grinder is easily adjustable yet consistent. Tamping (pressing the coffee down into the basket to achieve the correct density) is done via a whirring magnetic blade and results are routinely impressive. And it looks like a proper coffee machine.

The really interesting devices, however, are the Aeropress and Hario. The former is a plastic, hand-operated press that you sit on top of a mug. To operate, Maxwell inverts the press, pours in water at about 90 degrees C, and adds coarsely ground coffee. After a few minutes, he turns it the other way up and depresses the rubbertipped plunger to force the coffee through a paper filter, 300 of which are included with the Aeropress. To my slight schadenfreude, the resulting coffee is actually pretty bland. Maxwell identifies part of the problem right away – our kettle isn’t the best, and the local water is very hard. And that’s coming through in the flavour. It’s a reminder that all the ingredients matter, not just the beans.

Then, in a bid to make coffee with the Hario – using a dodgy little fuel burner rather than the halogen lamps used by pros – I summon up a really weedy beverage. It’s more like a cup of hot water that’s been shown a photograph of some coffee beans.

Now, I have made great cups of coffee at home with an Aeropress. It can produce anything between a classic, flavoursome drip/press-style drink and something more like an espresso, depending on how much water you add. Its simplicity and ease of cleaning are also huge boons. But, it does take a little trial and error.

The Hario is frankly a mad thing but it can produce fantastic coffee – try it next time you’re in a specialist shop. But a lesson here is clear: high tech beats low for foolproof results when you’re under pressure. If you want to make coffee the specialist’s way, you’ll need practice.

That leaves us with a real outlier. Kitchenaid’s Cold Brew Coffee Maker is an upmarket way to make cold brew, the hippest drink of the last few years.

This involves putting 250g of beans in a mesh basket inside a glass tank, to which is added 1.25 litres of cold water. That’s right: you need an entire bag of beans to make about one litre of cold coffee. But it produces something pretty exceptional.

On first sight of the Kitchenaid, Maxwell is love-struck. “Wow, look how fine that mesh is,” he says. And it is. The beautifully engineered and tactile tap on the front is also quite wonderful.

The coffee is, undeniably, cold coffee. However, in this simplified, almost tech-free form, everything Maxwell’s spent the afternoon saying about the more complex flavour profiles he loves makes sense to me. It’s fruity, it’s sweet, it’s summery… And it’s time for me to chill out as I am now totally wired from all the caffeine.

“I think that’s the best we’ve had today,” Maxwell concludes.

The Jura has all sorts of settings in its touchscreen menus to improve your brew