A while ago, we went low-tech with coffee. I liked the old Gaggia machine that used to hiss and burp, turning one corner of the kitchen into a little Milanese coffee bar. It was great for little caffeine-addict shots, though a hassle if you wanted to make a pot of coffee for everyone. But my wife and the Gaggia weren’t friends, and eventually she said it took up too much space and threw it out. So I went to dig out the cafetiere and found the skeletons of three in the back of the cupboard — the glass (which is the most expensive bit) gone, presumably broken. This is the secret to the international success of Bodum, the market leaders in French press coffee makers. They use aggressively thin glass.
Why bother with these gadgets anyway? For most of the 1,200 years since an Ethiopian goatherd called Kaldi decided to sample the red beans that made his goats so frisky, human beings have been happy to make their coffee by boiling the ground-up beans in water. (The roasting idea came about shortly after Kaldi tried the energy-delivering berries: the legend says that he offered them to a Sufi holy man who, disapproving of the intoxicating effect, threw the beans in the fire. The aroma that arose set humanity on a path that led inexorably to the soy mocha Frappuccino).
I do like simmered coffee and I have a little, long-handled copper pot to make lovely, muddy Turkish coffee. But most people need their shot faster, and about a century ago people started putting coffee under pressure, first with fearsome percolating pots and then with steam. The first espresso machines went on the market in 1905. Around that time, a German housewife called Melitta Bentz was unsatisfied with boiling coffee in a linen sachet, and, using her son’s school blotting paper, invented the drip-filter method, still a favourite among coffee-professionals for the mellower taste it produces. Powdered instant coffee arrived in shops in the United States in 1910. The plunger-driven cafetiere was invented in 1929 but became commonplace only in the 1970s.
The most talked-about pressure gadget at the moment is the AeroPress, which was invented by the genius who came up with the brilliant ring-shaped Frisbee, the Aerobie. But Alan Adler’s coffee maker does not have the simplicity (or the aerodynamics) of that — in fact it’s rather fiddly, an annoying collection of plunger, body, stirrer, filter paper and so on. You stand it directly on your cup — which is great — but you can’t make coffee for more than two with it, which is not so good.
But serious coffee-heads love the AeroPress. They debate it in online forums (if you’re really cool, you use it upside down) and rhapsodise about the lack of acid and the new depths of flavour revealed by it. It is used more and more at official coffee tastings. So I tried it on my caffeine-junkie wife, testing it head to head with coffee from the new cafetiere (china, £35 from Lakeland, hasn’t broken yet).
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She liked the cafetiere coffee, and the crema it leaves on the top of the coffee. I preferred the AeroPress, though I don’t think the differences are great. But I have — in researching this — discovered how to make much better, less bitter coffee; an amazingly simple method that works every time. It is this: don’t use boiling water. Leave the kettle with the lid open for three minutes, and make the coffee when the water is at 80 degrees. It’s an eye opener.
Alex Renton’s AeroPress — and lots of interesting advice — came from The Coffee Machine, 632 Kings Road, London.
AeroPress retails at £23. thecoffeemachinelondon.co.uk