Vacuum Coffee Maker
We’ve been messing with a vacuum coffee maker recently. It’s an interesting contraption. It consists of two glass globes connected by a glass tube. First you fill the lower globe with water and get it heating up on the stove.
Next you grind some coffee beans and place the grounds in the second globe. That one gets stuck on top of the first one.
The tube connecting the two globes has this filter to keep the coffee grounds in the upper one.
This filter actually comes from a Yama machine. We’ve found it seems to work a little bit better than the one which originally came with our Bodum.
Once the water in the lower globe starts boiling, it rises up the tube and starts flooding the grounds in the upper globe. At first it’s just a slow seepage.
But pretty soon it starts moving very quickly and all of the water starts rushing up.
You need to keep a close eye on it at this point. It’s critical to take it off the heat before the water level in the lower globe gets down to the bottom of the glass tube. If you do this, then as the lower globe cools, the pressure will drop and it will start sucking the coffee back down.
Eventually, almost all of the water will get sucked out of the upper globe, and the bottom one will be full of coffee. At this point, you take the two halves apart.
It isn’t the quickest system, and you can’t sit and read the paper while it’s going. You really need to keep an eye on it. But the resulting coffee is really good. It doesn’t have the bitterness of a lot of drip coffee, and it doesn’t have any of the sediment you get with a French Press. And it’s just a lot of fun to play with.
