tricks

Don’t try this at home.  Wait, TRY this at home!

Often I get assigned “coffee duty“. This often happens when we have people coming over, we host a party, or bring coffee to an event. I often find myself getting out my two glass airpots and brewing coffee into the carafes. Then I carefully pour into the airpots.  While this solution works, I was interested in brewing a larger quantity directly into an airpot.  This would be less work and temperature loss (a lot).  Even my great home equipment isn’t made to do this, but I developed some workarounds to the problems I ran into.

1) Cone filter.  These are great for brewing smaller batches of coffee. With larger quantities you wind up over-extracting the grounds at the point of the filter (the bottom). This can give you a nasty bitter taste even if you use the correct amount of coffee. Workaround? Stir the basket grounds when brewing is 2/3 complete.

2) Water reservoir is too small.  In my Technivorm I can do 10+ cups (close to 1 liter) of filtered water.  Unfortunately, an airpot is typically 1.6-1.8 liters. Workaround? Before the 10 cups were gone I’d add 6 more cups of water.  Your application will vary, I did a “dry run” with just water.

3) Basket too small  for extra coffee.  Typically to brew an airpot of coffee you want about 3.25 ounces of beans, which is roughly a cup of dark roasted whole bean coffee. This may be too much coffee for the basket and cause an overflow. Workaround? I did a scant cup of coffee (7/8) as to not overload the basket.

4) Airpot is taller than the brewer!  Workaround? As you can see, I was able to put the brewer on a small box to accommodate the airpot perfectly under the brewer.

If your coffee maker doesn’t brew at the right temperature, or takes longer than six minutes to brew a normal pot don’t try this.  You need a quality brewer that will brew for the right amount of time at the right temp. The Technivorm MoccaMaster is a high-quality coffee maker that will last for many years and make coffee as good as your best local coffee shop.