Holiday Gifts for Coffee Lovers

Recently I read a couple of nice posts by Ecco Café's Andrew Barnett and Counterculture's Peter Giuliano on home coffee brewing set-ups for holiday gift giving. Their recommendations were excellent but I noticed that neither seemed to have a particular user or size of household in mind, and it seems to me one size doesn't fit all. So here's another take on the topic.

Most versatile overall choice: An Aeropress. Makes a concentrate that at full-strength is excellent in a caffe latte or cappuccino and that when diluted to drip strength makes as good a cup of coffee as there is. $25 investment and it's also far and away the best travel brewer.

Add a $20 Aerolatte Moo:

and for about $50 you have a simple way to brew a delicious caffe latte or cappuccino. Clearly the Aeropress is no La Marzocco and the Aerolatte no precision milk steamer, but for the vast majority of folks out there who just want strong smooth coffee with frothy milk this is a far more realistic option than spending a couple of grand on a decent home espresso machine and grinder combo. 

Speaking of grinders, it can't be said often enough that next to using enough coffee grinding your own beans at home just before brewing is the best way to exponentially improve the quality of your coffee. But in reading a lot of the coffee press lately it's easy to get the impression that a $200 Baratza grinder is the least expensive acceptable option. 

Realistically for most brewing methods a basic blade grinder is sufficient albeit not optimal and still gets you the quantum leap from pre-ground coffee that's stale in a day to whole beans that last a week or more.  A big step up from these $20 choppers - and all the grinder anyone needs at home unless they've got a professional quality espresso machine as well - are the $70 conical burr grinders from Cuisinart and Bodum. I especially like the new Bodum Bistro because it has a borosilicate glass grounds container that's much better at minimizing static cling than the plastic found on most grinders:

Anyway, for single person or couple who drink only a cup or so of coffee at a time the Aeropress plus a grinder seems to be the most useful set-up - and can be had for less than half the price of the aforementioned Baratza grinder alone, which wonderful as it is at $200 costs more than most consumers I know are willing to invest in their entire home coffee brewing set-up. 

For a more meaningful quantity of drip strength coffee you want a brewer of a least a 1 liter capacity. The best set up by far remains the 1 Liter Nissan Thermos with #6 filtercone I've recommended previously (http://caffeinatedcalm.blogspot.com/2011/06/brewing-great-coffee-at-home-without.html). You can buy this for about $60 all-in - or spend five times as much for the luxury of automating the process via the Technivorm Moccmaster, the only home electric drip brewer worth owning.

In either case you've got a far superior set-up to the sundry Hario V60's, Chemexes and the like recommended elsewhere, since at one liter you're brewing just enough coffee to have the ideal 4-6 minute grounds:water contact time the drip method really requires - meaning you can forget about narrow-necked Japanese kettles, weighing your brew water and other such arcana better left to your local professional barista (or forgotten about altogether).  Plus, since you're brewing into a double wall stainless steel thermos rather than a Hario or Chemex glass carafe you'll enjoy something else users of these methods won't experience: coffee that's hot rather than lukewarm to begin with, and that stays that way. 

For those who want a more refined cup still - as well as for anyone who like me lives at high altitude - far better than fussing around with single cup drip brewers would be to invest the time and money in a delicate but incomparable vacuum pot. While the classic and expensive Cona is the best of the best of these, a more realistic choice that won't have you in tears when the inevitable happens and you break part of it is the venerable Bodum Santos at $90:

With no paper filter to absorb flavor and add undesirable ones of its own and a brewing temperature that by design is optimal throughout the brew cycle the vacuum pot is to even the best drip coffee what a well-recorded CD is to an old cassette tape in terms of clarity and precision of flavor and aroma. The Santos gets my nod over other alternatives because of its relative durability and, again, because it's designed to brew a full quart of coffee (though lesser amounts are fine), making it a viable choice for everyday use for 2-4 coffee lovers in a household. 

What about the venerable French Press? Clearly the best are the double-wall stainless steel models made by Frieling as well as the Bodum Columbia, both of which can be preheated with boiling water to overcome the rapid heat loss during brewing that plagues glass models. You also really want to have a burr rather than blade grinder and keep the grind coarse for this method, in order to keep fine particles (aka sludge in the brew) to a minimum, and far more than for paper filter drip you want to brew only what you'll drink in 15-20 minutes since the fine particles and oils in the finished brew keep right on brewing as you sip. Still, if you favor coffees whose provinence and roast style showcase body and richness over aroma and acidity (e.g. full-city+ Sumatra, Sulawesi, Ethiopian Harrar, Yemen Mocha and the like) this may still be your go-to brewing method. Don't let the fact that it (along with coffees of the sort I just mentioned) have been shelved by some of the one-cup Hario'd drip persuasion stop you from liking what you like.