New Automatic Pour-over ☕️; Diamond Moccamaster 💎; Coloured Aeropress 🔴🟡🔵 : This Week in Coffee
The Big Three
Mundo Novo launch Commercial Automatic Pourover.
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With the rise of speciality coffees and acidic flavour profiles we have seen more and more interest in percolation and immersion brewing methods. As a general rule, the lighter the roast, the more floral, fruity and acidity flavours you’re going to get and the harder these will be to preserve in an espresso method. This is enhanced by new processing methods like natural decomposition and so-called ‘honey processing’ which also producing lighter and more delicate flavours.
These delicate flavours is one of the reason why when professionals taste individual beans they use the ‘cupping’ method which involves simply steeping the grinds in hot water.
More interest in lightly roasted coffees means more commercial coffee shops are looking at pour-over, V60, Aeropress and filter coffee methods to preserve and showcase these flavours. I’m specifically not talking about batch brewing filter coffee (“American diner style”) and I’ll get to why that isn’t in the same category. We’ll call the other methods ‘non-batch immersion’ methods.
These non-batch immersion methods methods usually suffer from a combination of three different issues. They either have a very long brew time and/or they’re hard to get right consistently and/or they disrupt the flow of the cafe.
Generally they’re slow mostly because the brew time is very high but they also slow down everything else in the coffee shop - they disrupt the flow. A barista has to watch the extraction for minutes, may need to top the filter paper up and will need to interrupt whatever else they’re doing to come over and finish the brew off. Compare this with an espresso machine which is quick and has amazing commercial flow because once the machine is dialled in in the morning, it’s fire-and-forget for the rest of the day.
Now, you can use a regular batch filter machine which is fire-and-forget but then you’re going to have coffee sitting in the canister for hours on end. This brings you back to the starting point - light roasts. While a rich dark roast can sit in the hot canister for a few hours, a light roast is going to degrade very quickly and all the flavour will be lost into an earth soupy mess.
Okay long introduction into why I like the Mundo Novo even if it isn’t quite as novel as they’re describing. This automatic, commercial, pour-over machine was launched at SCA Expo and retails at around $3000.
There are other machines like it - specifically the Poursteady which is around $10,000 for their three cup version. You can already see one of the reasons why you might pick the Mundo Novo over the Poursteady!
The main innovation is that the Mundo Novo dispenses water in a spiral motion which may or may not lead to a more even extraction from the grounds but personally I’m skeptical that the side-to-side motion of the Poursteady isn’t good enough.
If I was a small coffee shop that wanted to offer filter coffee pour-overs and maybe I was struggling to recruit and retain skill baristas I’d consider the Mundo Novo. My only concern would be if I was recieving multiple filter coffee orders quickly in a row then I might wish I had the Poursteady instead for the ability to do three or give filter coffees in one go.
Limited Edition Moccamaster Diamond
For Moccamaster’s 60 year anniversary they’ve launched the limited edition “Diamond KGB” with a lifetime warranty instead of the (already impressive) five year warranty.
I’m the proud owner of a Moccamaster one-cup and it’s one of the best pieces of coffee equipment I’ve ever owned. The thing is an absolute workhorse making at least two cups of coffee a day with little or no complaint. Personally, I would say that the KGB is a great edition to many offices and non-speciality coffee shops.
This Diamond edition is, truthfully, quite a gaudy version of their existing KGB for an extra €20 but personally I think that’s well worth the money for a life time warranty. Sadly it’s not available with a UK plug.
New Coloured Aeropresses released
Aeropress have released four new colours to go alongside their existing grey and clear versions. Is this going to change your life? No. Are they fun to look at and still an incredible under-rated piece of coffee equipment? Yes.