Anette had an old 1000W photography lamp around – I’ve used it in the past for high speed espresso droplet shots – and I’ve noticed it gets quite hot.  My inner child suggested I should use it to make a vacpot.  So I did.

It kicked up surprisingly quickly!

There isn’t much temperature control – just on and off.  This was about amusement and not taste so I left it on.  It probably ran a little hot in the top chamber.

I usually like to hover over the vacpot – enjoying the shifting smell and getting info on the brew’s progression.  1,000W of light shining up at you makes this hard to do!

The brightness of the lamp makes the other shots look like they were taken at night, not in a bright sunny roastery.  It didn’t taste great.  At least I could open my eyes properly.

This has left me thinking about how hard it would be to construct a simple halogen heater.  Anyone tried it?  Has to be cheaper than buying one no? Advice, warnings, suggestions for future eye protection and circuit diagrams all welcome in the comments…

This morning I got up early to fly over to Dublin, to the CatEx show there.  Apart from catching up with Stephen, and lots of other lovely coffee people, and catching a little of the Irish Barista Championship, I was really there to see the guys at Marco and the new machine they had on their stand.

I am not going to be able to get very far in all this without talking about the Clover first.  The reason that the Clover got me excited initially was that it was going to be a potential way to keep promises¹ made when serving coffee.  Some people hated the amount of control it offered (deeming it soulless automation), while others got excited about dialling in coffees.  No doubt the profiling it offered really appealed to the people who bought the company.

After the Clover disappeared from the market the industry seemed to take a step back and then dig out all its old coffee brewers and start playing with them again.  More French Pressing, Vac Pots popping up everywhere, and every self respecting coffee nerd having a Chemex in cupboard.

While researching different bits and pieces for a potential cafe Anette unearthed the Quooker Tap. Nice idea, but some problems when it came to coffee!  I began to wonder if it was possible to add a mix tap to add cold water, maybe drill a little hole in the end of the spout and put a probe in and live mix a desired water temp.  Stephen, Anette and I hammered the idea out a bit more but didn’t really know what to do with it.

At the Caffe Culture show last year we got chatting to Paul Stack from Marco about how possible the idea was.  His proposal was awesome – they would take on the project and build us one.  For them it was a great research project, and they are a bunch of wonderful coffee obsessed people who immediately understood where we were coming from.

Paul came over to the roastery in August last year and we went into greater detail about what we wanted.  I demanded typically ludicrous things:  I wanted a built in scale, a live temperature display, I wanted to be able to jump between temperatures for different coffees quite quickly.

During development Paul sent across piles of data and I was extremely impressed in the consistency of water temperature delivered – a swing of around 0.2°C with their testing kit once the boiler had stabilised.

What I worked with today is still very much a prototype – it will be developed a little more before it is shipped over to us for further testing.  Hopefully a drip tray, a built in timer unit and a few other bits and pieces will be added soon.  I am not going to go into great detail about how it works operationally because it is likely that that will change to something a little more intuitive.  Before use it requires switching to ‘BOOST’ mode that cycles water right up around the font to heat and stabilise the water lines for consistent delivery.  We’re going to work on more intuitive movement between brew temperatures and I probably don’t need to explain how to use a scale.

Water delivery speed was relatively slow – good for Chemex, and not too slow to be frustrating when making a press.

Some pics (remember this is a prototype!):

Marco Boiler

Scale control and water delivery

Live brew temp

Built to fit a large Chemex underneath!

All credit to Marco for working towards a very creative, versatile boiler that would suit people who want to embrace all brewing methods yet still want control and repeatability.

Initially the plan was just to build one for us but I think the reaction it has recieved at the one tradeshow alone means that they will be looking to produce more units if the demand is there.

For those interested I’d recommend e-mailing Marco, and they will keep those interested up to date on the boiler.

Oh, and it doesn’t have a name yet – suggestions welcome!

If people have thoughts or questions then please post a comment and I will do my best to answer.

1. there is a big long post coming baout making and keeping promises with brewed coffee – soon!

Firstly I needed to load up on snow.  I was surprised how much I needed to get the required weight.  I melted it first to make sure everything looked ok.  Apparently in Norway they tell kids not to eat snow because it has worms in it.  This snow had no worms in it.

Once boiled we were ready to go.  I chose the Muchoki for this for no sensible reason other than I haven’t had a cup for a few days.  For the sake of nerdiness I stuck a TDS meter in it before it got hot.  20ppm – assuming the meter is reasonably accurate.

I didn’t take any photos of the brewing process, because I was busy… brewing….  (One day I will do a videocast!)

Then we drank it.  It was pretty good, though a touch overextracted.  Huzzah for snow!

1. Yes, yes – I know we are all bored to tears with hearing about Twitter, but sadly we are stuck with it so we might as well embrace it and microblog ourselves into a stupor