(upbeat music)
- Today, we're gonna look at these things.
These are very cheap filter coffee makers.
How cheap?
Well, this one cost me £30
and this one is very slightly fancier at £39.
And that's, I think, pretty cheap for a machine
that makes coffee.
For £30 in the UK, you can buy something
like a Hario Drip Decanter.
This, this thing costs the same as that.
And this makes great coffee.
But historically we've said that these
don't make great coffee.
Now this doesn't heat water.
This is just a plastic V60 and a carafe to catch the coffee,
nothing special here.
But we can we make great coffee with it.
But why can't we make great coffee with this?
So the idea is we're gonna look at this kind of a brewer
and understand how it works, why it sucks,
and what we can do to overcome the ways
in which it is flawed, to maybe get better coffee out of it.
Because I'm not saying that everyone should go
and buy a cheap coffee maker and hack it and play with it
to get good coffee out of it.
I think it's worth investing in well-made equipment
that will last a lifetime.
And frankly, that's not this.
But if you can't afford anything else,
but you want better coffee or you're brewing on someone
else's set up and you want to do the best you can,
well, let's find out what we can do
to make the best coffee possible with the tools
that we have.
So how do they work?
If you open these up and you look inside,
and you open up from the base
and they don't really want you to do that.
But if you do, make sure it's off and be careful.
You'll see just how simple these things are.
So you put your water in the water tank at the back,
and it feeds through a one-way valve down into the base
of the unit.
And that's where the heating element is.
And that element actually heats the hot plate
that this glass carafe sits on.
So unfortunately you can't have this without the hot plate,
'cause it's the same heating element.
Now, as the water passes through a tube,
surrounded by the element, it gets hot.
Some of it will boil and that steam will help press
the water up the tube, over the coffee,
and just drop it out of its little hole, exit hole,
onto the coffee below.
And that's basically it.
And it'll do it till it runs out of water.
Inside here you've got like a little thermostat
on the element to control the temperature to make sure
it doesn't really overheat.
So that's it.
You've got a heating element, a thermostat,
some tubes, and a bit of plastic, and a little bit of glass,
but that's what you get for your money.
And it makes coffee, which is kind of amazing.
But when you make coffee, it does have some problems.
Let's make some coffee.
Now this one here has a nice little swing away action.
I think that's quite nice.
It's 'cause this is fixed and doesn't move.
Let's just throw some coffee in, some water in.
Now we're brewing 30g to 500ml.
I'm not gonna use the lines on the side of this tank,
because they make no sense.
There are two sets of numbers,
one for large cups and one for small cups.
And a small cup currently is 75 milliliters.
Just think about that for a second, 75 milliliters.
That is two and a half ounces to Americans.
Now that is a small cup of coffee,
but really who is endorsing this?
If you put a temperature probe inside this,
then you'll see the first liquid out isn't very hot,
because it's sort of the other side of the heating element
already because of the nature of the way
that the tubes fill.
So that first water out is kind of cold,
and it slowly over the course of the brew
gets hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter
and hotter and hotter.
(coffee brewing)
Now, generally, as soon as you brew this,
you want to turn these off.
Don't leave the hot plate running.
That will cook your coffee.
It will taste gross.
How is it?
It could be worse.
Honestly, like it's not that bad.
It's nice coffee. It's nice water.
It's ground on a grinder that costs 100 times
more than this.
So, you know, we've set it up for success,
but it's not, I would say, a flawless cup of coffee
by any stretch.
I think you can taste that kind of colder start.
You know what I mean?
And it brewed for a long time, around kind of 90 degrees
Celsius, and didn't really get hot until the very end
of the brew.
Now, if you've followed the channel for a while,
you'll know that I'm actually pro brewing
with boiling water.
So what I wanna fix about this brewer there is the start.
The start is too cold.
Most of the brew is too low of a temperature,
and you can taste a kind of absence of goodness here, right?
It tastes a bit under-extracted, a little bit empty,
could be better.
Now this thing, the way that they work is very simple.
Once it's on, it's on.
It's got no kind of bloom function,
and that's kind of a shame.
So that's maybe something worth trying to work out.
And then if we look at the coffee bed,
you can see that we had kind of like a big crater
dug in the middle of this.
The water has come out with a little bit of force
and just burrowed a hole in the coffee.
So that's not gonna do wonders for evenness of extraction.
So I'm gonna wonder, is there something
we can do about that?
While I have this open, actually, there is a piece
of technology in this thing,
and in this thing too that is kind of interesting.
Because you've got a hot plate,
what they do is they put in a little spring here
and a little stopper so that when nothing is underneath
this cone, when the jug isn't there,
it closes the stopper and it doesn't drip.
Because what you don't want is to pull your carafe out,
have this drip onto a very hot, hot plate, sizzle,
kind of do the whole cooked dehydrated coffee
sticky thing on there.
So they got a little steep and release function by mistake.
And I wonder if that's also something that we can
potentially manipulate to help us make better coffee.
So the first thing we're gonna deal with
is brew temperature.
And the fix for this is actually pretty well known
and pretty well talked about.
You may have come across it before.
We're gonna fill the tank with hot water.
Now, I don't know for certain how the plastic
in this will do with boiling water inside.
I don't worry from a safety perspective,
but there might be some funny tastes.
I don't really know.
I think everyone uses BPA-free stuff
in sort of commercial food appliances these days.
So we should be okay.
What I'll also do is stick a probe into the coffee bed,
'cause there's another experiment after this
that I'm kind of curious about.
But let's brew with some boiling water in the back
of this thing, otherwise identical setup.
And I'll keep this cup to the side to compare
to the next cup.
So water in, into the coffee bed, start logging.
(coffee brewing)
That was a very interesting brew.
It held in the sort of mid to low 90s
at the sort of the top of the slurry above the coffee bed,
which is pretty great actually for lighter roasts.
Certainly, that's a nice high brewing temperature.
I don't know how this kind of constant high heat
works in comparison to say a pouring kettle,
which will be losing heat over the course of the brew.
So a typical V60 at home will have its peak temperature
quite early on, and then it will decline towards the end.
This is staying hotter for longer.
That's interesting.
Definitely more extracted.
Getting toward the upper end of where I want it to be
from an extraction perspective, actually.
If you look at what it did to the coffee bed,
it was an even more violent brew it seemed.
It's definitely kind of dug a hole in the middle
of this thing, and I think that's probably bad
from an extraction perspective, and I will deal with that.
One more slightly silly temperature experiment,
but I'm kind of curious,
I've got 450 grams of hot water here,
instead of 500, and 50 grams of ice.
And towards the end of the brew, I'm gonna drip feed
the ice in right under the hot water spout
to see if I can bring down the brew temperature
just a little bit towards the end.
Will that help?
I don't know. Let's find out.
I know it's ridiculous, but that's what we do here.
Now, that was definitely interesting.
Though I probably timed my ice badly.
We had a bit of a U-shaped curve of temperature there,
where the bottom of the bed was sort of just below
the 90s, which is fine for the bottom of the bed.
And then we kind of held it there with the ice.
And then I put the last piece in, and it kind of tanked down
into like the 70, and then crept back up to like 80
towards the end.
That's pretty good.
That's definitely interesting.
Okay. Maybe there's something there.
Okay, let's put that in the maybe pile
of kind of interesting things and ridiculous ideas
that we tested today, and move on.
So now let's talk about the bloom.
It's a thing that we do in pourover brewing all the time.
We pour a little water on, let it steep.
Let the kind of coffee degas a little bit
before we pour to get a higher extraction
and a little bit more evenness in our extraction too.
This doesn't do that.
Once you turn this on, it delivers water till it's done.
So there's no option for that.
And fancier brewers do have bloom options
built in, either customizable ones,
or just kind of part of the brewing process
will do a delivery of water, a pause, and then deliver more.
Obviously, we could do this manually.
I could turn the machine on, turn the machine off
for a period of time, and turn it back on again.
I was looking for a slightly more ridiculous solution
to that, so I got one of these.
It is a pretty generic smart plug.
So this connects to the internet,
and can be controlled by the internet.
What I did was I connected a few services like,
"If this, then that," which is always useful,
one, my phone's voice assistant,
and a service called Apaleo,
which lets me do kind of logic things,
lets me lets me build timers essentially.
It's not the greatest route.
I'm sure someone much smarter than me could give you
a much simpler way of doing this,
but I just wanted to kind of proof of concept it.
So here's how it works.
I would talk to my phone and trigger the whole thing
and it would turn on the brewer.
I could have the on switch on,
but the plug itself would be off.
And it would turn on for about 35 seconds.
That should be enough time for it to start delivering water.
Now I'm gonna put hot water in this ahead of time,
which is maybe not the easiest thing,
but we're automating a process here.
So just go with me.
After 35 seconds, it switches off for about 20 seconds.
Now I know we want to bloom for longer than that,
but when I turn this back on,
water won't immediately be delivered.
There'll be a little bit of a gap again.
And after 20 seconds blooming, the machine switches back
on and brews, and it switches off after I think,
five minutes from that sort of trigger.
Having set this all up and found that it works,
a small downside is that this machine switch,
when you cut the power to the machine,
it just turns off.
It flicks off.
Now I could probably just gaffer tape that in place
and that would work fine, a bit hacky.
But I just wanted to proof of concept it, right.
Like I just wanted to see, does this work, does this help?
So, let's do what we did without the ice,
but everything else with the bloom phase,
but actually with one more twist.
I said that there's a steep and release button here.
What I'm gonna do is do the entire bloom phase
without the carafe in place.
And at the end of the bloom phase,
I'm gonna put the carafe in.
That means that we'll have a kind of steeped bloom,
which should help with evenness a little bit more,
and then it should start to brew.
And then we should have a good time, I hope.
Hey Siri, brew some coffee.
- Okay.
(coffee brewing)
- Drain you out, and it should kick back on in a second.
Now, just as this finishes up,
obviously, if you were to tape over this switch,
you're overriding a safety mechanism
and even though my routine does have the switch
being switched off at the plug as part of it,
that doesn't always make it 100% safe.
So just, if you're gonna mess with this stuff,
be aware that there are safety features
that exist for a reason.
These hot plates get incredibly hot,
hot enough to boil water.
So leaving them on hot isn't always a good idea,
with coffee on top or not, frankly.
Interesting, I think from, certainly here to here,
and here to here, we've had an increase in strength,
which means an increase in extraction.
And with the same grind settings and the same water
and the same-ish temperatures with the exception
of this one, increased extraction probably suggests
increased evenness of extraction too
and I think the bloom probably helped.
But for all our improvements,
I look at the bed of coffee and it still looks like
there's been a bit of violence, right?
Like it's a flatter bed actually, having had the bloom.
That seems to be a benefit for sure,
that kind of layer of water on top,
perhaps buffering the water coming in, the violence of that.
I think I have a solution, or I think I have something
that might help a little bit, but I'm not sure.
I'll be testing it for the first time and
you'll be joining me as well.
And that will come after a short ad from this video sponsor,
which is Squarespace.
If you need a website or a domain, then I would recommend
checking out Squarespace.
Squarespace makes it so easy to go from having an idea
for a website to having a website.
Start with one of their beautiful templates,
pick something that fits your need.
It might be your portfolio.
It might be your cafe.
It might be your writing, and go from there.
Fill it with your words, your images,
your style, your feeling.
You can tweak, adjust so easily.
And once it's running, it looks great on every browser,
every device.
That's all taken care of.
There's nothing to patch, upgrade, or install.
It's easy. Don't take my word for it.
Click the link down below and sign up for a free trial,
and just build something.
And when you're ready to launch, use code,
JAMESHOFFMANN for 10% off any website or domain.
Thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video.
So here's what I've been thinking about.
The water comes out of this as like a little spout,
and it's very simple.
It's very simply made.
It's just a kind of a hole and water falls out
with a bit of pressure, but there's no real distribution.
And I don't know if it's practical to try and replace
something like this with a spray head.
3D printing isn't great for kind of the materials
you'd want to use with sort of hot water,
and that's what most people are printing with.
So that doesn't seem like a sensible solution.
And then I was thinking about this,
it's called a Melodrip.
Now it's been around for quite a while.
And the idea here is that you'd use it with say,
pour over brewing, and you'd pour your water into this,
and it would distribute the water
into a kind of a shower head over the coffee.
But I didn't want to just sort of do that,
the whole brew.
That just doesn't seem fun or practical.
And so that was kind of out.
Then I was thinking about the sort of drip style
cold brewers, right?
Like Peter McKinnon made a very beautiful video
about his the other day.
And it reminded me that what you'd do is you put
a piece of paper on top, as well as below the coffee,
'cause the paper helps distribute the water out.
So I wondered if you could do that.
But then I thought let's use less paper.
Let's try and put a metal disc on top of the coffee,
essentially to buffer the coffee itself from the water
coming in, right.
It should sit over the coffee under the spout
the whole time.
It should help mitigate the violence of the spout.
But I don't know.
There is just one way to find out.
(coffee brewing)
Now if we look inside here, we have a flatter bed,
but it's not gone exactly to plan.
The disc has sort of slightly wedged itself
in just into the top layer.
But overall, I just don't know what impact it's had.
Now the obvious downside is you've got to get it out.
So maybe paper is a better solution
from a practical perspective, but I don't know if paper
would like float around or float away.
But it's worth testing.
Having had a taste, I think we can call it as a fail.
It feels like a big drop in extraction
and a big drop in evenness.
It's not necessarily that sour.
It just feels like it somehow bypassed a bit of the coffee
doing it this way.
Not a success.
I feel like there's some sort of idea here
in distributing water better, but I can't find one
that's practical, easy, obvious, you know,
not gonna add a ton of cost to the machine.
If you have any ideas, let me know
down in the comments below.
I'd be really interested to hear.
Now, I feel like we've come a long way.
We've done a bunch of different experiments
and slowly we're putting it all together.
What I'm gonna do now is brew the best brew I can
with what we've learned from this thing.
And at the same time, I'll also brew a V60 of the same
coffee, same dose, same grind,
all of those kind of things with the technique
that I typically use, which is linked up here,
if you don't know about that.
And then I will taste them and compare them blind
to see if there's an obvious difference,
to see if this is getting close to a V60,
if it's really close, if it's miles away.
I just want a kind of point of reference to kind of wrap
things up and see how far we've come.
And to complete a triangle of tasting, I'll throw in
an untweaked brew from this thing,
which brews the same as this thing really,
as a kind of do nothing, what'd you get,
do lots of stuff, what'd you get,
V60 what'd you get, but blind.
So we need to let this cool and equalize in temperature
a little bit, and we'll clean up this,
and then Michael will come in and switch them around
so I don't know which is which.
So this one here I would guess is the regular little batch
brewer that we didn't do anything to.
It just tastes empty and a bit hollow.
And like it has that kind of cold start taste
and it's not bad, actually.
It tasted, the coffee that went in, reasonably.
It's just not that good.
Next up, I would say is probably this one.
This one is a big jump in extraction.
It is much sweeter than this one here.
It's much more complex.
It's a really quite nice cup of coffee.
It's not as good as this cup of coffee.
It actually tastes slightly less extracted
than this one here, but it just is a little bit prettier.
I don't like using the pretentious language,
but it's got a bit more clarity to it.
It's nice and sweet.
I wish it actually had a little bit more extraction
like this one, but this one does not have the evenness
of this one here.
But this is the winner.
So I'm gonna say this is the V60.
I'm gonna say this is our modded technique,
and I'm gonna say, this is the unmodified
Russell Hobbs thing.
And it is, it's the Russell Hobbs.
Hopefully, this is the Melitta.
It is the Melitta. That's good.
Which means this is the V60 as predicted.
And I would say, this is really not a bad cup of coffee.
I'm kind of into this.
I'm kind of, yeah, I think it's tasty.
I think it's good.
I think there's a difference here,
in that little bit more clarity.
The fight is evenness, right,
like water delivery in these things sucks
and finding a way to overcome that remains a challenge
that I'm frustrated I didn't fix in this video,
but it's one I'll keep thinking about
and trying to come up with a decent solution for.
Leave me a comment if you've got a good idea.
But I guess the learnings from this would be as follows.
If you're gonna take on some of these tips,
and you don't have to do them all, right.
If you had to just sort of pick and choose a few,
I would definitely 100% start with hot water
in the brew chamber.
That's the biggest single gain you will get in cup quality.
The second thing I would do would be
the sort of steep and release, right?
If you have a cheap brewer that has that option to it,
use the steep and release function.
It's definitely an improvement to evenness and extraction.
I think that's definitely a win.
Three would be a bloom phase, right?
And you could sort of skip the bloom phase in a way
by having a steep phase and then putting your carafe in
after say 30 seconds or when it's filled a certain amount.
Having it go on, off, on again, I think is a benefit.
And then lastly, if you wanna throw some ice in at the end,
I think it's kind of interesting.
It's a lot of extra work for pretty limited returns,
but it's kind of fun.
It's interesting.
It has an impact I didn't really expect it to.
But yeah, if you try that, definitely let me know
what your results are like.
I think for darker roasts, I'd definitely be leaning
that way, as a way to sort of moderate brew temperature
towards the end of the brew,
where you're likely to pick up a lot of very harsh
very bitter notes, but that's the deal
with cheap coffee makers.
That's how you can get some better coffee out of them.
And again, I'd love to hear from you down
in the comments below.
Let me know if you try it, let me know your successes.
Let me know if you have some failures too.
But for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching,
and I hope you have a great day.