The Zojurushi 5-cup coffeemaker attracted my attention at a previous International Housewares show. I’d been trying to find a successor to the legendary Kitchen Aid 4-cup. Could this be it? My appetite was whetted when I ran into it again at Oren’s Daily Roast. I practically begged him to let me try it, but I’m already into him for so much coffee, he put me off. Finally I got the courage to scarf one from their sales rep at this year’s Housewares show. I was pretty excited to see it. It has the second most important virtue of any coffee gear, good looks.
The 5-cups are to me really four, but that’s what I’m looking for.
Number one, though, can it brew great coffee?
I finally scarfed one off Zojurushi’s PR people who I met at the International Housewares Show. One showed up on my doorstep a few days later.
It uses a number 2 Melitta filter. It has a removable water chamber and an inline charcoal filter. I was surprised that the filter appears to be located after the water is heated. As I use mostly low-mineral no-chlorine water I hardly need such a filter. No mention is made in the instruction book as to where to buy replacements.
Using the Zojurushi is easy. Fill the water tank up to the line. The instruction book may be light on the water filter replacement but it is excellent about its suggested formula, specifying 35 grams of fine grind coffee for a full pot. That works out to the industry formula. This might not seem astounding but recipes are almost never mentioned in coffeemaker instruction manuals, and when they are, they are usually wrong.
Monitoring the brew temperature showed me what I wanted to see. It really gets hot, not quite as instant on as the Technivorm, but very close, 200 degrees Fahrenheit for most of the brew cycle, even a little above towards the end. Best of all, the water gets all the grounds nicely wet. It’s a little appreciated fact that the biggest advantage manual drip has over auto drip is your hand always knows where to pour hot water. I found the best way to ensure this is to remove the top during brewing; I presume this is because the lid must be located precisely, but it’s easy to try it once and see if you agree. With minimal futzing, this coffeemaker just works almost perfectly.
Result? After years of searching I’m done. The Zojurushi does a stellar job, almost the equal of the Technivorm in temperature and actually, gasp, a little better in its drip performance. You almost can’t do better yourself.
Recommendation? Place 35 grams fine grind coffee for a full pot. Flip it on and in seven minutes, you’re ready to enjoy. Seven minutes may seem overlong to American drip aficionados, but trust me you will like the coffee. I ascribe the slightly longer contact time to Japanese fascination with European standards (I’m half-kidding) and the fact that during the first minute the water is just under ideal brewing temperature.
I brewed several batches of Bridgeport Coffee Company’s El Salvador Finca Las Nubes – Ernesto Lima. They charge for heirloom bourbon coffee grown by the kind of farmer who walks around dusting his plants every afternoon and, using this brewer, I could taste it. I then brewed some very different Oren’s Daily Roast Viennese Blend, which is make up of two stellar Colombian coffees, one light and the other French roast. It’s my favorite summer after-dinner coffee. I get a lot of local produce during the summer months and this coffee is able to add to a meal already chock with rich flavors. This brewer actually made coffee virtually identical to what I could do with a Hario V60, no mean feat.
This review has a simple ending: Zojurushi is top rated, the current five cup champ.
I spoke of my best cup of the Coffee Fest 2011 Show as a Sumatra coffee slow brewed for me at the Counter Culture exhibit. My best coffee from Coffee Fest was the Backpacker’s Blend given me in the hall by a small-batch roaster, Kalamazoo Coffee Company from, where else, Kalamazoo, Michigan. He appeared to have just two packages of it, so it seemed all the more precious when he offered one of them to me. I came home and opened the sack to take a whiff – too dark roast, I thought. I didn’t even brew any that day. The next day lunchtime rolled around. I often brew something slightly darker roasted for my afternoon coffee. I chose to use the Sowden SoftBrew, which steeps the coffee. For reasons thus far unexplained by science, there’s a significant difference between steep method brewers and highly agitated drip or vacuum methods. I’ve heard plenty of conjecture, but no solid facts. Let’s just say they’re different.
To brew using this method, I decided to emulate the formula used by Peet’s Jim Reynolds in his French press tutorial in my Coffee Brewing Secrets DVD. Jim used a rather robust grounds-to-water ratio: 57grams for four six-ounce cups. Of course, I ground coarse, as coarse as my Preciso grinder would allow. I preheated the SoftBrew inside and out so that when the water was poured in to mix with the grounds it would not be suddenly cooled by unheated porcelain or the filter’s cold steel. I heated the water to a full boil, and started a stopwatch. One minute from the boil, I poured enough water over the grounds, just as Jim did. After another minute, I poured the rest of the water into the SoftBrew. I covered it and timed the entire time from the first water was place in contact with the grounds until I poured the coffee, four minutes.
Often I find steeped methods have paradoxically harsh flavor, which I believe comes from people pouring still-boiling water over the grounds. I say paradoxically because the brew often tastes underdone, indicating the water has cooled too rapidly. All steep methods are going to experience heat-loss during brewing, but the act of pre-warming the pot would seem to circumvent at least some of the initial temperature drop.
Just before I poured the coffee brewed in the SoftBrew I gave the whole mixture inside a stir. I did this because the grounds can’t help but move towards the top of the brewer during soaking. This means the coffee towards the top is going to be stronger than that at the bottom. I want everyone to enjoy the same brew strength in their cup. The stirring does increase the likelihood of fine grounds in the coffee, but I think it’s a small price to pay as well as a small increase in fines.
The coffee was perfect. The roast was definitely towards the dark side, but minus any perception of bitterness or burnt caramel that dominates so many darker roast coffees. There was still a healthy brightness of acidity in each taste. This was a coffee that would stand up to cream nicely, but I enjoyed it just as it was.
My thanks and compliments to Kalamazoo Coffee Company. It was indeed my best cup after the show.
Water is the number one subject people ask about. Water is the solvent that brings for the oil from the grounds. Without water, there’s no coffee. Learning about water and how to view it helped me enormously to brew better coffee. As in most things coffee, there are lots myths surrounding water. I want this to be short and sweet. Here’s my quick opinionated practical guide to brew great coffee.
Hard Water
“Hard water won’t extract because it’s already too full of minerals.”I hear it all the time. Don’t think of water as absorbing coffee oils. Think salad dressing. Oil and water don’t mix. Think of heated water being a solvent that removes coffee oil from the grounds and they get mixed into the hot water, making the beverage known as coffee. Also, when water is heated the minerals go into suspension. They are virtually unimportant during brewing. What minerals do is add taste. The reason not to use highly mineralized water is they risk adding a flavor that competes with or clashes with your coffee flavor. If that’s not reason enough, hard water suspended during heating, cools and hardens on the insides of your coffeemaker’s plumbing. It doesn’t take much to clog your coffeemaker’s arteries and interfere with the flow. This causes everything from substandard brewing temperatures, to slowing down brewing to simply halting the process. A coffeemaker manufacturer’s repairman once told me the majority of their service was simply calcium-choked coffeemakers.
If you have highly mineralized water, you should do the following: Drink some. If it tastes good, you can brew coffee with it. If the water doesn’t taste good, you shouldn’t brew with it because it will flavor your coffee, almost always it will taste bad. For bad tasting water use bottled water. For very hard water, you can choose. If you are willing to routinely be running vinegar or Urnex (a good coffeemaker cleaner) through your machine, and use fresh water (better still distilled or low-mineral bottled water) to rinse afterwards, you can continue to use hard water. But consider if your water is hard enough, you won’t save much by just switching to bottled water, compared to buying vinegar, coffeemaker cleaner and bottled water to rinse the machines.
Bottled Water
If you use bottled water, check to see that it is low enough in minerals to make a difference. Usually it is lower simply because most bottled water manufacturers do some filtration to make their products consistent… but not always. Some bottled waters are full of minerals and not even any softer (meaning lower in mineral content) than the hardest tap water. The most reliable waters for brewing coffee are so-called drinking water, which are usually highly filtered municipal waters. Most often, they are treated with reverse osmosis filtration, which all but eliminates minerals. Then, the water bottler adds some particles in controlled amounts, just enough to add ‘normal’ flavor – water with no minerals can taste ‘flat’. There are some excellent good-tasting bottled waters, both low in minerals and with good taste that are not r/o filtered, but they take a little patience to find.
Softened Water
Under no circumstances should you use softened water, meaning water that’s been treated with a home water softener. Actually, there is an exception – espresso machines sometimes benefit from softened water, but these are dedicated machines and it’s a special case. I’m still not certain I fully approve of it, but at least it qualifies as a possibility – with espresso. This is not true using drip, vacuum or press pots. Softened water is especially problematic with automatic drip machines, where softened water and ground coffee can combine to make gelatinous goo that will become stuck in your brew basket.
Softened water is virtually undrinkable anyway due to its elevated sodium content. I anticipate the question of alternate softening methods. To be honest, I don’t know, nor do I know if it’s been researched by anyone. I’m eager to learn if any tests have been done.
So, there are the coffee basics you need to brew great coffee minus the myths.
When Good Eats’ host Alton Brown did a coffee segment some years back I was surprised at how casual the man who claims to be food’s OCD poster child was about preparing a beverage I know to be among the most finicky and demanding of cooking arts. If his general demeanor convinced me that Mr Brown is not a devout coffee enthusiast, his advice that his special sauce for getting the best coffee taste was adding salt to the grounds sealed it. I was genuinely despondent over the segment. For one thing, it showed he either never saw or wasn’t convinced by my own appearances on Food where I attempted to evangelize good brewing techniques and attentiveness to the process. Second, I was horrified to see him suggest adding salt.
To Salt or Not
Salt is, according to food medical sages, a slow poison to health. I’m a philosopher when it comes to such warnings. I think a lot of living is eating and, after my early years as a strict food puritan, I came to take a common sense mix of good living and reasonable caution. I don’t smoke or drink heavily. I preach moderation in all things, including salt. By my reckoning a key to long life is learning not to be a health fanatic as worry appears to kill as quickly as the occasional wrong ingredient. So my objection to salt in coffee is not based upon health issues. I acknowledge that salt is not a killer in the amounts advised by Brown.
I’ve also heard food industry critics challenge Brown using the conflict of interest argument. They claim the Brown is funded by a major salt company and thus his views are tainted by his paycheck. Again, I say nay. I think Brown appears to me to be sincere in his beliefs. If I’ve learned one thing in writing about coffee, you’re going to find funding from those you generally agree with and who recognize that what you’re saying is what they want to help spread around. It isn’t always a conflict. It is more often the other way around. The people who want to fund you like you because you both generally agree. I think Brown likes salt and the salt companies simply know this, like this and make their investments accordingly. So, my objection has nothing to do with an impropriety.
I think Alton Brown is wrong, that’s all. Oh, is he right that adding salt to coffee affects the flavor? Yes, he is. But why? Salt is a taste desensitizer. It is roughly the same thing as advising eyeglass wearers to not clean their glasses before viewing their cable TV because it will help cover the artifacts present in video downloads. It’s actually a pretty fair analogy because salt softens the harshness in coffee – coffee that’s poorly brewed that is. Oh yes, it’s also coffee that’s low quality. This is what irks me. Brown, who counsels people to spend extra money and time seeking high quality seafood, meat and vegetables, suddenly offers coffee shortcuts to help hide the defects in inferior beans, and mistakes inherent in poor brewing practices and faulty equipment. Suddenly, the man who’s taught you to cook dinner as if you’re a chef in the most expensive Paris restaurant, is instructing you to brew coffee in a World War II-era Soviet worker’s kitchen. He’s doing all this during an age of comparative coffee bean greatness. I’m befuddled.
Now if I may move upwards from scolding Rachel Ray’s predecessor for a moment, let’s talk about what exactly salt accomplishes in brewing. Salt is a flavor de-hancer. When you go to the supermarket on a Saturday and the cute person handing out tiny wine samples offers you a cube of cheese to accompany it, it is to help the wine by cutting the harshness of a relatively young, inexpensive wine. No wine expert would consider having cheese before or during a wine tasting. More important no one whose spent a hundred dollars or more on a bottle would want to risk destroying their tongues ability to savor that extra fragrance and taste nuances they’ve paid top dollar for. If they do, I can help them save money.
Cheese is called “the winemaker’s friend” precisely because it deadens your taste buds. It may not hurt your experience, but at least know you are like the wealth rock star who learns from a former starlet’s autobiography that he bedded her down. He has no memory of the experience but it must have been wonderful. To me that’s a waste.
Salt does not heighten the flavor of most foods, but limits your ability to taste them. Once you learn this, you are likely to either save money by buying cheaper foods knowing you can reduce the off tastes, or you can begin to really savor them by reducing the salt and allowing your taste buds to really focus on their various flavor essences and aromas.
Ironically, in an age when coffee snobs smirk at seeing their social inferiors adding a dollop of cream to their cups, cream, especially the richer, fattier varieties, can arguably be called flavor enhancers rather than taste deadeners. The challenge here is that the corporate dairies customarily add sodium to cream, probably due to the assumption that a majority of their customers buy poor coffee and don’t know how to brew it.
I urge you to buy direct trade coffees grown by farmers known to your roaster, and brew those coffees within fourteen days of roasting, using the practices I’ve spent years learning and spreading. If you do all this right, you will end up with some of the most exotic and pleasurable aromas and flavors known to man. If you still want to sweeten or enrich them with sugar or cream, be my guest.
But I urge you with equal passion to spare the salt.
There is hip and there is hip. The Hario V60 is definitely what the doctor ordered for the new slow coffee movement, that is brewed coffee done by hand, one cup at a time. I heard some marketing guru state the other day that the single-cup coffee market was going to be big. Really? That would have been big news a few years ago. Frankly, I’ve been using one-cup brewers for a dozen years, but I’m not claiming to be psychic.
Recession Chic: You already own a cup, half the coffeemaker.
They are just what the doctor ordered for upscale expensive beans, and my desire to drink a brewed cup par excellence. Manual drip brewing is a superb extraction method. Realize that brewing 10 cups at a time is difficult for drip because it takes so long for hot water to get hot, and get through the grounds without over-extracting and becoming bitter. One cup? No problem.
Let’s look at what’s different about the Hario and why it’s getting such a buzz.
Brewer – the power of this brewer is the bottom, where the coffee exits. Usually it’s a tiny hole. This allows the brewer to regulate the water to help control how long the water is in contact with the grounds. If the water goes through too fast, you just get hot water. If it’s too slow, you get bitter coffee. The Hario hole is so big, it hardly controls the flow at all. This allows you to grind super fine and that is mostly a good thing. The Hario presumes you will grind your own coffee. If you use preground drip grind, it the water will likely run through too fast. The key to grinding is to grind fine enough to slow the drip, ending up with between four and six minutes contact between the water and grounds. In this way, it is similar to the Chemex, which also has a large gap at the filter bottom.
Negligee-thin filter
The filter is an extension of the philosophy of the exit hole. The filter appears designed to encourage flow, not hold it back. Again, this will encourage you to grind fine. The filter paper is designed to be practically transparent, quite different from Chemex’s, which seems thicker and slower in comparison.
Grind – so what grind you should use? I said between 4 and 6 minutes is the ideal contact time. But, why such a large spread? Well, this allows for your personal taste, but also when you grind finer for drip, there’s a double effect. The finer grind slows the flow, but it also increases contact area between the water and grounds, so trial and error is necessary. I found when brewing four cups, which this brewer is capable of, I ground slightly coarser, still a fine grind, but just a bit less fine, so that my entire batch was ready in six minutes. When I only needed to brew one cup, I ground superfine, but it still took less time because there was less water to run through the grounds, so I had to grind very fine, almost a powder, and due to the increased ground surface exposed to hot water, I got the same strength in about four minutes. Is that clear? I hope so.
Oversize Hario coffee exit means use fine grind.
The Hario has these swirling fins inside. One colleague of mine was just overwhelmed with this brilliance of this innovation. I must just be different, but I fail to see how important these are. They add a nice visual design touch, but I seriously doubt if they really encourage a specific flow in any significant way.
The Hario V60 is available in plastic, glass and ceramic versions. I tested the least expensive plastic version. I would expect the ceramic version to be allow the water to cool fastest, and glass perhaps slowest, but I’d reckon the water travels through the grounds so quickly that it won’t be an issue.
Nice brewing view of first pour. Note channels peeking through filter.
Here’s my method: Boil some good tasting water. Place one 10gram scoop of coffee per 6 ounce cup. I used Counter Culture’s Peruvian Valle de Santuario for my tests. Grind fine, finer than for auto drip, but definitely not espresso grind. As grind is so important to this brewer’s performance, expect to do some futzing to get the taste you like. Also expect to alter your grind if you change the batch brew volume. For four cups, I weighed 40 grams coffee, and backed off to almost an auto-drip grind. Then the contact time between grounds and water was just shy of 6 minutes. This particular coffee has vanilla, fig and chocolate notes in it and the Hario brought out all the noble acidity and richness I could ask for. I suspect the filter paper webbing has a lot to do with the extraordinary success of the Hario V60. The filter is the closest to a glass or fine mesh filter with all the flavor and oil you could ask for, yet absolutely no sediment.
The Hario rinses clean, but the plastic version I tested is not dishwasher safe!
The Hario V60 is a fine brewer, far from being overpriced and it is not just geek gear. If you want jewelry or high end kitchenware, you can buy a glass or ceramic model. It does not displace either the Melitta cone nor Chemex, but it offers a fun and good tasting option to manual brewing, and places a healthy emphasis on grinding fine, rather than counting on the exit hole or filter to regulate contact time. With its innovative filter paper that offers the best in flavor transparency, the Hario V60 is a winner.
The Zojurushi 5-cup coffeemaker attracted my attention at a previous International Housewares show. I’d been trying to find a successor to the legendary Kitchen Aid 4-cup. Could this be it? My appetite was whetted when I ran into it again at Oren’s Daily Roast. I practically begged him to let me try it, but I’m already into him for so much coffee, he put me off. Finally I got the courage to scarf one from their sales rep at this year’s Housewares show. I was pretty excited to see it. It has the second most important virtue of any coffee gear, good looks.
