Moka pot, hand brewing pot, AeroPress, when it comes to coffee, do you prefer deliciousness or fast food?

Text | Jiang Yinlong

Whether it is a Turkish coffee pot, a siphon pot or a French press, it is not difficult to see that there are only two principles of coffee pots: soaking and filtering. Soaking is to allow hot water and coffee powder to fully blend, while filtering is to let water "pass" through the coffee powder through a filter device. As long as the technique is proper, both methods can achieve good extraction effects.

The word "extraction" in coffee extraction sounds professional, but it is actually similar to the principle of brewing tea - or in other words, the process of brewing tea is also a process of tea leaf extraction, but no tea drinker would use this awkward name. The extraction process of coffee and tea is both "solid-liquid" extraction, that is, using a solvent to separate the components in a solid mixture - the solid mixture here is coffee powder and tea leaves, and the solvent is of course water.

From this definition, we can see that Turkish coffee pots and French presses are both immersion extraction, the difference is whether or not they are filtered later; while siphon pots are filtration extraction, and the "core device" of filtration is the filter element at the bottom of the upper pot. From the historical process, the filtration coffee pot seems to be the direction of coffee development, because two more "extreme" coffee pots will soon appear in the early 20th century.

One is the hand-poured coffee pot, which sublimates the ritual sense of coffee to the extreme. Its inventor is a housewife in Dresden, Germany, named Melitta Bentz. In Germany, there is another Karl Benz who founded the Mercedes-Benz automobile empire, who may be more famous, but Melitta Benz's rewriting of the history of coffee drinking has obviously had a more "silent" impact on human civilization.

The story begins like this: Melita Benz is a senior coffee lover, especially likes a kind of freshly brewed Saxon coffee called "Schälchen Heeßen". Maybe the coffee filter device at that time was not perfect enough, maybe she didn't have a sufficiently delicate siphon pot, or maybe the coffee powder was ground too fine, every time Melita Benz drank coffee, she would be troubled by the coffee grounds left in her teeth. Until one day, Melita Benz suddenly had the idea of ​​using her son's blotting paper as filter paper, and then she found a way to filter the coffee grounds as much as possible while retaining the coffee aroma as much as possible.

On this basis, Melita Benz soon invented a copper coffee filter with an arched bottom and a water outlet hole. The world's first hand-poured coffee pot was born. In 1908, Melita Benz registered a patent for this invention, and its trademark was the handwritten signature "Melita". The hand-poured coffee named "Melita" was thus tainted with a strong German style.

This kind of hand-poured coffee can gradually "tame" the taste buds of coffee lovers all over the world in the years to come, and it certainly does not rely on its German style. Hand-poured coffee requires extremely delicate operation. Different coffee bean varieties, different roasting degrees, different grinding particle sizes, and even different numbers of water holes and filter cup threads all correspond to different brewing methods. Of course, in return, hand-poured coffee also has a richer and more extreme taste, which is unattainable by other coffees.

If hand-poured coffee takes the ritual of handwork to its extreme, then another type of moka pot takes "steampunk" to its extreme. 25 years after Melita Benz invented hand-poured coffee, Italian Alfonso Bialetti discovered that local women used a washing tub with a deep hole to wash clothes. There was a container under the tub containing ash and soap. The soap foam produced by the mixture when it came into contact with water would float to the washing tub above, so that the clothes in the tub could be used when washing. Inspired by this, Alfonso Bialetti invented the moka pot: Similar to the siphon pot, this coffee pot also has a two-layer structure. After the water in the lower pot is boiled, it will be sprayed into the upper part of the pot through a mesh filter filled with coffee powder. The difference is that the coffee in the siphon pot will flow back to the lower pot, while the coffee in the moka pot will be sprayed directly into the upper pot.

The Moka pot is the first coffee pot in the history of human coffee to extract coffee through steam pressure. The year was 1933, and time was running out for humans to make manual coffee pots. Thirty years later, with the advent of Philips' first drip coffee machine, coffee pots entered the electric era.

With the development of the times, it is becoming increasingly difficult for busy urban men and women to squeeze out time to use a handmade coffee pot to brew a cup of romantic coffee. In a world dominated by office buildings and cubicles, the coffee map was eventually filled with electric coffee pots and even instant coffee, while the slow-paced handmade coffee pots gradually retreated to coffee shops, waiting for people's rare rest time.

However, this does not mean that the development of handmade coffee pots has been interrupted. In 2005, a mechanical engineering lecturer named Alan Adler once again refreshed the list of members of handmade coffee pots, and this coffee pot is AeroPress. AeroPress is a bit like a large syringe. As long as you put coffee powder and hot water in its "syringe" and press the push rod, the coffee will flow into the lower pot through the filter paper. From this perspective, AeroPress is like a French press used upside down, but its shape is more tainted with the atmosphere of the "fast food era".

Although electric coffee pots are obviously more adaptable to the pace of development of the times, manual coffee pots still have a long future. The emergence of AeroPress is a good example of this. Although the development process from Turkish coffee pots to AeroPress proves the "fact" that humans are becoming lazier, when it comes to real deliciousness, there will always be people who are willing to take the trouble.