by Jimmy Sherfey*
Those who have tasted specialty coffee done right—the round acidity, the sweet-syrupy body on the heels of a malty aroma—understand why enthusiasts line up for a single cup that can cost upward of $6.
Alas, that silky decoction very often calls for the slower deliberation of the pour-over brewing method, a timely manual process in which a barista slowly pours water over fresh coffee grinds in a cone filter to evenly extract a bean’s flavor.
It’s arguably the quintessential brew-style of the specialty coffee movement, but preparing pour-overs in a cafe—where customers are frequently looking to grab a quick (but still, quality) coffee and go—can make for some initial awkwardness.
When a cafe slows down the brewing process of what was formerly a push-button procedure and puts a kettle into the hands of an employee—no matter how expensive his/her apron—the whole procedure, which can take longer than five minutes for a single cup, is enough to garner disapproving glares from any rushed consumer.
Herein lies one of specialty coffee’s main challenges: re-branding a commodity that has, for decades, been attached to the idea of convenience. Based in New York, where the struggle is real, the team behind the Poursteady—a new coffee machine designed to marry speed, precision, and convenience—hopes to bring specialty brews to the typical hurried consumer.
Poursteady’s four-man team—including a product designer, a programmer, and two mechanical engineers—began building their device by implementing technology atypical to coffee equipment. Previously, principal engineers Stuart Heys and Marc Sibenac designed lab automation systems for pharmaceutical companies and mobile robotics projects for various organizations, including Boeing and NASA.
They even worked on the rover models, which the space agency used to simulate conditions for the Mars Rover Mission. “When you have a contract that lasts years and is well into six figures to make something like that, and NASA sends a team of scientists and engineers to the Arctic or the Atacama Desert, the machine has to work,” says Poursteady CEO and product designer Stephan von Muehlen.
Herein lies one of specialty coffee’s main challenges: re-branding a commodity that has, for decades, been attached to the idea of convenience.
For years Sibenac had been an avid pour-over drinker, and when talking with Heys, they realized their robotics background could easily translate to the world of coffee. In 2013 they set out to automate the craft process, bringing a prototype to the New York edition of science fair the Maker Faire that year. After positive response, they felt their automated five-station, push-button pour-over coffee simulator could find success in a commercial setting. Following two years of research and development, Poursteady 1.0 made its retail debut last July at the Cafe Grumpy in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood.
While the Poursteady isn’t exactly putting a man on the moon, the engineers were still working in uncharted territory. If they could design a pour-over machine to jive with the workflows of a real-life shop, they would have what promised to be one of the most game-changing brewing tools in specialty coffee to date. Together with graphic designer Greg Mihalko, Heys and von Muehlen hammered out the machine’s industrial design.
How Does the Poursteady Work?
Baristas use an app to set and assign “recipes” to one of five brewing stations lined up under a motorized track. Along this track, a single suspended pour spout zips back and forth to the active stations applying increments of hot water pre-determined by the barista.
As hot water issues forth, the nozzle swivels on an axis, mimicking a barista’s pouring motion. The spout can also pour other patterns such as hearts, stars, or zigzags by generating a linear bitmap that sends information to motor controls following a conversion from Cartesian to polar coordinates—you know, normal coffee stuff.
The barista can assign recipes to each station before business hours or call an audible mid-shift to fine-tune a brew to a customer’s liking. Once the recipe is set, the barista’s manual preparation resembles that of an automatic espresso machine—grind, dose, and initiate the desired station with the press of a button. Since pour-over coffee is not brewed in a pressure chamber as with espresso, it takes longer than 30 seconds.
According to Specialty Coffee Association of America, the window of time water can be in contact with coffee using any automated brewer has to fall between 4 to 8 minutes, and the water volume can never exceed eighteen times the amount of coffee. Unsurprisingly, a consortium of industry wonks, well-versed in the subject of coffee extraction, have already established an acceptable range of parameters to ensure coffee is optimally extracted (many home coffee machines fail to meet these parameters, by the way).
Coffee must be brewed at a water temperature no less than 198° F and no more than 205° F. Depending on the point in the brew cycle, the coffee and water ratio cannot fall outside a certain range. The Poursteady manages the workflows to ensure neither of those parameters are compromised, and von Muehlen says the machine will not start a brew unless it can handle all of the functions queued up across all active stations at a given time.
Where to Try Poursteady-Brewed Coffee
While the Poursteady is still in the certification processes, which will clear the path for large-scale production and distribution, that has not stopped a few independent shops from inviting the technology into their arsenal.
Currently, per von Muehlen, 15 units are floating around “in the wild,” the most-recent of which went to new Bushwick coffee bar, Supercrown Coffee Roasters. Cafe founder and roaster Darleen Scherer (former owner of Brooklyn’s Gorilla Coffee) recalls her first encounter with the machine.
“I thought, ‘The Poursteady could really change things.’ I love it because of its consistency and the parameters you can dial into it. You set it and let it do what it’s designed to do. You can make five cups that each require different brewing parameters at the same time,” says the Supercrown boss. “Ever since the Clover, the single-cup commercial coffee brewer, everyone has been trying to do single-serve coffee.”
Remember the Clover?
As a tangent, the arc of the Clover is worth a look, as the Poursteady appears to be on a similar trajectory. The Clover came to the industry ten years ago amidst no shortage of fanfare. It promised a cleaner, full-immersion brew (think: French press) that, like the Poursteady, is sensitive to time, dosage, and brew temperature, without sacrificing the speed and efficiency crucial to cafes. Also akin to the Poursteady, the Clover promised to make quality coffee more accessible to a larger audience.
Stumptown purchased the first Clover at a cost of $11,000. According to a 2008 Wired article, it was at Cafe Grumpy—which, eight years later, happens to be the first shop to purchase the Poursteady—that Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz tasted what a Clover could do. Wowed by its single-serve capabilities, Schultz had high hopes for the machine, believing it could re-invigorate the coffee culture within his retail chain, which was slumping at the time.
When Starbucks purchased the rights to the machine, many third-wavers were crestfallen. What they hoped would be the machine to usher in a quality coffee renaissance amongst the masses would be relegated to brewing beans of inferior quality, as opposed to the more primo selections from quality roasters. Even Starbucks’ C-suite leaders admitted that a principle reason for the buyout was to keep the innovation out of competitors’ hands. The move could be interpreted as a cunning power play at a crucial time, when a growing legion of punchy, quality roasters and shops presented a real threat to a lumbering retailer like Starbucks.
It’s only eight years later that the Clover is brewing a cup that coffee pros wouldn’t completely balk at, now that the large retailer has felt more pressure to offer cleaner, lighter roasts, closer to styles of the grassroots craft coffee movement.
“Ever since the Clover, the single-cup commercial coffee brewer, everyone has been trying to do single-serve coffee.”
After the Clover fallout, the specialty coffee industry regrouped, and many shops reserved their budget for expensive automated espresso equipment. But, for single-serve brewed coffee, they took a slower, more-intentional approach.
In the eight years since, pour-over has become something of an art form and it’s looking for technology to catch up. In 2016, pour-over coffee culture enjoys a greater cachet with the consuming public. Still it’s not as prominent as some cafe owners would like it to be. And it all goes back to the problem of efficiency.
At his busy, quality coffee bar located in the bustling Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago, Caffe Streets owner Scott Southard initially planned for pour-over to be the only paper-filter brewed coffee in house, amounting to half the shop’s revenue. Eventually, high-volume traffic—his shop sees an average of two hundred customers a day—led them to implement batch brew, which cut the pour-over program to an estimated 10 to 20 percent of sales.
“It doesn’t take much to overload our pour-over bar because no matter how good the barista is, they’ve only got two hands,” Southard explains. “Having a piece of equipment that takes far less constant attention could really alleviate a lot of the wait times and stress that comes along with a high-quality pour-over bar.”
Supercrown’s Scherer notes that her previous business, Gorilla Coffee, could not offer the pour-over method prior to 2 p.m. The sheer volume of traffic often poses a dilemma for quality-oriented cafes, as a long line is not conducive to the kind of careful kettle-wielding that takes a vital employee out of the game for five minutes at a time.
Still, Southard wants to see how Poursteady’s first generation performs before handing the task over to a machine. “The purpose of manual brew methods is to have the capability to adjust every single factor of the extraction, and without those capabilities. I don’t know if the Poursteady, or any other mechanized manual brew method, makes sense,” he states.
A Pricey New Toy
The robotics pedigree of the Poursteady team could prove to be the X factor in winning people over, and the technology boasts a state-of-the-art feel. For instance, the water temperature is maintained with a PID (Proportional Integral Derivative) system, technology used in aerospace and, more recently, espresso machines.
But precision technology doesn’t come without a price, of course. Poursteady 1.0 retails at $11,900, and it works exclusively with pricey Marco boilers. The Marco UC10 and UC45 models cost, $3,100 and $4,965, respectively.
For busy shops like Caffe Streets and Supercrown, the Poursteady presents an interesting proposal, balancing quality and high-volume. But will it be attractive enough to cafes that have mastered the manual pour-over (even if at a low threshold) to make a $15,000 plus purchase for brand new, and new-to-market technology?
In the eight years since, the pour-over has become something of an art form and it’s looking for technology to catch up.
“This is a huge barrier to entry for our shop, not only because of the cost—which is rough enough—but also the space,” explains Southard. “We have a very efficiently customized bar with little space for additional equipment. Trying to add a big new piece of machinery would be a challenge in our already cramped space.”
Beyond the initial investment, an independent shop like Cafe Streets would have to pray the machine’s hardware never fails, or wait for the wider industry to adopt the new-to-market technology. Replacement parts and technical support are often crucial to the maintenance and longevity of machine.
Poursteady’s von Muehlen says the machine’s components are “engineered, rated, and tested for continuous use for years of maintenance-free operation,” adding that they are taking steps to reach out to equipment companies and field technicians who could service the machine.
For now, a number questions darting about the Poursteady remain unanswered. Can it weather the wear and tear? Will quality coffee pros even embrace the new technology? Will any of that matter if the machine holding the greatest potential for the entire industry follows the Clover’s trajectory and get snatched up by a major retailer? Only time will tell, proving that, no matter how you grind it, patience is virtue in the world of pour-over coffee.
