I’m not a coffee connoisseur by any means. I am a coffee snob/elitist, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise. I do like coffee very much and tend to drink more than i should. I bring this up now because a short while ago the odd-looking beast above arrived and while it hasn’t rocked my world it has taken my appreciation and understanding of coffee up a notch or two.

I won’t belabor all the technical nuances i’ve picked up since buying this thing, but i will provide some salient facts:

1. It brews coffee hotter and at a more consistent temp than other drip coffee makers
2. It holds the brewed coffee at exactly 167 degrees F
3. It is magnificently easy to clean
4. The important parts are very well built

I learned about the existence of “Tehnivorm” coffee makers from the well-titled web site http://coffeegeek.com/. The Cuisenart Grind ‘n Brew i’d had for years had been acting strangely and, frankly, i was growing tired of cleaning all the moving parts day after day. Since i’m one of those who tends to keep things forever i started researching what i should buy to replace the aging Cuisenart.
Every coffee web site i found basically said the same thing, just go buy a Technivorm; if it’s brewed coffee you’re after don’t waste your time an money with anything else.

Ok, i thought, sounds fair, now what the fuck is a “Technivorm”?

So after additional searching i located Boyds Coffee and plunked down the AMEX card.

But i wasn’t done since now i needed a grinder. Let’s face it, the brewer is just a water heater and a means to get that hot water through a given amount of ground coffee at a specific temperature for a specific amount of time. The key to good coffee is to grind the beans right before brewing. Cooks Illustrated did one of their exhaustive tests a while back finding you could get everything else wrong, but if you had fresh-ground coffee, you’d get a better cup than doing everything right but using day-old ground stuff. So after more research i bought a refurbished “virtuoso” grinder from Baratza.

So, after spending all this time and money and effort what did i get? Well… like a person who has tried espresso numerous times but still finds it bitter and icky and fails to understand what the big deal is, but then manages to find the real thing (Cafe Artigiano is a good example), and says “Oh! Now i get it,” i have re-discovered regular brewed coffee.

For all of you whole find coffee bitter, or sour, or anything else that you’d never actually choose to drink i suggest you give Technivorm a look. In fact you can approximate the Technivorm for next to nothing… just get fresh ground coffee, a plastic cone filter holder, and pour water that has just started to boil through the grinds. This is how we always make coffee when camping and it always seemed to taste better than what comes from a regular home brewing device. Turns out it actually was better.