(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
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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..
