Brewing Coffee with a Vacuum Coffee Maker

About a year ago, I received as a Christmas gift a vacuum coffee maker. I was very excited about brewing coffee with it, except that I could not find a set of instructions or best practices. For one thing, there are too many variables to create a definitive step-by-step process. Some of these variables included:

  • the coarseness of the coffee grounds,
  • whether to start with ice cold water,
  • whether to place the top chamber before I heat the water
    • if not, at what water temperature should I place the top chamber
  • the duration that I leave the coffee maker on the heat source

In any case, you have to start with freshly drawn, filtered water, and you have to grind your coffee just before you brew the coffee. You can’t make good coffee without good water or without freshly ground beans.

After several weeks of experimenting, I came up with a pretty good solution, and it involves the following steps:

  • Grind the beans to a medium-coarse ground, just a bit more find than the press-pot grind
  • Use room-temperature, filtered water
  • Add the coffee-ground chamber after the water reaches a rolling boil (95° C and 185° F)
  • Brew on the stove for about three minutes and then remove from the heat source

You can see this process in the video I made last winter.

My Broken Bodum Santos Siphon Coffee Maker

I’m glad I documented the process because I broke the carafe a few months ago. I have since reverted to brewing coffee with a press pot because I didn’t want to buy a $60 replacement carafe. Should I ever bite the bullet and get a replacement, it would have been pretty unlikely that I would have remembered how to brew coffee without this video.

Does it work for you?

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