Brewers Cup

In one week international man of intrigue Todd Carmichael will compete in the US Brewer’s Cup, a competition that crowns the nation’s best brewer of black filter coffee. It’s fairly standard for competitors to develop their own customized technique for the competition, but a new video leaked by Carmichael himself reveals the owner of La Colombe has gone so far as to invent his own brew method.

On Twitter Carmichael referred to the apparatus as the “Manual Siphon 2.0” and spoke of the benefits of “slurry temp profiling”. The video has no sound, but it appears to use multiple chambers to control the temperature of the fully immersed coffee grounds. A plunger causes the mixture to run through a filter and into the bottom chamber of the apparatus, which doubles as a server. Carmichael’s patent-pending use of the Bonavita Variable Temperature Kettle makes a showing as well. From all appearances this approach is involved, tedious, and arcane. In a word, we love it.

Hopefully we’ll get an opportunity to sample what we can only dub “the Carmichael Brewer” at SCAA this week. In the mean time we’ll be looking for a glass blower to fashion us one.