How I Test

Kevin Sinnott

When I first got interested in coffee, I was attempting to emulate every great experience I had. Often this was in a commercial establishment and I quickly learned that commercial coffee equipment was designed to do three things properly, which I ultimately learned was true of good consumer gear as well.

Temperature -- the water needs to get hot enough to extract the precious oils from your grounds. The standards are almost universally between 195 and 205 Fahrenheit. This is a good start, but I find there are brewers famous for their results that go outside this range. The French press tends to spend much of its time brewing at below 195 and a manual percolator brews at nearly or at boiling. But no one thinks coffee can brew properly at 170F and even a percolator does much of its extraction at below boiling. I measure the temperature of each machine I test and report it, also supplying a graph as I’ve done since the late 1980s. It’s helpful for comparisons.

Contact time -- how long the hot water is in contact with the grounds is critical, as important as how hot the water temperature is. As you'll quickly learn around here, many, if not most, consumer machines err on prolonged contact times. This becomes a vicious cycle because long extractions equal bitterness and the consumer almost always uses less coffee next time around, and the result is weak and bitter coffee, the most common of all cups. This is usually easy to measure with a stopwatch, but brewers that hide the brewing process or stop and start it as part of their design can make it more difficult. Nevertheless, I always attempt to measure and report it accurately.

Grounds saturation -- the grounds are being taxed just like you and me. In a perfect world each of us contributes a fair share. The best coffee brewers are designed to expose each coffee particle to water for an equal amount of time at the same temperature. This is not as easy as it might seem. I always examine the grounds bed after brewing and observe any unevenness that would indicate over or underuse of grounds. Frankly, as long as the contact time is in range, underuse is the only problem, because it means waste. I endorse spending for good quality beans, but I don't expect you or me to buy product and not get its full use.

Cup quality -- Regardless of industry claims, there is very little scientific conclusion about what makes a great cup of coffee. I know what I like and I conclude according to my subjective impressions.

Recommendations -- while my role is to review, I tend by nature to want products to work and I reserve the right to suggest unorthodox practices to make the product successful. A typical example would be to suggest making six cups in a ten cup machine that makes a cup-per-minute, thus giving you a six minute contact time by modifying the brewer’s yield in order to make its coffee taste decent, assuming all other parameters are met.

Biases and potential conflicts -- I've been writing about coffee brewing equipment for more than ten years. I've made friends and contacts in the industry. I get a lot of free stuff. I also write for pay (I’m a writer by trade) and have consulted for several prominent coffee brewing manufacturers. I've regularly "bitten the hand that feeds me" by giving bad reviews to good people. I've also given good reviews to products made by people I don't personally care for. If I'm reviewing a product that I got for free, I usually mention it. I get enough free stuff that I don’t have to do much to keep the stream coming. I will mention it if I'm reviewing a product from a company that I consult for, but I will not review products that I've had a hand in producing. If that happens, I will appoint a guest reviewer and expect an honest and direct review.