“Manual brew” is the passcode to premium taste for coffee lovers for the past years. With more effort, the exquisiteness of coffee beans is squeezed perfectly. French press, drips, aero press, and tubruk, we all have these methods inside our brain ware. How about ‘siphon’? Or ‘vacuum pressed’?

What is it?

No wonder if we barely heard of ‘siphon’ or ‘vacuum pressed’, since the manual brew method is considerably very new in our home country. However, the origin or siphon coffee (sometimes under a plethora of other names - vacpots, vacuum brewed coffee, siphon brewer, etc.) traces back to early 1800’s by Loeff of Berlin. The first successful siphon machine was popularized by a French woman.

How it works?

Siphon coffee works almost like ‘tubruk’, only that the coffee is brewed in vacuumed glass bowl (thus the nick ‘vacuum’). Scientifically, it is made using two chambers,where the first is filled with water. By heating the bottom chamber, vapor pressure forces the water to rise into the upper chamber. Here it is mixed with the coffee grounds. The water, now mixed with the grounds, is pulled back down into the lower chamber, a filter which sits at the bottom of the upper chamber, and the bottom chamber in turn fills with brewed coffee.

Most importantly, how does it taste?

It’s very bright, more acidic than bitter, and a little bit fruity. It tastes the best with lightly sweet, sour-ish bites to balance the taste without overindulging the palate with too much sourness. Here’s a secret: go with strawberry shortcake.

Unfortunately, the number of siphon coffee maker in Indonesia is still limited. Huize van Wely at Pacific Place, SCBD, is among cafés that serve this vacuum-brewed coffee. At Huize van Wely, you can also watch how the coffee machine works at your very table.