most people who know me well know that i’m a true coffee fiend. i adore it, and my saeco vienna superautomatica espresso machine and i are besties for sure. it’s with great joy that i turn it on every morning and wait for it’s blinking lights to stop so i can froth my milk and pull my shot or three. (really mk! best present ever!)  i’m not super skilled at creating tree branches or birds or heart shapes with the foamed milk, but i do manage to spoon it over the espresso in a somewhat graceful shape. i’ll call it “soft mountain”.

i love my machine and will keep it till it dies. but i can’t help but notice (old) new brewing methods coming back into use, such as the infusion styles offered by chemex and (i think) the blue bottle company. it seems like every coffee shop i frequent now is all about it. two-tiered drip stations line the counters, and the wait time for your cuppa is a little longer, since the filters are thicker. but the end result is richer than what you get out of something like a braun or a krups, and you don’t end up with any coffee grounds escaping into your cup, like you might with a french press.

then there is the siphon method (like the bonmac, shown above, or the version from hario), which looks like something out of a high-school chemistry class nightmare. from what i understand, a vacuum-like effect is created by the boiling water in the lower glass bulb…it gets pulled up into the top, where the coffee grounds are, and somehow everything intermingles and falls back down to the bottom. the results, i hear, are magical.

(1. bonmac siphon, 2. espresso tamper, 3. sugar sticks, 4. espresso cup & saucer, 5. bean storage, 6. glass creamer, 7. glass espresso cup)