The Über Boiler, a programmable hot-water dispenser in use at Penny University.Even though espresso was the star at the World Barista Championship held in London last week, the thousands of coffee geeks who gathered under the soaring glass vault of the train-station-like Olympia exhibition center seemed to be just as mesmerized by the coffee produced by syphon, Aeropress, Chemex, V60 drippers and other brewers.
The fascination with so-called “slow coffee” isn’t new. And it wasn’t limited to the convention hall. Penny University, the coffee bar opened in May by Square Mile Coffee Roasters, became an unofficial annex of the WBC. Coffeescenti from around the globe trekked across London (no easy feat on the temperamental District line) to snag one of the scarce seats — six at the bar, two by the window — and order the selections of the week: Capao from Brazil made on a V60, Yirgacheffe from Ethiopia made on a syphon or La Linda from Colombia made on a woodneck. Most had all three.
Penny University was playing the role of Brian Eno when he came out with “Here Come the Warm Jets”: an album that didn’t come close to cracking the Billboard 100 but that shaped a generation of music. So what if “Needle in the Camel’s Eye” didn’t get radio play? Some key people took notice. Looking at the coffee professionals sitting at the counter, I could almost see the same ideas forming in the thought bubbles above their heads: “I should do this, too.”
Preparing three coffees according to three techniques isn’t as easy at it looks. Every coffee is a performance. And every day the performances are repeated hundreds of times in front of an exacting audience. Which brings up the issue of hot water.
Rather, it brings up the Über Boiler, the sleek, powerful, programmable hot-water dispenser in use at Penny University. It has a few bells and whistles that might seem superfluous until you consider that it’s being asked to produce precise amounts of water heated to specific temperatures with almost no recovery time. It’s a kettle that performs like an espresso machine.
The Über Boiler is fed with a water line and is capable of producing 28 liters per hour, which means that hot water is no longer a task. Tim Styles and Tobias Cockerill, the baristas at Penny University, don’t need to flip on boilers or pull out instant-read thermometers, fill water tanks or wait more than a few seconds for the temperature to hit its mark. The water is there when they need it.
There are no Über Boilers in the United States yet. The machine is manufactured by Marco, which is based in Dublin, and the company is in the process of getting a U.L. listing.
By the time it appears here, it might have competition. Before the end of the year, Luminaire, a start-up founded by former and current students at Olin College of Engineering, outside of Boston, expects to start manufacturing its own sleek, powerful and programmable hot-water dispenser.
Ben Salinas The LB-1.On a recent trip through Boston, I saw a prototype of the Luminaire Bravo-1 at Barismo, a small and serious coffee bar and roaster in Arlington. The LB-1 and the Über Boiler look similar, and perform similar functions. But there’s an essential difference. Where the Über Boiler is a built-in appliance that draws hot water from a six-liter tank, the LB-1 sits on the counter and heats water like a souped-up tankless water heater.
“You can take the unit, plug it into an outlet and use a spare water line or flow jet, and within two to three minutes you have hot water,” said Ben Salinas of Luminaire. “It’s lightweight. It’s easy to carry around. And because there’s no boiler in it, you’re using no power when it’s just sitting there.”
Salinas and his team are coffee fanatics and have been following Jaime Vanschyndel, the general manager of Barismo, for years. They concluded that waiting to heat water for pour-over coffee made no sense. The LB1 that I saw dates to November 2009, and if it looked cobbled together — exposed screws, LCD readouts that might have been salvaged from a clock radio — it functioned impressively.
It will be interesting to see how the Über Boiler and the LB-1 measure against each other. Either way, the “slow coffee” bars that are likely to start appearing soon will probably use a high-performance boiler of some kind.
“Computers are good at making hot water,” Salinas said. “Humans aren’t. The barista’s role isn’t making hot water, it’s making coffee.”