Down at our Retail Store, its a daily practice to use multiple non-pressurised brew methods to taste coffee . As we had a guest appearance from one of Supreme HQ office members, we decided to put together a mock competition in her honour to highlight the impact three classic brew methods have on a particular coffee. The gear used was: the elegant yet simple Chemex Coffee Maker; the super user-friend friendly SwissGold; and the ubiquitous Bodum plunger/frenchpress. We selected a few coffees (single origins like our Panamanian Carmen Estate and PNG Bitam) and ground each coffee according to its designated brew method. (This is an extremely easy comparison to try yourself with the array of coffee brewing equipment many of you already have at home).

The three methods were prepared simultaneously as per our particular rituals for each, and the coffee was allowed to cool for a few minutes. (This is actually one of the more important stages of the process. If you really want to assess the quality of a cup of joe, you need to be able to actually taste it. As painfully obvious as that sounds, drinking coffee from when its warm to luke-warm gives you the best idea of its flavour profile – need I mention it should be black coffee with no sugar?). The results were as expected (seeing as we use two of these methods daily), but it was a great reminder of just how much of a factor brewing style is in regard to what you like/don’t like about coffee.

For the record:
Winners: the Chemex and SwissGold won the challenge depending on the particular coffee and personal preference. The Chemex produces the cleanest cup and makes all the highnotes of a coffee more produced (aspects like sweetness, and fruit and nut complexities).  The SwissGold on the other hand,  gives more body to the coffee, extending the dimension of flavour into the caramel, toffee, milk chocolate and cocoa -like flavour notes.
Loser: The plunger was never a winner compared with the two other options. We think this is largely due to the coffee steeping as it brews (as opposed to the pour-over filter approach that the other two devices use). Steeping means you end up tasting the organic structure of the beans along with the flavours of the dissoved coffee solids. However, we know from past experiences that plunger holds up quite well if using blended coffee and when adding milk to your drink.

All the coffee brewing equipment we used is available on our website.