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information about a vacuum coffee maker?
QUESTION: My husband remembers someone in this group talking about a vacuum coffee
maker. He can't even remember what it was called or how it worked but he
remembers someone saying it makes good coffee. He is currently trying to
find information about this type of coffee maker via internet and he isn't
having too much luck. Does anyone here know anything about a coffee maker
which somehow uses a vacuum?
ANSWER: I am currently using a Bodum Santos vacuum coffee pot. It makes coffee on
par with a French press or better. The Santos is hard to find. Many stores
with a large Bodum inventory do not carry it, or for that matter have ever
heard of it.
You can get one directly from the Bodum warehouse outside of Milwaukee
www.bodum.com. Or from the Coffee Clatch on the Web.
A vacuum coffee pot has two main parts: an upper globe and a lower
globe. You put water into the lower unit and ground coffee in the
upper ball. The upper unit seals to the lower with a gasket and the
grounds are kept from falling through to the lower ball by a filter.
To use it you heat the water in the lower unit until it boils up into
the upper unit and steeps the coffee. By boiling into the upper unit
you create a vacuum in the lower pot. After 2-4 minutes you take the
pot off the heat and the lower unit cools (increasing the vacuum).
This sucks the brewed coffee back down into the lower pot. You then
separate the upper from the lower and serve from the lower pot.
In the 50's and 60's it was possible to buy an automatic, metal,
electric vacuum maker. I remember my parents had one. Today, the
only place I know of that offers a vacuum pot is Bodum. They make a
vacuum maker which is called the Santos. I have one. It makes
coffee about on a par with The French press method. The whole process
is involved and you must be very devoted to the process to make it
worth while. It is quite a bit of fun to do it in front of company,
however. The one caution is that the entire coffee maker is glass and
I hold my breath every time I take it out to play with.
You can see a picture of this pot at the Bodum web site:
http://www.bodum.ch/products/coffee/coffee.htm
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