Machines & grinders (7)
- Burr alignment — Getting a grinder’s two cutting discs perfectly parallel — the marker test, foil shims, lapping, and why a tilted burr quietly ruins a good coffee.
- Chemex Corporation — The American family-owned company that has made the Chemex Coffeemaker since Dr Peter Schlumbohm patented his hourglass glass brewer in 1941 — a laboratory funnel and flask fused into one object, now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
- Espresso machine — The machine that forces hot water through a compact bed of fine coffee at high pressure to make espresso — traced from 19th-century steam boilers through Gaggia’s spring lever and the nine-bar Faema E61 pump to modern pressure-profiling machines that shape the pressure curve shot by shot.
- Hario — The Tokyo heatproof-glass maker founded in 1921 to produce laboratory glassware, whose V60 cone dripper — released by the company’s own account in October 2005 — became the default brewer of specialty coffee and the most-used dripper on the World Brewers Cup stage.
- Kono — The Japanese equipment maker trading as Coffee Syphon Co., Ltd., whose KONO brand covers vacuum siphons, the Meimon cone dripper and its own coffee beans — the second name, alongside Hario, behind Japan’s standard brewers.
- La Marzocco — The Florentine espresso machine manufacturer founded in 1927 by Giuseppe and Bruno Bambi, whose 1939 horizontal boiler and 1970 GS dual-boiler saturated group became the shape and the thermal standard of every commercial espresso machine that followed.
- Mahlkönig EK43 — The tall German shop grinder that specialty coffee adopted for espresso — 98 mm cast steel burrs, 1300 watts, and the machine an entire argument about grind uniformity was built around.