Can you brew Coffee without a Coffee Brewer?
Hello coffee lover. What’ up? Hope you are well caffeinated, or I am sure you would want to have a coffee after reading this.
Something interesting happened in Indonesia last week. There was a Brewers’ Cup championship and one contestant, Amadeo, won the 6th place.
You might be wondering what’s interesting with 6th place. We are not even talking about who came first or their recipe.
I am sure all that would be fun and something to look at, but, what caught my attention here is the equipment Amadeo used.
It’s a freaking plastic funnel from IKEA.
Crazy?
This made me wonder. While we are obsessed with recipes, high-cost equipment like grinders, temperature-controlled kettles and so on, what is more important? Isn’t it the joy of drinking coffee?
I recalled how my journey with coffee started. And what experiments it contained.
It was during the pandemic era when I ordered a French press and Blue Tokai coffee beans. I ground them in a mixer and made myself a great cup of coffee. Surely the IKEA Effect was real.
A year went by; I spent quite some time with the French press and had my own way of brewing with it. At some point, I was telling my friend about this carefully created process I was obsessed about. He laughed and said he would just drop ground coffee powder in boiling water, leaving it for sometime and he was good to go.
I tried that and it was not bad. That made me realize it doesn’t take much. We humans are good at complicating simple things.
All that said, I have invested a lot in coffee over the years and made my daily coffee a very complex routine.
I think, in the end, it’s about finding some hobby that you can happily waste your time on.
Coming back to jugaads and experiments, I came across many.
From using a fresh press to froth milk and make it ready for a cappuccino, to adding salt in your coffee to make it less bitter. Every time I come across such a jugaad, I get fascinated.
One that I tried recently is to imitate a Hario Switch without having one. I wanted to try immersion for the bloom and then a regular drip pour over. This is a perfect fit for a Hario Switch, but I didn’t have one. So for the bloom, I used a ceramic cup, then transferred it to a pour over afterwards. Isn’t this the same? You get a lot more control with the switch, I know, but this is a low-cost way to achieve what it does.
It is these experiments that take the coffee culture forward.
I curated some more jugaads for you:
And lastly, I want to leave you with this video where Lance tried the IKEA funnel to brew.
So {{ first name | friend }}, what is your favourite hack or what are you going to try next? Are you getting the ₹80 IKEA funnel?
Let me know.
That’s all I have. Have a caffeinated weekend.
See you.
Keep on brewing!