Making coffee

The benefit of manual pour over compared to drip coffee from a machine is the ability to ensure more of the coffee grounds gets exposed to water for extraction. As water falls onto the grounds and travels through them, channels form.

Classical pour over methods call for the water to be added and drained a bit at a time. This way new channels form with each pour of water and more of the grounds get exposed to water.

There are alternative and equivalent strategies that require less thinking and monitoring. You can add all the water to the grounds, then use a spoon to stir the grounds as the extraction and draining through the filter is happening. Because this means dirtying a spoon, I prefer the orbital shaking method. After adding all the water to the grounds, move the holder of the filter, coffee grounds, and water in an orbital motion so that they keep mixing as the water is draining.

For a long time, this is how I have made my coffee in the morning. I’ve gotten my grind sizes, water temperature, and grounds-to-water ratio to a place where I really enjoy the coffee I get from this process.

The problem with this process is the physical activity it requires. Especially after just having woken up in the morning, spinning the entire coffee making contraption can be a challenge, at times ending with coffee grounds and boiling water all over the kitchen counter.

This general idea of gently spinning liquids in an orbit is generally used in biology labs. This is to blend materials in cell cultures, assuring uniform concentrations of the material that the cells need to take up.

I looked into getting an orbital shaker to use for making coffee, and some of them are relatively affordable. You can also get spare ones from labs, they often have old ones they don’t want anymore. They are however quite large, and I didn’t want to dedicate so much counter space in my kitchen. The affordable ones I found also have pretty garish colors that don’t fit with my kitchen.

Instead, I figured the mechanism is pretty simple, and I could probably build one myself.

I got all the components from Amazon. The biggest challenge was imaging some mechanical parts I feel must exist, but having no idea what they would be called. I spent about two evenings searching for things like ‘plate with hole for rod’, ‘stable feet for hobby projects’, ‘box to put electronics in’, or ‘sideways ball bearing’. Eventually I found terms that produced the results I needed (but I have since forgotten them).

To turn the orbital shaker I used a DC motor with a speed controller, and by aligning two lids from two hobby boxes I got a surface that could orbit using an offset axis.

Simply drilling and screwing things together took a lot longer than I had expected. Yet it was extremely satisfying! I didn’t draw out any plans, and that might have made things simpler, but it was a joy to just take the components and figure out how I would put them together.

Once the orbital shaker was finished I felt a great deal of pride, and I even liked the result aesthetically. I did have to add a friction pad to my coffee scale though to keep the pot from gliding off.

For about a month I was using my orbital shaker for the spinning method of pour over coffee brewing. As I was doing this, I was growing tired of the primary step: pouring the water into the filter with coffee grounds. With the passing days, fueled by the success of the orbital shaker, I couldn’t help thinking if I could solve this problem as well with the same strategy.

Initially I was overthinking it. I started looking up components to build a temperature controlled boiler from scratch. Eventually I learned from a friend that there are tiny portable and cheap kettles. So instead I figured that I could drill a shole in one and connect tubing to a pump to provide boiling water to the coffee.

After another Amazon/Google session, I learned about the different kinds of pumps there are, food safe tubing, and standards for tube sizes and the various adapters to make it all fit. I figured I could use a speed controller also for the water pump to make sure the coffee isn’t blasted by the pump. I found a hobby box large enough to contain the base of the stand and the electronics in the same style as the orbital shaker.

The challenge that appeared was the outlet for the water from the pump. Just using a normal nozzle at the end of the water tub made a harsh beam of water that didn’t wet the grounds properly, and it was easy to create too much pressure, pushing the grounds up along the sides of the filter. To my surprise, I couldn’t find a small shower head to attach at the end of the tube. In the end I made one by drilling holes in a plastic stopper that I connected to a couple of adapters.

So I ended up with a coffee machine.

Unlike a traditional coffee machine though, I have control of water temperature, how much water is added, and I can ensure even extraction using the orbital shaker.

The coffee system takes up more space than I’d like. And it doesn’t taste quite as good as when I make it manually. My theory is the water gets cooled as it travels through the pump and the tubes.

Many people who make pour over coffee enjoy the feeling that you are really making it yourself. As do I. Now every morning I have the additional joyous feeling that I’m making it with a device I made.

In all, I really enjoyed this as a hobby project. And it’s empowering to know that if you have a problem, you can make your own solution to it, using nothing but off the shelf components from Amazon. I didn’t even need to learn how to use a 3D printer or CAD!