One thing that garners increasing attention from café goers is a comprehensive, exciting and diverse filter program. The issue that café owners are facing is either sacrificing their best barista to slave over a single brew for 5 minutes at a time or alternatively pumping out filter from the anonymous, and certainly un-sexy, batch brew airpot.
At Five Senses Coffee we’re always on the lookout for new equipment to help streamline service in cafés of all shapes and sizes. The latest piece of kit to grace our benches is an exciting new solution to the filter coffee demand; Introducing the Poursteady.
The Poursteady is an automated, on-demand brewer being hand built by some passionate robotics engineers. It’s available in either a 3 or 5 cup model, and the equipment gives cafés the power to deliver multiple consistent brews simultaneously while also boosting customer engagement with the push of a button. Baristas will be able to set up pourovers and have them brew to perfection without slowing down the crushing of espressos on the coffee machine. But more than just efficiency, the Poursteady brings a definite theatre, and therefore engagement to the preparation of your filter program.
On first glance, the Poursteady has struck the right balance between sleek design that’ll slot into any bar and make a clear statement. Every piece of the unit is either manufactured inhouse by Poursteady or carefully sourced from trusted vendors such as the Macro Ecoboiler, which is used for hot water supply. Each machine is assembled and tested for thousands of cycles at Poursteady HQ in Brooklyn before heading out into the world. But aside from build quality, the Poursteady really comes to life and gathers the fascinated onlookers when it’s in action brewing up a storm.
The operation of the Poursteady via an iOS app is extremely versatile and can be as simple or as in depth as any barista would like. Starting with brewer type and coffee dose, your team are able to input a wide range of variables and receive brew ratios and total brewing time in return. Then comes the water dispense and this is the fun part because they let the robotics engineers loose! Via the app you can select and then fully automate the shape, size and timing of each pour from the rotating nozzle which will whip, with lighting speed, from pourover to pourover on the rack to achieve your wishes. It’s quite a mesmerising sight to see! It’s a lot of fun to experiment with these variables; for example, one long pour vs 10, 12 or 20 pulses. Diving deeper again, you can choose from many different pouring patterns which you can pair to the specific needs of your pourover choice, whether it be flat bottomed Kalita Wave or classic V60. The options really are endlessly variable, yet infinitely repeatable.
Often the recipe you would use to hand brew won’t directly translate to automated brewing and this is mostly down to the manual nature of brewing – a technique that folks often instinctively adapt and change depending on how their brew progresses each time. That isn’t to say that you can’t get the same results, in fact it’s quite the opposite – once dialed in, you’ll get perfect results every time.
With the ability to isolate, adjust and repeatedly test singular brew variables, the Poursteady allows you to hone in on what each is doing to your final cup and which ones you want to lock in and repeat as a recipe. With all of that you can brew multiple coffees to order, each with their own recipe that can be recalled and assigned to any group, at any time. Smashing!
Where this differs from say, a batchie setup, is that whilst batch brewing is helpful for speedy service and minimal input from staff, a batch brew requires you to brew 1 – 3 litres of coffee ahead of orders being received. It also limits you to one coffee (unless you brew multiple pots – then effectively doubling or tripling your potential wastage). The Poursteady minimalises wastage and allows you to have as many coffee’s as you can fit in your cupboard, each brewed to their own recallable recipe.
I’ve thought long and hard on what kind of café would benefit from this setup and honestly my answer is most of them. A small team of 1 or 2 baristas can serve all their customers and utilise the Poursteady’s theatrics to create a talking point for greater engagement. A larger team can implement the Poursteady on to their bar and service an 80+ seater with fresh brews all day long.
While we’re always excited to get to play with new coffee toys like this, what we’re really looking forward to is seeing it put to use on specialty bars, using its robotic wizardry to dispense out a cracking range of pourovers!
Watch the Poursteady in action at Top Paddock!
Want to see the magic in action? If you’re in Melbourne, the barista team at Top Paddock are using it to serve out a range of delicious coffees right now.