The Bodum Chambord French press, after I'd poured my first cup.

FRENCH PRESS: The French press was invented about 150 years ago, and later redesigned somewhat by the Italians. It’s a really affordable piece of equipment — we sell a simple version for $25 and a more ornate version for $40, coffee included — and really simple to use. You just put in the ground coffee, pour in freshly boiled (but not still boiling) water, stir and cover. Four or five minutes later, you press the plunger down (trapping the grounds at the bottom of the carafe) and pour. It really is simple.

That simplicity, however, belies the complexity of flavors you’ll taste when brewing in this way as opposed to in a drip brewer. There’s no paper filter to soak up those tasty oils; in fact, they float lazily to the top of the brew, making for a romantic look and delicious aroma. What’s more, a bit of dusty sediment will find its way into your cup; it’s not gritty or bitter, but simply adds a magical kind of texture to an already great experience.

This Chambord is equipped with a coffee coat: keeping it warmer, longer.

The only real drawbacks to the French press are that the coffee tends to get cool pretty quick — though insulated versions are available, as are “coffee coats” (at least for the Bodum lines that we sell) — and that unless you’re willing to spend a lot of money, you won’t find one that makes more than about 8 cups (which is really about 2.5 actual cups). It’s also slightly tougher to clean that simply washing out the “coffee pot” on a drip brewer — but, then again, most people don’t realize they need to clean the rest of the drip brewer too, and over the course of months and years the quality of their drip coffee is plummeting down. This is why coffee always tastes better right after you’ve purchased a new drip maker… the one you were using before was probably full of gunk!

More and more people are using French presses, and you can even find them at big-box stores like Target. Unfortunately, you won’t find anything resembling great coffee in those stores, which makes the elegant simplicity of the French press a relative waste.

This is a quality coffee grinder...

GRINDER: First, let me give you a harsh truth: If you have a device in your home that contains two blades, which you turn on and soon after turn off in order to make coffee beans into coffee grounds, you have been bamboozled. What you have is not a coffee grinder, it is a food processor. A really poor food processor. A cheap chopper, period. So clean it up and shove some carrots in that thing, because it doesn’t deserve to be graced by anything other than Millstone coffee. (Yuck!)

If, however, you’d like your coffee grounds to actually be ground, you’ll need to procure a proper coffee grinder, otherwise known as a burr grinder. Without getting too complicated, it contains two cylindrical burrs that spin in opposite directions. These have precisely designed teeth, which catch the coffee beans and don’t let go until the pieces have been ground into an exact size. It then spits them out, and when you’re finished you’ve got a container filled with grounds that are all within microns of the same size.

...as opposed to a food processor.

The reason this all matters? First of all, a roasted coffee bean loses most of its flavor within a few minutes of being ground; that’s why a quality coffee grinder is the single most effective way to take your home coffee from tepid to tasty. Of course, it helps if you buy coffee that’s been roasted in the past few days — NOT months — and of a decent quality… but we’re taking baby steps here, so I’ll leave that alone (for now). The chopper, meanwhile, cannot produce grounds of equal size and shape, no matter how hard you try.

A decent grinder with fineness adjustment (you want semi-fine grounds for a drip brewer, coarse grounds for a French press) and portion control (set it for four cups, it grinds up four cups’ worth) can be had for as little as $50, if you’re willing to look around. I have a Krups model that’s small and relatively easy to clean, which I found on sale online more than two years ago; we use it at least once a day, and it’s still singing. We’ll be selling these too, soon, though I suggest you don’t wait on me to make this important investment.

The author stirs the beginnings of a brew in this traditional vacpot.

VACPOT: Now we’re getting into the esoteric, the vacpot, the best kept secret in coffee. Despite the huge growth in speciality (that means “good) coffee over the past couple decades, the vacpot is still seen as a novelty item, if it’s even seen at all. That’s unfortunate, because the vacpot is widely regarded as the absolute best way to brew a cup of coffee. And what’s more, it’s a relatively easy thing to use; however, it does take a bit more time and a bit more cleaning than a French press.

The short version: Heated water in a lower chamber rises up through a glass tube, and into an upper chamber filled with coffee grounds. (There’s a filtering mechanism in between; the Bodum version I sell does this without cloth or paper, which is preferable.) Once the heating is done and removed, the brewed coffee in the top chamber is sucked back down into the bottom chamber; the chambers are then separated, with the grounds remaining in the top and your delicious coffee in the bottom.

The Bodum Santos is a more functional vacpot, for use on any stovetop.

The major difference between this and the French press is that the vacpot (also known as a vacuum brewer or siphon brewer) brews the coffee quickly, just like in a drip system, except instead of through drips, it all sort of happens at once. All the coffee is brewed at once, as opposed to the drip system, and the intense heat used to do this happens to help keep the coffee warmer than in the traditional French press. The flavor, meanwhile, is clean and crisp like a drip brewer, but much more potent (not necessarily “bolder”).

The auxiliary benefits are also worth noting: It looks way cooler than any other brewer — some are amazingly ornate and perfect for setting in the middle of a coffee table, a spectacle during the brewing process for those who’ve never seen it in action. It feels more organic and old-world (despite that it’s only about 100 years old). It does take up more space than a French press, and cleaning isn’t simple. But invest in one of these and you’ve got an instant conversation starter, and your coffee cred will go up substantially.

And seriously: It tastes amazing. If you don’t believe me, come by the shop and I’ll fire one up… then, after you’ve had a few sips of the result, I’ll happily sell you a wonderful Bodum version that’ll work right on your stovetop.