Starbucks' Vacuum Coffee Pot

By Joshua Quittner Sunday, Oct. 15, 2000
    • PRODUCT An automatic vacuum coffee pot, due out this week, that Starbucks is marketing as the "pre-eminent coffee experience"

    HOW IT STARTED Europeans have been brewing coffee in vacuum pots for 100 years. Americans have been too lazy

    JUDGMENT CALL Once you get the hang of it, it does make a superb cup of coffee. But for $169, it had better

    Most of us don't brush our teeth, have sex or say a kind word about a fellow human as many times a day as we drink a cup of coffee. Small wonder, then, that so many people are so fanatic about making that caffeine-imbibing experience--the smell, the temperature, the taste--as perfect as possible. The truly obsessed will sooner or later try every kind of coffee-brewing technology there is: percolators, plunge pots, Mr. Coffee or Bunn, drip filters made of gold or paper. And still they are unsatisfied.

    For the Seekers of the Perfect Cup, from the people who made the vente mocha Frappuccino as ubiquitous as the Big Mac, comes Starbucks' Barista Utopia Vacuum Coffee Brewing System ($169). The idea is to take vacuum coffee brewing, a method long favored in Europe, and Americanize it--make it plug-in simple, electric and automatic. You put freshly ground coffee in the large funnel on top, insert the funnel's rubber gasket tightly into the water-filled carafe below, push ON and stand back. The water quickly heats to a perfect, sub-boiling 205[degrees]F and gets sucked up into the vacuum created in the funnel, where it briefly mixes with the grounds before cascading back down into the carafe. It's a riot of noise and smell. And Utopia looks fabulous too; its translucent plastic housing would be right at home next to an iMac.

    But how's the coffee? Our testers found that one must be careful when distributing the coffee in the funnel--sometimes the powerful uprush of hot water failed to soak all the grounds, making the brew too weak. Once we got the hang of it, though, the taste was indeed swell. Strong, not bitter and hot. Say it all together now: "Ahhhhh, coffee."