Review: Balmuda The Brew

A few months back, I came across an interesting new coffee machine from Balmuda, the brand that created the sweetest toaster that ever was. Balmuda The Toaster uses a thimbleful of steam to make toast, a peculiar-sounding idea with surprisingly good results.

The new Balmuda The Brew looks like what you might imagine if you closed your eyes and used your mind to conjure a small but handsome drip machine that emulates pour-over brewing. It's like little else on the market except the Chemex Ottomatic 2.0. It maxes out at about a diner mug and a half of coffee per batch, a fairly small 12 ounces, dispensed into a carafe that resembles an insulated stainless version of a maple syrup pitcher at IHOP.

It's classy up top, with a shower head that pours hot water into a conical filter while keeping the whole process on view. Press Start and a dramatic blast of steam preheats the carafe, a nice touch, before the first shot of water hits the grounds. The machine then pauses to allow the grounds to bloom—letting them soak for about half a minute so they can off-gas and release any bitter flavors—before brewing starts in earnest. Unlike a regular coffee maker, where water continually drips throughout the cycle, the Balmuda pulses its way through the brew, a few seconds on, a few seconds off. The Brew's brewing cycle takes between four and seven minutes, with the temperature gradually and intentionally tailing off toward the end.

Photograph: Balmuda

At the very end, hot water squirts directly into the carafe via what must be an intricate tubing network, a process the company calls “bypass brewing” that intentionally dilutes the coffee. It's similar to the way you can stretch a mugful of too-strong coffee with a shot of hot water. I wondered if this process could be another one of those peculiar ideas that works wonders.

As The Brew brews, a fancy nubbin of light glows yellow atop the control panel and a metronome-like sound that's supposed to be “reminiscent of the pendulum of an old clock” keeps time. Much in the way Bamuda's toaster beguiles you with a thimble-size mug that nestles into the top of the machine and is used to fill the steam tank, The Brew is quite charming. You'll pay handsomely for it, though. The Brew costs a stunning $700—a price that continued to stun me again and again once I started logging all the problems I had getting it to make good coffee.

Balmuda's recommended brew specs are pretty vague, with one scoop of grounds, which the company estimates at 0.4 to 0.5 ounces (oddly, not the grams that coffee nerds typically use for weight measurements) for each tiny 4-ounce cup. Per the user manual, you can “adjust the amount of ground coffee as desired, according to the grind style sizes and roast levels,” which is not very helpful.

To make a diner mug's worth of coffee, you select the medium setting on the control panel. Since the machine uses Hario V60 filters (the V60 is a well-loved pour-over dripper) and a pour-over brewing style, I used a V60 recipe from Jessica Easto's Craft Coffee to get rolling. Using Lighthouse French Roast, a favorite dark roast, my first cup was good as first cups go, not $700-good, mind you, but I figured I could wiggle my way toward greatness. Doing that was more work than it should've been.

Right around this time, I happened to be emailing with Easto about her exciting new book, How to Taste Coffee, and though she hadn't yet seen The Brew, she took a look at its web page. Easto noted how the Balmuda brews concentrated coffee but, “they don't explain how or why they think brewing concentrated coffee at a lower-than-recommended temperature and then diluting it creates a better result than standard brewing.”

I asked Team Balmuda about this and a spokesperson responded that the temperature drop at the end of the brewing cycle mimics “the temperature changes that occur when a person hand drips coffee using a metal kettle.” As for what amounts to dilution at the end of a standard cycle, the machine cuts the brewing process off a bit early, which eliminates an “unpleasant miscellaneous taste and bitterness in the latter half of the extraction process.”

Yet as I struggled with subsequent batches, I wondered if Easto was on to something. Larger grounds made the coffee taste notably weaker and like wet newspaper. Some attempts on the strong setting made the coffee taste like vegetables with lingering newspaper-y notes. A smaller batch with similar settings, which should've been the sweet spot for this machine, was also a whiff.

Photograph: Balmuda

Usually when I review coffee makers, I just store my own in a cupboard and use the review model full-time for a month or three. This way, machines get plenty of testing, as I drink a lot of coffee. With the Balmuda, I was clearly missing something, and I got frustrated enough with it that I stopped using it and just set up an appointment with my coffee pal Sam to see if he'd flail too.

Sam is award-winning barista Sam Schroeder, co-owner of Olympia Coffee Roasters, and we met in Olympia's Seattle lab. He immediately zeroed in on the Balmuda's unique traits. Right away he did some math, and like Easto, he was surprised with the results.

A standard brewing ratio and great starting point for many coffee setups is one part dry coffee beans to about 16 parts water. Balmuda's suggested ratio is 1:12.

“That's pretty high,” Sam noted, surprised.

We started a batch using the same Amparo Pajoy Micro Lot coffee Olympia served that day in the café. Sam took full advantage of the Balmuda's exposed shower head and dripper, standing at the ready with a thermometer to measure the temperature of the bed of grounds as the water flowed through it.

“This is dramatic,” he declared, as vapor hissed, preheating the carafe. “It's like theater!”

Entertaining, yes, but he was having trouble making heads or tails of the bypass brewing used for the machine's regular brew setting, where it essentially brews a concentrate then adds water at the end.

“Typically, you only see that on cruise-ship-sized industrial brewers, where they can't move water through the grounds fast enough,” he mused, noting this was not a popular technique on the pro barista circuit. “If I'm at home, it makes less sense.”

We had trouble making sense of the coffee it made, too. Sam used a refractometer to determine the total dissolved solids, or TDS, a measurement that's often referred to as “the amount of coffee in your coffee.” At 1.37 TDS in the finished cup, things were right where they should be, but our tastebuds begged to differ.

“This is weird,” Sam said. When I asked if he meant the coffee or the machine, he said “both.”

Comparing the coffee we made against the coffee from the café's drip machine was weird too.

“This coffee is tea-like. Very delicate. It's weak. Super weak,” he said, gesturing at the Balmuda as we noted how flat it tasted compared to the brighter, fruitier, and more interesting shop brew. “It's not aggressively bad. It's just boring.”

Sam took what felt like evasive action for a second batch, switching a couple of variables at once, since we were so far from where we wanted it to be. He made a medium-size batch with 28 grams of coffee, 320 grams of water, a 1:11.4 ratio. He also used a finer grind and switched to the Balmuda's strong setting, which skips the bypass brewing. It made for a sweeter, better cup. Our TDS was 1.75 (“strong!”), but the extraction percentage was still a bit low.

“TDS is strength, and we've got strength, but extraction is balance, and this is still out of balance,” Sam explained. “Under-extracted coffee tastes sour and over-extracted coffee tastes bitter. People can like different strengths, but they don't say, 'I like a more sour cup.'”

By our third batch, we got things about as good as Sam was interested in getting them. TDS and extraction percentages were hitting their marks, and the coffee was fine but unimpressive. There was little left in the way of variables we could fuss with to dial things in, meaning we just weren't using these excellent beans to their full potential.

Photograph: Balmuda

“It's not a bad cup of coffee. The machine is capable of brewing a good cup,” said Sam. Yet in comparison to the café's drip machine coffee, the same Amparo Pajoy we were testing the Balmuda with, we noted the latter hadn't produced much that was noteworthy. Considering the quality we were getting for its monster price tag, and noting that you can make coffee that tastes as good or far better using a machine that costs less than half the price, we quickly lost momentum. Sam is a very coffee-curious guy, and he sure didn't seem interested in doing much more work with the Balmuda.

“What you're paying for here is style. It's cute. It's engaging. There's theater with the little light and the metronome sound. The joy is in using it,” he said. “Can you get it to make a great cup? Probably. That depends on you. Do you want to do all that's required to do that?”

At home, mimicking some of what we did in the lab, I was able to get the Balmuda to brew a decent cup of French roast. I started thinking about how much more it costs than its competition, and how I wasn't using my excellent and expensive beans to their full potential, and that was enough. I wasn't that interested in fussing with it either.