This story just makes me even sadder that I wasn’t able to attend the WBC in London. The competition sounded awesome, but at least I had a chance to catch some of it online. But the story from Oliver Strand in the New York Times is partially about his visit to Penny University (hey, you can also read about that in the current issue of Barista Magazine! — online here) and also about a trip to Barismo in Boston. The point of it is that with the new emphasis so many cafés are placing on alternative brewing methods to espresso, controlling hot water on demand is becoming more and more important, and so at Penny University they’re using an Uber-boiler (which is only available in Europe at the moment.) Meanwhile at Barismo, they’ve been experimenting with another new on-demand hot water option, the Luminaire Bravo-1. They’re both very cool, and I’m excited to see them come to more and more coffee shops soon.
The Uber is strutting it’s stuff down under too….
Just had some beautiful coffees brewed using the Uber at Proud Mary whilst on an all too brief coffee tour down in Melbourne.
http://www.fivesensescoffee.com.au/news/2009/11/13/proud-mary
Ken-
Had the opportunity to visit Penny University in London, as well as the chance to play a little with the Uber Boiler at the La Marzocco Out of the Box event in New York City. While it’s a unique boiler, I think it’s not quite suitable for brewing outside of places like Penny University – meaning places where any amount of volume of brewing for revenue is important, it’s unsuitable.
I did a quick write up of my criticisms of the Uber on my blog:
http://onocoffee.blogspot.com/2010/06/lost-in-time-marco-uber-boiler.html
The Uber-boiler is being installed this coming week at Safehouse Coffee & Tea, in Griffin, GA. The Safehouse crew is very excited, obviously.