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Blue Bottle – Fancy Pants Coffee

While I was out in San Francisco last month, I was able to get brunch at Blue Bottle Coffee. They are very persnickety about brewing coffee and make a pretty mean brunch too. Since I was luckily on East Standard Baby time, I got there right as the started serving food and right before the lines started forming.

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While they can do extra fancy espresso drinks from their human powered, lever driven machine, the true jewels are there cold brew and vacuum pot machines. Both of these beauties were imported from Japan and are a marvel of persnicketiness.

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The cold brew machine is similar to method we use to make iced coffee. However, instead of letting the grounds and coffee to sit, they slowly let the water drip through the grounds. Very slowly. And precisely I should add, roughly 88 drops per minute. The result is a very strong cup of coffee that is full of flavor without much acidity. It doesn’t have the cardboard taste that the coffee we cold brew sometimes does, but I am sure they are using better coffee than Folger’s.

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Their other amazing machine is a set of halogen powered vacuum pots. Vacuum pots are nothing new, but they are sort of finicky and not very common. The pot has two bulbs, connected in the middle with a valve. There is water in the bottom bulb and coffee in the top. When you heat the water filled bulb, it boils and expands up to the top bulb mixing with the grounds. You then take it off the heat; the lower bulb begins to cool creating a vacuum and sucking the coffee back through a filter. The standard pot goes for about $40 or so, and gets heated on the stove. The Blue Bottle folks use the same style pot, except they heat theirs with a $20,000 computer controlled, halogen heat lamp. I didn’t get a cup of this style because: I already had a cup and become twitchy with two and the price wasn’t listed, which scared me.

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One of the advantages of going on the weekend is that they serve breakfast. They only have 6 or so dishes, but they all sounded great. I went with the poached eggs, served over braised greens and a catalan style tomato sauce. I like my eggs a little runnier than they made them, but they were awesome mixed with greens and sauce. By the time I was heading out, the caffeine was just kicking into high gear and the line was out the door.

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