I'm amazed that I haven't seen these coffee art clones before. They're the creation of Karen Eland, a former barista, who one day decided to dip a paint brush into her coffee cup instead of nibbling on biscotti. By gradually building layers of espresso she's able to create a range of tones and what must be the tastiest smelling paintings ever.

Maybe it's my caffeine addiction talking, but this is the first time I've ever seen the Mona Lisa and wanted to give her a lick. [Coffee Art via Artsy Spot via Neatorama]

Designed by Frenchman Charles Teyssier, the "Caffe Inn" concept is purely aesthetic, offering little in the way of improvements on the tried and true espresso machine formula. It does, however, remind me of Iron Man, and that's enough. [Design Blog]

When I (or anyone) order a macchiato at either of Ninth St. Espresso's Alphabet City outposts, it's always made by a dude in his 20s wearing a baseball hat and facial hair who appears to move with a level of enthusiasm rivaling that of an arthritic retiree working as a night-shift security guard at a library. It looks like he simply doesn't care. At least, if you don't watch closely.

After he presses the tamper into a mound of brown, almost velvet-like powder to compress it into a perfectly even puck of coffee for proper extraction, he gives the portafilter a fast twirl, proving the coffee is packed in tightly enough that gravity can't wrestle it out. The steel pitcher holding the steamed milk is slammed into the counter once then swirled, twice and another swirl, three times—then half of its contents are dumped into a drain before they're poured into a tiny cup with hand movements that slink back and forth so subtly they're almost imperceptible, smoothly layering the milk into a triple shot of thick and rusty brown espresso, the drink topped with an arabesque mark of white in a small sea of tan foam. I wasn't witnessing malaise, but the skillful, measured movements of a pro.

That's merely what I can see—what I didn't know before talking to Ninth St.'s owner, Ken Nye, is everything leading up to that. The $15,000 hand-built La Marzocco machine my drink was crafted with is the only one of its kind in the U.S., an "almost prototypish" model that stuffs the state-of-the-art in espresso-making technology into a retro body style that evokes fine Italian machinery as much as it does coffeeshop centerpiece (photos above). The heart of the machine is an electronic PID-controlled triple boiler system. Typical commercial machines have two boilers—one for the coffee, one for the steamer—but Ken's machine has separate boilers for each group head (where the coffee comes out), each of which can adjusted to within a tenth of a degree.

Ken says that kind of temperature control really matters. He and others avow that taste begins to change within half a degree—as coffee gets hotter, it tends to be more bitter, while cooler coffee can be more sour. (How important is temperature to coffee? Ken keeps his shops at exactly 73 degrees year round—for the beans, not the customers.)

Older machines just couldn't get that kind of precision. They had a typical variation of a few degrees either way—which is why Ken retired his 1970s machine, which it sits, gorgeous as a classic car, in the back of the shop. The new machine is a glimpse of what other top-of-the-line espresso machines will perform like a year from now, says Jacob Ellul-Blake from La Marzocco R&D—though they'll have even more sophisticated, programmable controls for pressure, too, giving a barista exacting digital power over nearly every parameter of the coffee.

How those parameters are changed is where engineering meets art—it's entirely based on taste. Artisan coffee-making may be at last trodding toward digital control en masse, making the production of a cup of coffee approximate voodoo-inflected mad science. Ninth St.'s relatively new $3000 Mazzer burr grinder is also electronically controlled, its older grinder relegated to pulverizing beans for decaf, while water filters run amok throughout the shop to ensure a mineral level of 100-150 PPM/TDS, lest the water be "lifeless" or too hard, and damaging to the equipment—but the very analog rituals of tasting, like cupping, prevail. After all, there's only two elements in coffee: Coffee and water.

And despite all of the gear, what this bleeding edge of the coffee industry is attempting to imitate is the old-school wine industry. To see that, I had to step back a level, from coffeehouse to roaster, so Ken directed me to the current supplier of his beans, Chicago-based Intelligentsia Coffee.

Intelligentsia's New York training lab, run by David Latourell (formerly of the Clover's progenitor, the Coffee Equipment Company), is a large white space divided into two rooms. Two-thirds of the space is the lab, with two long steel tables pressed back against the wall, cluttered by nearly $50,000 worth of gear for making coffee: Chemex to vacuum pot, caffe solo to Clover. The other third of the space is a dedicated cupping room with a hydraulic table cut into a stage. Intelligentsia is one of the three big roasters, along with Portland-based Stumptown (who just opened a NY roastery) and North Carolina-based Counter Culture, currently spearheading the so-called third wave of coffee, the second wave being, in a nutshell, Starbucks.

The two big messages of the third wave, if you buy into it as a movement, are sustainability and coffee as a "culinary experience."

By sustainability, that means environmentally accountable and fiscally beneficial to the farmers who grow the beans, long screwed over by Big Coffee. But the sourcing goes beyond just quality and fairness: These people are bringing wine's notion of terroir into coffee—tasting precisely where coffee is from, not just down to the single-origin farm level, but down to blocks of a farm's land. (By the way, David says that Starbucks' sourcing practices are exceptionally solid, so no ill should be spoken of them in that regard.)

The incredibly nerdy and exacting methods developed lately for brewing coffee aren't about convenience, like the drip pot. They're designed to express and articulate the particular qualities and complexities inherent to a coffee, to make it possible to not simply taste coffee like wine, but to talk about it in a similar manner—"gilded by an orange and lime citrus acidity, the center of Itzamna radiates flavors of fruit punch and caramel"—and ascribing those qualities to a particular origin.

The feedback loop of the relationships with farmers that these roasters have been building for years now, David says, doesn't just mean that coffee is more responsibly harvested, but that coffee is actually better now, and there are coffees that were never possible before, since farmers have been refining their practice to grow coffee that suits the tastes of roasters who will pay more for particular beans.

David is actually un-elitist as they come, despite being at the center of a movement that smacks of cultural and culinary elistism. For him, all the gear, all of the mechanical extravagance and precision, is all about taste and getting the flavor profile you want out of coffee. He refuses to judge even those who drink Folgers and like it (he just wishes they'd buy coffee from somewhere that practiced more ethical bean sourcing). But I mean, how much can you really taste the difference between various coffees, or hell, one coffee prepared different ways? To find out, David made us several cups of coffee, prepared using the Clover, Chemex and CafeSolo.

Clover is particular suited to experimentation, since nearly variable can be manipulated digitally and the process is easily repeatable, potentially turning every cup into a science project. The Chemex delivers the cleanest profile of any brew method, plainly exposing the bean's flavor profile—there's no muddling to hide it, like with a French press—and the Cafe Solo is kind of like a reverse French press, offering something a bit heavier and richer. (We explained most of the major ways to make coffee earlier with Ken and David's help, if you're curious.) We tried Intelligentsia's La Soledad, from Guatemala, Flor Azul from Nicaragua, and La Maravilla, also from Guatemala.

Here's where I'm coming from, going into this: I can tell the difference good coffee and shitty coffee. The latter, well, tastes like shit. The former, I can drink black and like, tasting something more simply coffee, but that I can't define. In other words, the flowery descriptions adorning bags of coffee from most specialty houses haven't actually played out like that on my tongue. It's a rudimentary sophistication.

After an introductory cup of the Flor Azul, we try the La Soledad in the Clover with a 30 second brew time. It's pleasant and fairly light. There's a defining acidity to it, but it's not bitter in any way. David adjusts the steep time to 60 seconds. The resulting cup is mellower, and loses a lot of its punch. He makes a third cup, this time upping the dose: Perfection. A happy medium of the first two, what people mean when they say a coffee is "juicy" suddenly makes sense to me. I can't tell you if it was "pear" or "apple," but the subtle bite of a tart fruit is there, then it dissolves into something smoother, almost "herbacious," as David called it. Well, he also said it tasted very "green," since for him, coffee has strong color connotations. This would prove to be our favorite cup.

Next, we go to the Chemex. The coffee is thinner than what came out of the Clover, and the taste has a lot more acidity to it. And, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I picked up a weird cinammon note that became a lot more pronounced than it was with the Clover. What. The. Fuck. Am I really starting to taste like the obsessives I've been talking to? The cup that came out of the Cafe Solo is initially a disappointment that seemed overextracted, though letting it cool longer made it better, rounding it out to something more balanced, though ultimately kind of forgettable (I know, because I forgot what it tasted like and apparently didn't deem it worthy of taking notes on).

Beyond David's advice to junk my albeit fancy drip coffeemaker for a French press or Chemex pot, I kind of wondered how much I learned would stick with me: I mean, I actually did taste a real difference between all of the coffees we drank, but I got to compare them one after another. I got a machiatto from Ninth St. on my way home the next day, and there it was: Juiciness. I remembered it. I understood it. It was still there. Not merely "this doesn't taste thin and burnt and shitty" like a machiatto does from all but a handful of coffeehouses in New York, but layered on top the subtle sweetness of the milk and velvet mouthfeel is a tartness I can actually identify as "juicy." Fuck, it might just be peach.

I guess there is no going back.

Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.

Here's the rub about making coffee: The best ways to make coffee are the super simplest or the ultra-geekiest. The middle ground—i.e., your drip brewer—produces mediocrity. And where I come from, mediocre is spelled s-h-i-t-t-y. What's universal to every good method of making coffee is that there's a ton of control and consistency going on. In fact, consistency is the secret sauce to making great coffee. But we've got a few things we even get to the part you probably think of as "making coffee." These are the basic elements, no matter what voodoo you're invoking to make coffee: The beans, roast, grind, dose, water, temperature and brew time.

Beans

Buy 'em fresh, buy 'em whole, buy 'em sustainably. That's about all there is to it. Well, almost. If you're a dark roast drinker, it's time to branch out. Here's how Ken Nye, owner of Ninth St. Espresso, which has been at the forefront of NYC's coffee scene since 2001 explains it like this: Take a piece of dry-aged prime rib, which is loaded with complex flavors. How are you gonna cook it? Lighter, to preserve all of that complexity, or are you gonna char the holy hell out of it? There's nothing wrong with people who like the taste of a well-done piece of meat, but well, they're loving the char more than the meat. Same thing with some of the amazing coffees people that are being sourced now by companies like Intelligentsia, Stumptown and Counter Culture—they tend to roast on the medium to lighter side using older equipment to let the coffee's actual flavor come through. Roasting super dark is a good way to hide what's going on with the bean (good or bad).

Grinding

There's no way around this: If you care about coffee, you have to grind the beans right before you make it. As soon as they're ground, the oils inside the beans are exposed to air, and the thousand different flavor compounds inside start dying. Coffee's fragile, man.

The grind is the foundation process for everything else that happens afterward. In fact, David Latourell, formerly of the Coffee Equipment Company (of Clover fame) and currently at Intelligentsia, says that the number one thing people can do to "change their world" when it comes to coffee is to fix their grind situation. If the grind up is screwed, so is everything else. Uniformity is what's key, otherwise you get an uneven extraction, which means mediocre coffee. And the only way to get that uniformity is with a good burr grinder.

Blade grinders mutilate coffee beans, and the heat caused by the friction screws up the chemistry, so don't even think about it. A burr grinder pulverizes the beans instead of chopping them up. Just because it's a burr grinder doesn't mean it's a good grinder, though. You want one that's efficient and can grind slowly, otherwise you're introducing friction and heat that corrupts the coffee. Typically, that means a conical burr grinder, versus a flat burr grinder. While you can get a burr grinder as cheaply as $50, both Ken and David say that you have to spend at least $150-$200 for a home grinder—in particular, David recommends the Baratza Virtuoso, a conical burr grinder that's about $200. (Ken's commercial grinder, pictured, is about $3000.) It sounds like a crazy amount of money for a grinder, but if you're serious about making coffee at home, this is where you start. Fortunately, it's the most expensive piece of equipment you need to buy.

Okay! Let's get to brewing, from simple to whizbang.

Chemex

A Chemex pot is one of the simplest ways to brew coffee. Seriously. You put a paper filter over a carafe, dump in coffee grounds, and pour water over it. There is an art to it, however. As is the case with every method of making coffee, there's no one perfect dose, brew time or temperature for every coffee—it depends on the coffee, and of course, your taste, and that's where the art lies—but Intelligentsia's got some starting points (PDF). (200 degrees is a good fail-safe temp, though.) Intelligentsia's got a tutorial video ready to go. Besides the $35 Chemex pot, you need Chemex brand paper filters (no, the cheap filters won't do, because the paper weave sucks). Something to look for is a nice, even bloom, like we see up top (the coffee will puff up in the filter) as you pour. The end result is a light, super clean cup of coffee where all of its qualities shine through really brightly.

French Press

The French press, while low tech like the Chemex, produces coffee that's almost antithetical to the Chemex's clean profile: It's got more heft, it's grittier, it's a little less defined, but it's much richer, too. A solid Bodum press starts at about $30, give or take. The coffee is ground a little coarser here, for bigger particulates. Happily, there's another video to walk you through the process. Two things to emphasize, Ken from Ninth St. says: When you push down the plunger at the end of the brew time, go slow and easy. As coffee steeps longer, it gets more sensitive, so you don't want to agitate it by slamming down the plunger. Also, when you're done brewing, pour off all the coffee. Don't let it sit, you gotta get it outta there. (Image via jilliansvoice/Flickr)

Vacuum or Siphon Pot

The vacuum pot looks like it's straight out of a chemistry set—or meth lab—for a reason: You don't wanna go there. David explains that it's perhaps the finickiest way to brew coffee—it "requires skill" and an amazing cup out of it can be "elusive." It is a seriously cool concept though. So, you've got two chambers connected by a tube. Water is boiled heated in the bottom chamber so it rises into the upper chamber, where your coffee is hanging out. It brews. Then you pull it off the heat source (whatever you're using), and the coffee is sucked back into the lower chamber—vacuums, baby—leaving the grounds up top and an articulate, clean cup in the bottom.

Moka Pot

Then there's the Moka pot. What makes it special is that it uses steam pressure to brew coffee, and you make it on your stove, using coffee that's almost as finely ground as espresso, though not quite. Again, pretty simple idea with a couple of chambers connected by a tube. You've got a base chamber, filled with water, into which you stick a funnel-shaped filter filled with coffee. Start the water a-boilin' and steam pressure will start forcing water through the filter (and the coffee grounds, natch) into the upper chamber. So it's sort of like a percolator, and there's debate as to whether or not it's a true perc pot because of the way it uses steam pressure. You've got to take care not to let things get too hot, though, otherwise you'll screw up the coffee. Gimme Coffee's tutorial for making Moka Pot coffee is a pretty solid one to follow, and pots go from $25-$50, depending on size. (kanaka/Flickr)

Cold Brew or Toddy

Haven't heard of cold-brewing? This is how you make iced coffee, not pouring coffee you've brewed regularly over ice, which results in a sour, disgusting abomination. Well, every method we've talked about (and will after this) for brewing coffee involves hot water, and a relatively short brewing time. Cold brewing is the low and slow approach: Coarse coffee grounds are steeped in room temp water for 12-24 hours, depending on the coffee. What comes out is exceptionally smooth, with most of the acidity—and some would say complexity—gone, so it has drinkability, like Bud Light. The "official" and I suppose easiest way to make cold-brew coffee is using the $40 toddy system, which claims credit for starting the whole damn cold-brew deal in the first, but you can make it on the cheap.

AeroPress

Update: Alright already, we hear you guys: We can't leave out AeroPress, which delivers a super smooth cup of coffee with a superfast brew and extraction time. Plus the apparatus is cheap, under 30 bucks. It's basically like a giant syringe. Ground coffee (a little finer than drip) is placed in a tube with a paper filter on the bottom, which is placed over whatever want the coffee to wind up in. After hot water is added and the coffee steeps, a plunger is inserted and pushed down, forcing the brewed coffee through the filter. And hey look, another tutorial from Gimme.

Drip

Okay, I'm about to explode your world here. The drip coffeemaker you've got at home and at your office on the left here? It sucks. Remember earlier, how I said consistency is the key to coffee? A consistent temperature is crucial, and most drip makers can't deliver that. They can't even deliver the right temperature to begin with. 200 degrees is the golden temperature for brewing coffee, and most drip pots top out at around 180, which isn't hot enough for a proper extraction. Plus, they probably wet the grinds unevenly, making it worse. In fact, Ken and David both say that the only drip brewer who can deliver that is from Technivorm (on the right), whose drip brewers actually meet the temperature standards of the Special Coffee Association of America. And Technivorms coffeemakers aren't cheap, going for around $200. Sorry dudes.

Espresso

You know what? Let's just get this out of the way: You can't make amazing espresso at home. Not unless you're will to spend something $7500 on an espresso machine from someone like La Marzocco. Why? Consistency. Temperature. Pressure.

As big and scary as an espresso machine looks, again, the basics aren't too complicated to grasp: It's using pressure to force water through a puck of finely ground coffee. What's inside that giant box is a boiler system—or two—that heats the water that passes through the puck and powers the steamer, and a motor to force the water through with a degree of pressure, so that the coffee is quickly extracted with all of those "beautiful oils" Ken from Ninth St. is fond of talking about, if the espresso shot is pulled skillfully. It should be dense, rich and topped with a yummy looking rust foam on top, called crema.

Lesser machines aren't that good at the two most important things an espresso machine works with: Temperature and pressure. To start, good commercial machines have at least two independent boiler systems, one for the coffee, one for the steamer. In the past, Jacob Ellul-Blake from La Marzocco R&D told me, before the brew boiler and steam boiler were separated, you ran into a problem where steaming milk would cause the steam pressure inside of the machine to drop, which would make the water temperature drop as well, since temperature and pressure are proportional—and you'd get a less-than-excellent shot. So, a good machine keeps a consistent temperature. Incredibly high end machines are super-precisely controlled temp-wise, within tenths of a degree. That's because taste is affected with a temperature variation of half a degree. (We'll go more in-depth on that later this week.) On the pressure front, most home machines just can't deliver the 8-9 bar of pressure that you need for a good extraction.

So when it comes to espresso, if you desire excellence, you're pretty much resigned to going to a coffee shop. They've got the equipment—and hopefully barista skills—you just don't have. But that's not a bad thing. David related it this way: It's like the difference between cooking at home and eating out. You can make a delicious meal yourself (coffee analog: Chemex or French press) but you're probably not going to make cookie-covered ice cream balls using liquid nitrogen, and that's okay.

Clover

Clover was the darling of the coffee world until the Coffee Equipment Company was bought by Starbucks. All hand-built, around 250 of them were made before Starbucks swooped in. Essentially, the Clover is a nerdy way of delivering water to coffee with precisely—digitally—controlled parameters that are repeatable every single time, so you can brew the same cup over and over and over, or so you can experiment more rigorously, carefully tweaking one element at a time.

The gist of the Clover of this: You place ground coffee in a chamber, which is filled with a precise amount of water at the exact temperature you set (give or take a degree) for the precise brew time you set. When it's done. Coffee pulled into the chamber by the vacuum formed when the piston is pushed back up with the Clover's powerful motor—it can lift 350 pounds—with the grounds left on top thanks to its 70 micron filter. The resulting cup is clean—coffee aficianados love clean cups—and expressive, though it's not quite so as the Chemex method. But that's what $12,000 of coffee engineering gets you.

That's not quite every method of brewing coffee—seriously, there's about a million, like CafeSolo or single-cup ceramic drip—but those are the majors definitely worth knowing (or in one case, forgetting). But in sum, if you're looking to change your home game, Chemex or French Press are the ways to go. If you wanna get really geeky about coffee, believe me, we haven't even started, so stayed tuned.
Still something you wanna know? Send questions about coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee or coffee to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.

The Mypressi Twist has a pneumatic engine—which works with CO2 cartridges that get you eight cups each—that allows you to brew a fresh espresso with no need for external power. You only need hot water and coffee to get your caffeine fix.

It will arrive to this country in the fall for $129, so the survivors from the swine flu can have espresso with their human bacon anywhere and at any time. [Mypressi via Single Serve Espresso via Engadget]

Computing
• LaCie 750 GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive for $88.24 (normally $125).
• iRobot® Looj 120 Gutter Cleaning Robot for $49.99 plus free shipping (normally $80).

Flash Memory
• Kingston SD4/8GB 8GB SDHC Class 4 Flash Card for $10.99 (normally $20 - valid today only).

Home Accessories
• Breville BES400XL Ikon Espresso Machine (Refurbished) for $99.99 (normally $200 - valid today only).
• iRobot Looj 120 Gutter Cleaning Robot for $49.99 plus free shipping (normally $80).

Home Entertainment
• Toshiba 15LV505 15.6-Inch Widescreen LCD TV with Built-in DVD Player for $199 plus free shipping (normally $270 - valid today only).
• Logitech Harmony 520 Universal Remote (Refurbished) for $39.99 (normally $70).

Portable Devices (MP3 Players, Etc.)
• SanDisk 1GB Sansa Express MP3 Player for $11.99 (Reconditioned) plus free shipping (normally $38).

Oscar-Winning Movies
• La Vie en Rose for $12.98 plus free shipping (normally $20).
• The Departed for $12.25 plus free shipping (normally $20).
• The Aviator for $7.38 plus free shipping (normally $20).
• Citizen Kane for $12.87 plus free shipping (normally $20).

Hobomodo
• Aartform Curvy 3D 1.5 for $0 (normally $85 - valid today only).

It even comes with a matching chrome latte mug. And a product shot gallery with more liberal usage of reflective Photoshop shinies you will never see. Woe, though, is the AU$595 price tag ($420 US) and down-under-only availability. Here, it is demonstrated by a pair of Ozzies in a cavernous soundstage, to the tune of Green Onions:

[OTTO via Appliancist via BBG]

[Product Page via Born Rich]

Besides the spaceship orb on top, it holds more beans than the old machines (more productivity, less sore arms) and actually does give overworked coffee slaves more control over what comes out, like shot length and adjustable steam wands, both of which used to be fixed (from what I know about their current machines). Hopefully, this means better coffee. They'll be in about 30 percent of US stores by the end of this year, and 75 percent by 2010, but I think with a woodier look to them. [Hossli]

Basically, this blasphemous contraption picks up the gas espresso puts out when warmed, and translates the ion combos into frou-frou meatbag descriptions like "roasted, flowery, woody, toffee and acidity." Since it's a European-produced bolt bucket, for now it only tastes ristretto pulls of espresso, but the goal is to use it as a large-scale quality control agent.

Given the cold, ruthless machine that Starbucks has morphed into, I wouldn't be surprised if they dumped their human taste-testers for these things. Everything else is automated at this point, so why not? Embrace (and taste) the machinic mediocrity. [Analytical Chemistry]

Just add a single-serve pod of finely ground burnt coffee beans and hot water, and it won't be long before your brain starts juking the Watusi like it always does. [Handpresso, via Single Serve Espresso]

And while the espresso maker only pumps out one to two cups at a time, your third guest will be too busy crapping their pants to request that you fire up the machine for a second go, and otherwise ruining post-dessert conversation. We don't know how much this beauty costs, but like a trip to the gun store, we don't recommend you attempt the five-finger discount. [product via bornrich]

Porsche Designed Nespresso Espresso Machine [Single Serve Coffee]

But it costs $2,099, which is only the price of 525 lattes at $4 apiece. But let's face it, you'll pull this out like 5 times a year, relearning how to use it each time, thereby guaranteeing that you'll only pull it out 5 times a year. But we still want one. – Mark Wilson

Product Page [via MSN]

We'll save you all the stuff you need at least a bachelor's in EE to understand, and just say that this man is a huge nerd in more ways than one. Definitely cool though. – Jason Chen

Rancilio Silvia "PID PIC NES" mod [Growdown via MAKE]