the beauty of Coffee is born from the infinite ways to personalize it. But with the number of fancy espresso machines, pour-over sets, French presses, and bottles of cold brew concentrate on the shelves, it can be exhausting to choose the preferred method for your kitchen. One way to think about what’s best for your home is to determine whether you’re making coffee just for yourself or for the whole family. If you live alone and are looking for a new way to add some excitement to your morning prep routine, there’s an interesting option worth considering: Siphonysta.
A siphon coffee brewing system is a fairly outdated way of brewing coffee. The setup looks like a science experiment. A bulb of ground coffee is heated with water and then sucked through a vacuum cleaner into another chamber above it. Sometimes a cup can take up to 20 minutes to fully brew. No one in my contacts is waiting 20 minutes for a single cup of coffee, which is probably why its popularity has declined. But if you have a little time on your hands for a good cup of coffee, a siphon is considered a great brewing method because vacuum technology is known to improve the aroma of coffee.
Picking up the pace
Tiger’s Siphonysta is the first electric siphon machine that reduces wait time to just three minutes, instantly catapulting the siphon method into this century. Made in Japan, the Siphonysta may seem like a coffee machine for coffee nerds who like to experiment with brewing coffee in every way possible. While that’s definitely true, I think it’s a great option for any single-serve coffee maker. If you live alone, maybe with one other person, and aren’t going to need to brew a large batch of coffee every day, this is a great way to make amazing coffee at home.
I tested the Siphonysta using Verve Coffee Roasters Miraflores Light Roast and grind two tablespoons (the tablespoon is included with the Siphonysta) of whole beans in a Fellow Ode Brew Grinder Gen 2 on the 7 ⅔ setting. I also compared the taste of Siphonysta’s latest cup of coffee to that of a French press. For the French press, I changed the grinder setting for the beans to 9. The coffee grounds for a French press are supposed to be a little larger, so I felt it was a fair adjustment.
The Siphonysta is a fairly small machine, about 12 x 9 x 14 inches. It can be a little difficult to get used to. The upper and lower chambers are screwed to a round base, which locks into the machine. I had to twist, turn and manipulate each of the cameras quite a bit to secure them to the base. Then you will also need to place and rotate a dome in the upper chamber. If all of this is not done accurately, the machine will not function properly. Once you do it for a few days, you start to get the hang of it, although I still feel that this aspect of the machine should be much more agile.
The body of the machine, which has a matte black exterior, appears solid and reliable, although the two plastic chambers worry me a little about durability, especially considering all the nuances required to maneuver the parts into place. The cameras are made of a plastic that does not seem to be of the best quality. I feel like if I accidentally dropped one of them on the ground, it would break, causing the entire machine to stop working instantly.
Internal workings
The Siphonsyta works by adding water to the upper chamber and ground coffee to the lower chamber, above the filter, which is located in the lower chamber. The machine comes with a metal stand that you can place the bottom chamber on to keep it stable while you pour the grinds. You fill the water to the one-cup line or the two-cup line, which is just over a cup.
Photography: Andrew Watman