My New Fancy Bean-Juice Machine

My new, and very fancy, Moccamaster KBT bean-juice-maker.

Founded in The Nertherlands in 1964 by Dutch industrial engineer and (presumably) coffee enthusiast Gerard Clement-Smit, Technivorm (the fun to say result of combining the Dutch words for “form” and “function”) broke into the bean scene in 1965 with a successful home coffee grinder, which soon led to a brewer for the byproduct of the aforementioned grinders.

(Keep reading all of this in your best Dutch accent) During all of this, Mr. Smit’s spirit quest for the most delicious bean juice possible led him to design a home coffee machine that would eventually help define the gold standard of, well, home coffee machines.

Whilst NASA was exploiting the brains of ex-Third Reich rocket scientists in an effort to beat the Soviets to the moon, the Dutch were wisely locking their boffins away a sort of Dutch Los Alamos (probably) with hopes of designing better coffee makers rather than winning the Space Race. Go run your own race, I always say. Note the thick-framed black glasses. Photo Credit: European Coffee Brewing Centre

Rather than simply build a water pump and heating element that squirted dangerously hot H2O onto charred industrial scum-coffee grinds which then landed in a soulless-looking glass carafe located atop a very scary repurposed hot plate, Mr Smit got freaky weird with scientists and coffee experts in an effort to build the very best wasser pump/heating element/brew basket/carafe/hot plate combo (aka “coffee maker”) anyone had yet laid eyes on.

Well of course its the new snelfilterautomaat van Douwe Egberts, what else did you expect?! Photo Credit: Moccamaster

Soon, after much fettling with prototypes by bean boffins with high foreheads and thick, black-framed glasses, the first Moccamaster was born. Surprisingly not the name of a hip-hop artist from Hershey, PA, the Moccamaster combined empirical scientific brewing research with a timeless-yet-futuristic-looking aesthetic that tapped into the cultural zeitgeist of the time.

While contemporary Moccamasters look a bit more modern and sophisticated, this machine had to look like Jetsons-era witchcraft to any janky-ass Sunbeam-owning American in 1970. Photo Credit: Moccamaster

Typically quite pricey but revered by coffee snobs, geeks, and enthusiasts alike, Moccamaster coffee makers are capable of producing world-class cuppas with only slightly more attention to detail than the local peasantry assign to their low-brow “Mr. Coffee” machines. Boy, we sure like literal marketing here in the States don’t we?

Recently I finally dove in and purchased my own Moccamaster (the travel-friendly KBT model, not to be confused with the not-travel-friendly KGB) and saved almost $100 by purchasing a “Used-Like New” model off Amazon that had never been used and only had a damaged box. My first impression that the machine was surprisingly worth the hype has held true over the last few weeks of daily use, so if you’re like me and you fret and fuss over which single-origin, free-trade, Champagne-roast beans you’re going to store this month in your space-age AirScape cans, then you might in fact be quite happy with a Moccamaster of your own. Or a Mr. Coffee may serve you equally well, as this isn’t a space race.

I wonder if Technivorm makes a Fönduemaster as well?