Uses mechanical suspension to "guarantee a perfect uniformity of saturation every time", and apparently was "originally created to solve the problem of brewing coffee in low gravity environments".

They're quoting Scott Rao as having said "I have never seen a coffee machine that is this capable for less than ten thousand dollars"...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pe ... coffee-mac

Traditional cone brewing is clumpy.

No thanks.

I just spent 4 minutes watching water boil.

I thought you were kidding.

Interesting. It appears to be a percolator, but with better temperature control than the ones from the 1950's/60's.

All I know is that I have too many brewing devices/methods/filters/grinders already ...

The idea is quite cool (i.e. precision siphon) but I think I must not be in their target audience... age quickly catching up to me?

Edit: Wait a minute is it possible that it's recirculating brewed water back through the grinds again?

I thought it was a siphon too, but I think that it is recirculating the water, and thus, a percolator.

baldheadracing wrote:thus, a percolator.

Thanks - the diagrams/animations misled me for a little.

baldheadracing wrote:I thought you were kidding.

Interesting. It appears to be a percolator, but with better temperature control than the ones from the 1950's/60's.

All I know is that I have too many brewing devices/methods/filters/grinders already ...

Amen to that.

baldheadracing wrote:I thought it was a siphon too, but I think that it is recirculating the water, and thus, a percolator.

FWIW, my sister in-law and her husband have an old percolator. We gathered at their house over the Christmas break a couple of years ago and I was amazed at how good the percolator coffee was, even with non-specialty beans.

Hey guys,

I am the guy behind the PERK Kickstarter project and just now came across this thread. If it is alright, I'll address some of the thoughts that were posted, and then see if you guys have any other questions I can answer. Running a Kickstarter for a coffee machine that both answers the questions of a professional/prosumer and of a casual coffee drinker that has no idea what Third Wave coffee is can be a challenge.

Here is a podcast that may put the PERK project is a little bit more context, it is featured in the first 10 minutes of this podcast:
http://www.thecoffeepodcast.org/episode ... rting-talk

I developed PERK while working on a simple, consistent single cup coffee brewer that extracted as well as a well dialed in pourover, something that seems to be missing on the market for the home and office. I'm thinking of machines like Clover or Steampunk that were developed to help baristas consistently serve pourovers in a coffee shop, but for the home. While single-cup machines of course do exist, I have not found one that is low cost, can compare to these high-end machines. The machine in the short video we shot is a Technivorm Cup One and produces very different coffee from the larger batch Technivorms that perform very well. You will never see a Technivorm Cup One in a coffee-shop environment. I'll also mention that the Cup One goes for $220 and PERK is now going for $175.

While I didn't intend to improve on a percolator-type brewer, PERK ended up being based on the foundation of a percolator. It gently recirculates liquid from the bottom-up to at first aggressively agitate the grounds to evenly saturate them, then to gently flow liquid through them. Recirculation has a bad rap because traditional percolators were terrible, but there is no real reason why recirculation can't be great. Some people at first think of PERK as a siphon, and in a way it can be seen as that too, but I tend to stay away from that comparison. The biggest difference between a traditional percolator and PERK is the bottom-up flow that evenly saturates the coffee grounds without ever requiring user interaction. The other difference is the ability to control the temperature of the infusion (compared to the inlet temperature) to within a few degrees. In this way, PERK has been compared to a Sous Vide machine.

@cai42: yes, there tends to not be much to look when it is in operation. We had a lot of requests to see the thing work from start to finish, primarily to see a fully functioning prototype. A lot of people are tired of the scammy campaigns of the past, many of which were in the coffee category. They didn't have fully-functioning prototypes. We don't expect to win any drama awards with that clip.

@wsfarrell: when you are brewing a single-cup using any method, how do you ensure evenness of saturation? At the coffee shops I've seen, many follow some variant of Matt Perger's method with a spoon or swirling.

Your replies and questions are greatly appreciated. They will to help us better communicate in the future.