Lamason

There are many many ways to make a decent cup of cof­fee. We are see­ing some of these alter­nate meth­ods return­ing to com­mer­cial use around Welling­ton’s more inter­est­ing cafés: the Swiss Gold; the Chemex; the V60; the cold drip… and the siphon.

Dave Lama­son, for­mer­ly Peo­ples Cof­fee’s barista train­er, is pas­sion­ate about the siphon. So pas­sion­ate he’s opened a new café ded­i­cat­ed to this most the­atri­cal of cof­fee-mak­ing meth­ods.

This is Lama­son, Welling­ton’s only siphon-brewed cof­fee bar. (Oth­ers do siphon, it’s true: Mem­phis Belle, Cus­toms Brew Bar, and for a short while Mojo Ori­gins — but Lama­son is the first to make this method the cen­tre­piece of their café expe­ri­ence.) Lama­son is under­neath the carpark in Lom­bard Street — that’s the odd lit­tle street run­ning between Bond Street and the for­mer Man­ners Mall.

Inside there’s a lot of bare con­crete, with the dom­i­nant fea­ture being a very large wood­en bar. And on the bar is The Appa­ra­tus.

The Siphon is an old method of mak­ing cof­fee: it was invent­ed some­time in the 1830s, but large­ly fell out of favour in the last half cen­tu­ry or so. It held on in Japan, from where Dave import­ed his spe­cial café grade ver­sion for mak­ing mul­ti­ple brews quick­ly.

You have two pieces of glass­ware: the low­er a bulb filled with water and heat­ed; the top a cylin­der with the grounds in, stopped at the bot­tom with a wash­able cloth fil­ter. Through the “mag­ic” of sci­ence, hot water is dri­ven into the top; after a short while the heat is removed and the cool­ing air sucks the water through the grounds back into the bot­tom. And then you can drink it. (Just let it cool for a minute or two first.)

Wikipedia explains it bet­ter, and Cof­feeGeek has, well, an even geeki­er take on it. The water does­n’t stay on the grounds for too long, so there’s no dan­ger of over-extrac­tion or bit­ter­ness. Fur­ther­more, many peo­ple claim the fil­ter sys­tem used lets more of the flavour through com­pared to paper fil­ter sys­tems.

But bot­tom line: it’s love­ly to watch, and makes a clean tast­ing cup that reveals the flavours of the bean itself. It’s anoth­er good way to try sin­gle ori­gin cof­fee.

Of course you can get your reg­u­lar espres­so or lat­té (and in time, V60 pourover) at Lama­son too, made to the stan­dards we’d expect of Peo­ples, but this Welling­ton­ista would thor­ough­ly rec­om­mend you also try the siphon.