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.