sottoorg

As computers become more and more prevalent, writing has come to mean typing on a keyboard. But there is a man, known as the God of Fountain Pens by pen aficionados, who still continues to handcraft pens nibs even now.

WITH its brass-trimmed halogen heating elements, glass globes and bamboo paddles, the new contraption that is to begin making coffee this week at the Blue Bottle Café here looks like a machine from a Jules Verne novel, a 19th-century vision of the future.

Called a siphon bar, it was imported from Japan at a total cost of more than $20,000. The cafe has the only halogen-powered model in the United States, and getting it here required years of elliptical discussions with its importer, Jay Egami of the Ueshima Coffee Company.

I’m a lover of coffee; I enjoy everything about it: the visceral aspects of grinding freshly roasted beans, pulling, what you can already tell from sight, perfect shots from a commercial machine, watching the delicate beauty of separating crema, the esoterica of drinking it within half a minute to savor it at its peak.

However, you could get a somewhat similar beverage experience with the Bodum Santos for a measly $60 using proper vacuum press protocol mentioned in the article. I’m still trying to figure out what makes the coffee from this machine better. Is it the halogen lamp or the bamboo paddle? It’s an absolutely beautiful piece of art and industrial design, there’s no doubting that. But for 20 grand, it better be serving liquid crack.

As a lover of printmaking, typefaces and woodcuts, this project blows my mind. It would have been cool if they hand carved it.

A collection of bears turned inside out and restuffed.