Bay Area cafes tend to sell two kinds of drip coffee: one made via pour-over, where a barista slowly streams water onto grounds for one precise cup; or one made via batch brewer, an automated machine that can make a gallon at a time.
Some high-end coffee companies like Blue Bottle Coffee tout the human touch of pour-over and argue batch brewers are purely utilitarian, too often making mediocre, burnt-tasting coffee. But Eli Salomon, founder of Oakland manufacturer Voga Coffee, thinks pour-over varies too much from barista to barista, and that the high cost of labor involved means the coffee — regularly $5 in the Bay Area — is too expensive. Plus, it requires customers to wait.
Salomon wanted to merge the best of both methods and create a batch brewer that could easily and consistently produce coffee that is just as smooth, sweet and customizable as great pour-over.
The result is called Ground Control, and you might have already seen the machine peering out from behind a counter at a number of Bay Area cafes and restaurants, including Equator Coffees & Teas, Dandelion Chocolate and Chez Panisse. It looks kind of like a robot, with an Edison light bulb-esque top that spurts out liquid — and it’s wowing local roasters.
“It’s one of the best cups of coffee I’ve ever had,” said Helen Russell, CEO of Marin County’s Equator.
Voga wants to replace every drip coffee brewer in the world. It has sold its machines to cafes on multiple continents and won the Specialty Coffee Association’s Best New Product Award, considered the coffee industry’s highest honor for commercial equipment, in 2018. Ground Control is loosely based on a siphon — a vacuum coffee maker invented in the 1800s that’s often said to produce the cleanest cup of coffee because it fully immerses the grounds and keeps the water temperature steady as it brews.
Those two principles carry over to Ground Control. Beyond the size, digital keypad and many programmable functions, there’s one enormous difference: The machine brews the same grounds multiple times.
“We’ve created a new science of coffee that breaks essentially every single rule that was previously known in coffee brewing,” Salomon said. “Everything is upside down.”
A coffee fiend with no formal coffee industry experience, Salomon wanted to create a new drip coffee machine that would make the most delicious batches possible.
Salomon loved coffee made with a siphon — Blue Bottle Coffee’s Mint Plaza location is known for its lit-up bar of vacuum coffee makers. But siphons only make one portion at a time. He envisioned a giant, vacuum-powered, siphon-style machine that could make more coffee faster and be commercially scalable.
In 2013, he called his longtime friend Josh Avins, who had just finished his Ph.D. in chemistry at Columbia University, and explained the idea. Avins flew to San Francisco to build a prototype and test the theory in Salomon’s home. It worked: Salomon was thrilled with the result. But Avins thought they could do better.
“Josh shattered (my) idea into a million pieces, and we picked it up and we came up with something a lot more beautiful,” Salomon said. About a year later, he formally created Voga Coffee with Avins and Jason Sarley, a sensory analyst with the industry publication Coffee Review.
Avins was interested in coffee from a chemistry perspective. In the lab, he commonly worked on extractions, a procedure used to isolate a substance when it has been mixed with others.
“What is coffee brewing but another extraction?” Avins said. “I thought, we never do a single extraction in my lab. Let’s brew the coffee more than once.”
Salomon thought Avins’ proposal was crazy. Rebrewing grounds using the pour-over method, for example, would create little more than dirty water. Over-extracting — letting the beans and water hang out too long together — notoriously creates a bitter cup. It went against everything he knew about brewing good coffee.
Yet that crazy idea is what makes Ground Control tick. Water fully immerses grounds on the bottom of the machine, then a vacuum pulls the coffee to the top and dries out the grounds. The process repeats twice with fresh water, dripping a gallon of coffee into a thermos or carafe.
“Every brew brings out a different layer of flavors, and then we blend them together,” Salomon said.
That’s also where the customization happens. Cafe owners can create their own recipes for each type of coffee they carry, tinkering with the amount of time of each extraction for up to six extractions, though Salomon typically recommends three. A difference of a mere second in any of the brew cycles can create a radically different cup: perhaps more acidity, more sweetness, more floral notes, more chocolate.
“That’s been the most exciting thing for me: creating the cup we want,” said Rich Avella, co-founder of Highwire Coffee Roasters, which uses a Ground Control in its Berkeley cafe.
The amount of control and possibility with Ground Control led Avella to get rid of Highwire’s pour-over line in Berkeley. Many cafes tout pour-over for its precision, with a barista carefully streaming water into a filter for about five minutes, which gives the water a chance to slowly extract the best flavor from the coffee grounds. But that reliance on the human touch means pour-over can be difficult to do well consistently, and some customers don’t want to wait that long for coffee.
With Ground Control, “we can offer a single origin that’s in a really tailored recipe to deliver a great cup — and it’s ready right now,” Avella said.
The time-consuming nature of brewing every cup to order caused Dandelion Chocolate to stop offering pour-over — or any drip coffee — at its Valencia cafe for years. The cafe was too busy to handle the volume of orders, and batch brewers on the market didn’t appeal to founder Todd Masonis. Then he met Salomon and tried a cup brewed on Ground Control.
“When people try our chocolate, some say, ‘I didn’t know chocolate could taste this way.’ I felt the same experience with the coffee,” Masonis said.
Now, Ground Control is at all of Dandelion’s three San Francisco locations as well as its new Las Vegas cafe. In addition to drip coffee, the machine allows Dandelion to brew cacao nibs for cacao nib coffee.
Highwire Coffee in Berkeley and Equator Coffee at Fort Mason became the first two cafes to get Ground Control machines two years ago. Now, there are roughly 70 installed around the world, including in Canada, Colombia, Singapore and Hong Kong. Salomon said Voga is talking to coffee chains and convenience-store chains, which could bring that number up significantly in 2020. Voga’s goal is to bring its machines to about 300 more locations this year.
Salomon believes Ground Control is the first serious new technology in batch brewing since the first automated drip brewer in 1954. Recent innovations that have excited the coffee industry have focused on single-cup brewing, such as 2005’s AeroPress and 2007’s Clover. A popular at-home brewing tool, the AeroPress looks like a giant syringe and fully immerses grounds like a French press, except its use of a paper filter means the end result is smoother. Meanwhile, Starbucks purchased Clover, which uses a vacuum and digitally controls the temperature and number of seconds the grounds interact with water.
The development in batch brewing is exciting for top roasters like Equator’s Russell, who said great coffee beans can be ruined by an improper brewing process. (“It’s like listening to Mozart on AM radio versus going to the symphony,” quipped Salomon.)
But Salomon says Ground Control is also meant for corner stores that want to take their drip up a notch or for places that serve but don’t specialize in coffee, like Berkeley bagel shop Boichik Bagels. Machines start at $6,000 — more than a standard drip brewer but less than a commercial espresso machine. Salomon hopes his machine makes great coffee more democratic.
“Coffee used to be something that was accessible to everyone, and then we started to see a shift toward very expensive coffees,” he said. “We’re not here to make a fancy cafe fancier.”
Janelle Bitker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: janelle.bitker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @janellebitker