Auto-Brewers: The Future of Coffee…Again?
My first coffee shop job was at Kidd Coffee, a small franchise in the middle of nowhere Ohio. We were forty-five minutes away from the nearest city and thirty minutes away from any other coffee shop. We offered four coffees year-round: mild coffee, bold coffee, decaf, and “Highlander Grogg,” a vanilla and hazelnut flavored coffee. We brewed them in big batches on our row of Bunn auto-brewers and let them sit for four hours, or until a customer complained that their coffee was cold, whichever came last. I had no idea where coffee came from or what it even was. Once, a customer asked me if we had any Colombian coffee. I stared back at him blankly and asked, “What is that, a flavor?”
This scene plays in my head whenever I see an auto-brewer, which has become the symbol of bad coffee since the emergence of the third wave coffee movement. Experiences like mine were the general standard for brewed coffee until forward-thinking professionals led us all into the golden era of by-the-cup brewing, an era that may be on the verge of another reformation – back to auto-brewers.
Posted under Coffee Retailing, Culture, Equipment, Professional Techniques









