Easy drinking, Consistent, Delicious. Batch Brew holds a special place in our hearts here at Ancoats Coffee. It’s a way of brewing coffee that is both simple yet elegant and we believe it should hold pride of place in the world of coffee brewing.
Filter coffee made in batches often conjures up ideas of the old style American diner, where your cup of hot, and more often than not bitter dark roast, is refilled to your heart’s content. This image however, is one that feels somehow outdated in the current speciality coffee climate as the world of filter coffee is now light years away from this humble vision.
Filter coffee has over the past decade exploded in popularity. It is now viewed as the refined, elegant and precise way to consume mostly black coffee. This explosion in popularity was mostly down to the renaissance of manual brewers such as the V60, Kalita and Chemex in speciality coffee shops around the world. Nevertheless while the quality and visual flair of such brew methods has been well documented they are often subject to inconsistencies of human error and are not known for their speed.
That being said what this boom has heralded is the refinement and improvement in the quality of the humble batch brew. The natural next step in this progression meant cafes began to seek out a more cost effective, reliable and precise way of serving filter coffee, a.k.a batch brew. Batch brew offered to both cafes and homebrewers the chance to produce a more consistent and high quality brew without compromising. Now don’t get me wrong, we love a manual brew as much as anyone else! But when it comes to a busy cafe environment the recent quantum leap in terms of the technology used for batch brew machines has meant that busy cafes such as ourselves have been able to increase the quantity and quality of our filter coffee offering through batch brew.
Notwithstanding all of this, we are always consistently impressed that many cafe’s have managed to turn out high quality, by-the-cup filter offerings in a fast paced environment, nor is it something we believe impossible either, as our range of hand brewed coffee sits proudly alongside our batch brew within our own cafe. However batch brew offers something else, a guarantee. It is a guarantee that without fail, the consistency, quality and reliability of our coffee will be high, every single day.
For this very reason, batch brew is also the favoured drink of choice among the majority of the team here at Ancoats. It’s quick and reliable excellence makes it the go to option for the coffee to keep us going, throughout the day and sometimes into the night!
Therefore with all of this said, can batch brew really be considered the perfect cup of coffee? I can’t help feeling there is a good argument to say yes. If you really want to consistently highlight the best qualities of a coffee, to more than a handful of people, batch brew is the obvious choice. The subtlety of taste paired with the speed and ease of preparation is a winning combination but perhaps one of the most important attributes of batch for us, is the time it gives you. The fact that batch brew is so quick to make, means we can give that extra bit of time to you our customers. In order to have a more meaningful interaction than simply an order and a price. This is invaluable, as time taken to understand the coffee you are drinking and the journey it has been on in order to reach your cup is a key drive for us at Ancoats Coffee.
For those of you who are reading this and somewhat batch brew curious, then I say go for it! Whether a cafe owner or a home enthusiast give this somewhat neglected brew method the respect and time it deserves. Unsurprisingly we have a number of coffees that would make a perfect batch brew, with just a few of our excellent filter options shown below.
Brewing notes:
- We would recommend using the standard 60g of coffee per 1 litre of batch.
- Brew’s should not be left for more than 2 hours in there respective brewing vessel / container