The Aarke Coffee System Offers Promising Innovation With Some Fiddling
A coffee maker's purpose is not to be beautiful. I have to tell myself this when looking at Aarke's new drip coffee maker, because the Aarke Coffee System is beautiful. This fact could serve to distract me from other important things.
The Aarke is Swedish, designed by Swedes in the Swedish modernist design tradition. But it also looks a little like a full Turkish tea service has been reimagined as a shiny new gasworks. It fills me with longing for a life I don't lead: functional, clean, freed from the messiness of a world marked by trivial disappointments.
Including a flat-burr grinder, the entire system costs north of $700, which is perhaps the price of such a life. The Aarke is part of a quiet renaissance among drip brewers, which had long been sidelined in the luxury world by espresso and pour-over. But a new generation of machines aims to elevate the home drip coffee game to the stuff of true connoisseurship, bringing out the most delicate flavors from premium beans at minimal effort on your part.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
The Aarke is among just a couple dozen brewers now certified by the international Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) as being capable of maintaining enormous precision in every particular: temperature, brewing time, coffee extraction, and probably also the purity of heart. The number of certified makers has doubled in the past half-decade. But the Aarke, with its shiny stainless steel exterior and modern industrial minimalism, just might be the fanciest-looking of the bunch.
Beneath its flashy reflective exterior, there some quite interesting engineering going on. The Aarke also offers a capability unlike any drip coffee setup I've tested: It promises to grind the exact right amount of fresh coffee beans for each batch of drip, using a sensor that measures whatever random amount of water you've freehanded into it. Wild stuff! More on that later. So Shiny, So Chrome
At the most basic level, the Aarke is a thoughtfully designed coffee maker, much like the carbonation system the company is best known for. Whatever its sophisticated sensors, it requires little effort to learn. It feels old-school. At 15 inches high it's not small by any stretch, but its heft could also be described as sturdiness. The Aarke also has what phone people like to call 'haptics.' The brew basket slides in with a satisfying mechanical clunk, and even the device's sole button offers pleasing resistance.
When you pour water in, the tank glows a subtle blue in response. This is the discreet way the Aarke says hello each morning. There are no beeps anywhere, no noises that aren't grinding or brewing. To start a brew, just add the appropriate amount of ground coffee to a standard No. 4 conical filter in the basket. Then, press the button.
Press that button quickly, it'll brew like a standard drip coffee maker. Press it for three seconds until the little light turns on, and it'll first bloom the coffee by wetting it down and waiting for trapped carbon dioxide to escape from the fresh-ground beans.
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