The Espresso School - Barista Courses and Barista Training in Melbourne

An AFL grand final rematch meant a predicatably slow day behind the espresso bar. Luckily for me a new Bunn Trifecta was installed the day before as work had just landed in a shipment of them. The Bunn Trifecta is an electro-mechanical cup-by-cup brewing machine (read: not a manual brewing device like a pour-over) that was released earlier this year. Only a hand full of cafes in Australia actually own one (Cafenatics Docklands Melbourne running 2 Trifectas side-by-side, Dandelion and Driftwood Brisbane, First Pour Melbourne; I'm sure there are others!). The design of the Trifecta is more akin to an automated Aeropress than the Clover brewing machine, the only other cup-by-cup brewing machine that was bought out by Starbucks in 2008. ANOTHER CLOVER? Simply put, no. The main differences between a Clover and Trifecta are: Clover requires manual agitation of coffee. Trifecta uses programmable air bubbles in a pressurised chamber to agitate the coffee Clover has an extremely shallow and wide brewing chamber. Trifecta has a long and narrow brewing chamber similar to an Aeropress Clover, when it was still available cost as much as a three group La Marzocco Linea (read: overpriced and cafe owners in Australia would never make their money back). The Trifecta is a lot more reasonably priced, no official figures yet but it's around the $5000-$6000 mark.

HOW DOES IT WORK? In short, the Trifecta works through three simple brewing phases: Wetting: The coffee ground saturation can be adjusted to determine the exact percentage of water and pauses used within the brew cycle for each cup of coffee. Extraction: Air is injected into a pressurized chamber to agitate the coffee grounds and create an entirely uniform extraction with complex flavors in each prepared coffee beverage. Hydrolysis: Air presses the brew through a metal screen to filter out the coffee grounds while simultaneously preserving the essential oils and aromas to create a complex and full body in each cup of coffee.

SETTINGS

Using a Colombian RFA coffee I was quite familiar with as I had been brewing it all week on the Hario V60 pour-over brewer, I set about dialing in the coffee. The Bunn Trifecta has a boggling amount of programmable settings that a barista can change:

Why the Trifecta has a pre-wet function with ambient temperature water, I have no idea. If anyone knows, please comment and let me know.
Edit: see Bunn's official response in the comments section below

ENGINEERING

My colleague took off the backsplash plate to have a look at the guts of the machine - undo two Phillips head screws and you're in. Inside you're able to clearly see a pump, stainless steel boiler, electronics PCB covered in silicon skin and drainage pipe (optional hook-up). It's very clean unlike the inside of most espresso machines with lots of space inside meaning servicing would be a dream.

I was concerned about the size of the boiler given how much water would be drawn from it for every brew and then topped back up with cold water. This would surely effect the temperature stability of the machine as well as the rebound (how long it would take the machine to be temperature ready for the next brew) esprecially when brewing 16 oz or 480 mL drinks. This could be remedied by adding a cheap small thermoblock before the boiler to pre-heat the inlet water, similar to how multiple boiler espresso machines draw preheated water to the brew boiler. I guess time will tell as I get to use this machine.

The filter was a fine metal mesh filter. The appearance of the coffee is very similar to a Clover brew and the exact opposite of a filter paper brew - cloudy. I ran a resulting brew through a paper filter just to see how much sediment there was - not as much as I expected (note to self - take a photo!).

There's a lot of plastic. Plastic brewing chambers and plastic filter handle. Probably a good thing in a cafe environment. A glass chamber would cost much more and cause safety problems.

THUMBS UP

• Push button operation - no barista intervention required. Simply grind the coffee and press the brew button. This means more predictable brews if the air controlled agitation of the coffee is consistent, unlike Clover which requires the barista to agitate the coffee manually.
• Once the coffee is brewing, the barista can then leave the machine unattended and wait for the brew cycle to finish leaving the barista free to do other work.
• Less chance of under and over extracted sections of coffee due to the diameter of the brewing chamber - maybe?
• Able to save and load recipes/settings

THUMBS DOWN

• The rinse cycle takes too long
• The rinse cycle doesn't clean the brewing chamber properly because it uses cold water - you have to take off the brewing chamber and wipe off all the oils before commencing the next brew. Likewise for the metal mesh filter.
• Steep learning curve - trying to get your mind around all the brewing parameters available to you is hard. The obvious ones such as brew temperature, grind size, agitation strength and brew time all behave predictably in terms of the final coffee produced.
• This one is purely cosmetic - from the customer's view point it looks like an industrial juicer! It would be cool if they replaced the white LEDs with flashing disco LEDs instead - just kidding!

I guess you can get around the cleaning issue when busy by having an extra brewing chamber and filter handle which you can clean when they're alternated in use. In fact, I'm surprised each unit doesn't ship with atleast one extra brewing chamber. I wonder how much these would cost?

FINAL THOUGHTS

I like it. Simple to use and anyone can use it as long as it is already dialed in for a coffee. As with any new technology, we simply need to wait and see until more baristas and cafes start using Trifectas and putting it through it's paces to find out if there are any fundamental design flaws. There are no real known issues with this machine yet (à la Slayer Espresso Machine).

I'll definitely be playing more with this machine to understand how it works and how each one of the variables effect the resultant brew. I'd really like to find out some of the recipes people are using out there - please leave a comment below!