My favorite brewing method is a vac pot. You're pretty much guaranteed to get the perfect brewing temperature every time, and it's an amazing thing to watch, and the results are also amazing. Plus, you know, glass is awesome. No plastic touching the coffee. It makes a great cup. I much prefer the cloth filters to using a glass rod. If I wanted a thicker cup like the glass rod produces, I'd just use my french press instead.
The problem, of course, is inconvenience. You really need to pre-heat the water before you put it in the vac pot, otherwise it takes too long. So that's a bit annoying. Then, clean up afterwards is nowhere near as convenient as just throwing a paper filter full of spent grinds away! You need a strainer to pour the water and grinds through, to catch the grinds and throw them away in the trash, or compost or wherever. And then you still end up with a lot of grinds in the sink. And you need to handle the cloth filter with some care, especially if you use it a lot. Over at
www.coffeegeek.com you can find some good tips, but basically, you rinse it out and put it in a jar of cold water in the fridge, and then periodically clean it with some sort of active oxygen cleaner. I have it, but I can't remember the name. Hmmm.
Anyway, the point is that for every day brewing, a vac pot is hard core, and just too much work.
So, 99 percent of the time, I use my Technivorm. I have the Clement Design version with the glass carafe. I've never liked the insulated carafe, myself. I figure that if I don't drink it within minutes after the end of brewing, what does it matter anyway?
I roast my own green beans from sweetmarias, using a hot air pop corn popper. I've used other methods, seen other roasters, including an iRoast, and a Fresh Roast. I've had a first-hand tour of gimme coffee's roaster here in Ithaca NY. John Gant is their roast master. They have a Sievets fluid bed roaster that takes 37 lbs of green in, if I remember correctly. And I've had some seriously good coffee, freshly roasted, by people who know what they're doing. And, while it's obviously better to have better equipment, and more control, in my experience, the main thing is just to roast it fresh in your own home. My hot air pop corn popper does a pretty good job. If it didn't, I would have bought a better roaster by now! When it dies, and I have an excuse to give my wife (but, honey, my old roaster died. I really need an Ambex mini-Roaster!) then I'll buy a "real" roaster, but until then, it's doing a fantastic job. I have a second hot air popcorn popper--a West Bend "The Poppery"--that I modded so that I can switch the heat on and off but still have the fan, and I use it purely to cool the beans once they reach the proper degree of roast. I also have a thermometer installed in my roaster, but I mostly go by the color, sound, and smoke smell, in any case.
After roasting and resting, the coffee gets ground in a Zassenhaus knee mill, which does the job, but isn't all that great. I'd really love to have a Mazer burr mill, and if I had $600 burning a hole in my pocket, I'd order one tomorrow, without any hesitation, but it does a good enough job for my paper filters in my Technivorm. It really falls down a bit for french press or vac pot brewing, though. The grind just isn't even enough. Not compared to a Mazer.
Anyway, the main thing to understand about coffee, which isn't really well known, is that it is a lot more like bread, than it is like tea. Tea leaves can sit around for a year and still be quite good, still make a great cup. But, you'd never think that two week old bread would be as good as bread fresh out of the oven, right? Same goes for coffee. A week after roasting, and you've really lost a lot of quality. It's still good, it's just nowhere near as good as it was a day or two after roasting. And of course, you should grind right before brewing. Pre-ground, pre-roasted coffee is the worst case scenario, but is, sadly, the rule.
Oh, and if you use milk or cream, put it in the cup first, then add the coffee. It makes a much better cup of coffee, believe it or not!
As gswitter mentioned above, the quality of the resultant "brew" degrades quickly over a shart amount of time. I would consider this method for iced coffee perhaps, but I find properly brewed using the Aeropress to produce a product more true to the aroma of freshly ground coffee.
