Syphon Latte

Pouring milk into the lower bowl of the Syphon brewer

Is it possible to brew a latte on the Hario Syphon brewer, using milk instead of water?? Well, I spotted a video recorded for some days ago, trying out this experiment and it actually worked. This particular video encourage me to retry the experiment and hopefully I will be able to produce a recommendable latte.

Milk poured at the two cup level

I filled the lower bowl of the Hario to the two cup mark with cold milk; therefore will be adding the amount of two Hario included measuring spoon of ground coffee. The general idea with this Syphon latte is to skip the part of heating the milk aside of the actual coffee brewing and combining them into one step.

The complete set-up, with milk in the lower bowl and ground coffee in the upper

The Syphon set-up will be; poured milk into the lower bowl and ground coffee into the upper bowl. The most interesting part about this experiment will be if the milk can boil and raise enough pressure to enter the upper bowl and merge with the ground coffee, without getting burnt. If the milk burns, it will strongly affect the flavor by adding the notes of rice pudding, which isn't preferred in a cafe latte.

The merging of milk and ground coffee in the upper bowl

The overall impression of the milk experiment was that it was quite slow to expand to the upper bowl compared to the normal procedure with water. It took about six minutes before the milk even showed signs of expansion, and therefore an extremely slow process when merging with the ground coffee. I was expecting a quick expansion to the upper bowl, because milk suddenly expands when exposed to heat, but not in this experiment. The merging between the milk and ground coffee worked just like when using water and was therefore very easy to control and brew. After pouring the final brewed cafe latte into a glass, the lower bowl showed some indications of burnet milk in the bottom, leaving that this method isn't the best way to brew cafe latte.

The final brewed result; latte brewed on a Syphon brewer

So what did I think? Well, I wouldn´t repeat the Syphon as a brewing equipment for producing cafe lattes, but when talking flavors the merging of milk and ground coffee did produce another deep flavor fusion. When drinking a normal cafe latte the heated milk is applied to the brewed coffee; therefore the added milk is applying creaminess and weakens the coffee flavors a bit, but when using the milk as the extraction fluid the flavors are intact and therefore non-weakend. There were some bits of the burnt milk, so the idea of producing a cafe latte by heating milk and merging it with coffee ground is perfect, but not using this equipment.

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// Hendrup