The Story of (Coffee) Steampunk
Meet Alpha Dominche — Exclusive Sponsor of Standart Issue 5
By Liz Clayton, originally published in Standart Issue 5.
They were always an unusual coffee company. Coming seemingly from out of nowhere — or at least, Salt Lake City, Utah — and with a mouthful of a name, Alpha Dominche landed their spaceship-chic siphon-style coffee brewer, the Steampunk, on the industry’s doorstep in 2012.
‘I’ve seen other startups fail from not having the right people in place,’ he told me in a telephone interview from across Brooklyn. ‘I think you have business people who make business, and designers who design.’
Many of us didn’t know quite what to make of it. From its hulking design (how were we supposed to fit this on a bar in a place like New York City?) to its inscrutable steam-agitation technology to its five-figure price tag, the brewer — which looked sort of like an espresso machine with a really modern pipe organ on top of it — made quite a first impression. Four years later, the company would announce its second product: the world’s first batch brewer aimed at making coffee with as much visual appeal as flavour. The Sight brewer, as it’s called, would attempt to bring performative, customer-wowing coffee brewing to the multiple-cup landscape much in the way the Steampunk had done for by-the-cup coffee and tea.
Alpha Dominche’s path from Steampunk to Sight would not be best described as a straight line. The company endured a period of awkward startup years as the earliest Steampunk parts, previously untested by the demands of true coffeehouse environments, began to reveal their mechanical weaknesses, and customer service fought to catch up with customer need. For some who’d invested in the expensive brewer and did not have technical prowess, the growing pains of managing a new and not widely known machine were difficult. The company’s headquarters, all the way out in Salt Lake City — not quite a specialty coffee capital — was perhaps not always as ready-to-hand with support as some shop owners would have liked. Even the Steampunk’s basic ergonomics could be a challenge to baristas. The product struggled as, over time, units slowly shifted from gleaming prominence on the front of café bars and even Whole Foods grocery stores to back-room storage.
Then in a surprise move in 2014, Alpha Dominche’s board of directors voted to remove the Steampunk’s inventor, Khristian Bombeck, from the company (with him, Bombeck would take the intercap spelling of ‘SteamPunk’, as well). The company recommitted its efforts towards service and support of its machines, and in 2015, announced the relocation of its headquarters — though not its entire operations — from Utah to New York City. Their new CEO and figurehead would be Danish-born Thomas Perez, former head of North and South America operations for Bodum, and a coffee equipment veteran of more than a decade. Perez would anchor the decision to move the company’s business side to New York City, which he already called home, and where the company plans to open a combined café and showroom — or Extraction Lab, as they call it — in spring 2017.
Perez embraced the challenge to run with the Steampunk and the Alpha Dominche brand, and take them from a customer-confidence-shaken startup into a viable, leading equipment developer. ‘I’ve seen other startups fail from not having the right people in place,’ he told me in a telephone interview from across Brooklyn. ‘I think you have business people who make business, and designers who design.’
What is That You’re Doing?
And if there was ever a machine that jolted the brewing-design landscape wide awake, it was the Steampunk. From its first iterations to today’s SP2, SP4, and under-counter-boiler models, the brewer’s visual and technological intrigue have always set it outside the pack. It showed up as an attention-getter, eagerly first-tested in elite cafés and coffee labs from Oakland to New York, and eliciting conversations everywhere it went.
‘It is a totally different customer experience,’ said Will Riggs, general manager of Davis Street Espresso, a Dallas, Texas café that’s worked with Steampunk since its early days (the shop has a much upgraded model №5).
‘Our baristas can literally hit a button that we’re confident is going to do what we want, and continue to be able to talk with the customer, and not have to stand there sort of fake listening like when you’re pouring a Chemex or an AeroPress,’ said Riggs about the brewer’s customisable, programmable technology. Davis Street sits alongside its sister company, Oak Cliff Coffee Roasters, and was eager to present its coffees via unique and striking methods when it opened its café doors in 2013 (to give you some idea, the Steampunk sits alongside a Kees Van Der Westen Spirit espresso machine and a Bosco lever espresso machine from Italy).
Davis Street’s primary goal is to show off what they’re putting all their time into roasting and sourcing. According to Riggs, ‘It is so much more important that it also gets equally well-executed in how the coffee is made, that it is made well. From the café side, we’re able to have even better customer service, plus there’s this really cool thing to look at and it lets the customer see a little more of what’s going on with brewed coffee,’ he explains. ‘Everybody’s used to seeing espresso get made, but even with a Chemex, you’re just looking at the top, you’re not seeing what that coffee’s doing. It’s a new conversation that wasn’t ever available to customers or even baristas to have with the customers, until the Steampunk.’
Andrea Allen, co-owner of Fayetteville, Arkansas roaster Onyx Coffee, also points to the Steampunk’s striking display as one of its biggest assets.
‘It’s very impressive to customers, it’s beautiful like a showpiece,’ said Allen. ‘For us, we’re all about trying to engage our customers to chat with them about what coffee is and what brewing in different ways can do. If we start using it for one customer, we always have a couple of people walk up and ask, “What are you doing?” and we can talk about the coffee that we’re using and also the method.’
Inspired by the underlying principles of siphon brewing, the Steampunk brews coffee — and can also be programmed for tea — by the cup, one brew at a time in each of the machine’s transparent chambers, called brewing crucibles. Water in the lower chamber is heated with steam, and forced upwards to saturate the coffee for initial bloom and full-immersion cycles. Steam-driven agitation bursts ensure proper, full saturation of the coffee grounds, and a vacuum-draw-down completes the brew. Almost every parameter (temperature, time, agitation, and so on) along the way is user-programmable, with recipes able to be saved and shared via digital controls. The result, dialled in correctly, is a repeatable, elegant, tech-savvy solution to producing full-immersion brews with cleanliness and depth of flavour.
For roasters who wholesale, their ability to ensure the quality preparation of their coffee across distance is one of Steampunk’s most alluring benefits, hearkening back to the old ideals of the Clover single-cup brewer and its CloverNet cloud network.
‘There’s [a Steampunk] in Little Rock, and we can profile our coffee that they’ll be using in it at the shop, and then send or publish the recipe on the software, where they can pull it up,’ said Allen on the joys of being able to dial in a coffee for someone else 200 miles away. ‘For a wholesaler or roaster, you always want your coffee to taste good, but you don’t always have control over that. To suggest a recipe is really cool and to know if you have the same brewing apparatus that if you plug that in, it will do it, that’s really cool.’
Making Batch Beautiful
It was from the Steampunk’s fundamentals — reproducible results, easily attenuated, shareable recipes, and, of course, a theatrical flourish — that the Sight brewer was conceived.
‘We had the idea for the batch brewer for a long time, and we knew there was something to be changed in that market,’ Perez said. ‘So when we sat down in January we said okay, what can we do? With Steampunk people loved the look of it. We said, let’s build on that design. Adam [Mangold] and Tymer [Tilton] came up with that design and we said okay, let’s do it.’
Mangold, Alpha Dominche’s lead engineer, and Tilton, the company’s principal designer, took what they’d learned from Steampunk and moved — swiftly — forward on a prototype of the Sight to be revealed at the April, 2016 Specialty Coffee Association of America conference in Atlanta, Georgia. The brewer is at least as bulky as a Steampunk, but with a vertical, hourglass motif and a vision to elevate the now-respected-again batch brewing format into a visual experience as well as a practical way to brew good — even great — coffee.
This time, the console’s taken off the machine itself, and is operated by an external app (that, like the Steampunk, can store and share recipes). Total brew time is visualised as a wheel on the interface, and the operator can control all stages of it from pre-infusion to infusion to pulses. Dose the top chamber with coffee, hit start, and the serving carafe placed at bottom of the Sight levitates upward — yes, you heard me — joining with the top carafe to form a seal via a spring-loaded valve between the two. To brew a full gallon output takes the Sight approximately six to eight minutes, with the coffee’s whole journey choreographed by illumination from beneath the brewer.
‘We want to be around for a long time, and we need to establish that credibility and trust in all the people who were trusting in us from the beginning.’
The Sight, like the Steampunk, ‘gives a nod to the siphon process,’ says Tilton, who is quick to admit the company is enamoured of the theatre that brewing can be. Commercially, the goal for the Sight is less about building a better mousetrap than it is building a much, much more beautiful one — the kind of coffee-making mousetrap you’d be proud to display on your front bar.
Perez is hopeful that the Sight can be ready to market by the first quarter of 2017. It will retail for $5,000 with a few colour options — grey, black, white — and the possibility of customisations. He’s optimistic about the brewer, but proceeding with enthusiastic caution on the heels of what happened with Steampunk.
‘I’ve seen first-hand, obviously, what it means when you bring out a very cool coffee machine and it doesn’t work. You get angry customers out there. We want people to know that we’re very customer focused and it’s something that has our utmost attention. We want to be around for a long time, and we need to establish that credibility and trust in all the people who were trusting in us from the beginning.’
Riggs and Davis Street stand among those, and have only seen the speed bumps as a learning experience. ‘I know a lot of people have ditched it,’ said Riggs of the Steampunk, ‘which is unfortunate because I think it’s a killer machine.’
‘Our customers love it, I can’t imagine what else we would do,’ he continued.
‘I didn’t want to put a slow bar on the bar. People like what we have going on. Some of the issues that we have had [with Steampunk] have been worth having, knowing that we’re sort of a part of this growing company, this
growing product, and kind of hoping for the best for it.’
For Thomas, the excitement of Alpha Dominche being innovators and still slight outsiders in the coffee equipment landscape is part of the thrill in his work.
‘It’s extremely funny, and challenging, and I love every day, seven days a week,’ Perez said. ‘Even though there’s so much out there and there’s so much history, there’s also so much space to invent and do things differently. I think the whole community is definitely maturing from what it was five to ten years ago. People expect more, especially from a company like us now. We have to push ourselves and when you bring some new stuff out it has to really have some novelty; it really has to be a game changer.
‘I love that challenge, and how much we have to push ourselves to get there.’
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