The way that we drink coffee has been rapidly changing over the past few years. Coffee has been going through a renaissance as new and different ways of consuming this favorite drink have continued to develop. Cold-brew and pour-over coffee, along with matcha lattes and other various flavors have been changing the coffee drinking game.

New Mexico is at the forefront of this renaissance as roasters and coffee shops continue to pop-up, adding their own twists to coffee consumption. Jakub Svec, of Santa Fe, is helping bring the coffee revolution into peoples homes and making pour-over coffee accessible to everyone. Jakub has created PERK, a fully automated coffee machine that replicates the pour-over method.

PERK won the BizMix 2016 Grand Prize for bringing the Third Wave Coffee movement to the home coffee lover. This movement treats coffee as something that should be enjoyed like a nice wine or a craft beer, appreciating the subtle flavors of coffee, varying from region to different varietal notes. The pour-over method is considered to be one of the best ways of enjoying coffee as it helps to bring out the subtle flavors in different roasts. The “Third Wave,” began in the early 2000s and focuses on delivering coffee so bright, sweet and fruity that it no longer needs cream or sugar. Third Wave purveyors focus on precision in every step of the coffee production process, from sourcing to roasting, but the final step in the process, brewing, has remained the most difficult. PERK aims to make the brewing process accessible to everyone, instead of solely to trained baristas.

While purveyors of Third Wave coffee focus on the nuances of their more lightly-roasted beans, recapturing the quality of their brews outside a coffee shop is notoriously difficult. Jakub developed PERK using Third Wave coffee roaster Iconik Coffee as a test facility, the idea being that the machine would then allow people to take home a roaster’s coffee and enjoy it to its fullest without training and hassle.

Jakub recently completed a demo tour of PERK across the United States, traveling from New Mexico to Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Colorado, and Texas testing his machine at Third Wave coffee shops across the west to make sure it stacked up against their manual methods. And it did.

After months of development and testing, Jakub is launching an international Kickstarter campaign for PERK on March 15, 2017 offering the machine for under $299.

www.perkbrew.com

 

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