UPDATE: Penny University to pop down 30 July.

If you want to see a Londoner famous for his temperature control get a little hot and bothered, just tell James Hoffmann in the most noncommittal tone you can muster you thought one of his featured brews from Square Mile Coffee Roasters was “fine” or “okay”. Better still, tell the 2007 World Barista Champion that, upon reflection, you suppose his coffee shop in London’s Shoreditch, Penny University, “fills a hole”.

“Ambivalence,” says Hoffmann, “is a terrible thing”.

Conversely, saying you positively hate his prized Blackburn Estate coffee from Tanzania is likelier than not to make him smile and get his attention. A puritanical shrine to brewed coffee that deprives its would-be disciples of espresso, milk and sugar, Penny University is meant to provoke. And so Hoffmann will take a “definitely hate” over a “sort of like” any day, even if devotion and love are the rightful responses to this groundbreaking, unplugged, pop-up coffee shop.

Make no mistake, Penny U is a retail space built to showcase and sell coffees, Square Mile coffees to be precise. Fearing some might wrongly judge the quality of the coffees according to the expense of machinery used to brew them, equipment most can’t use at home, Hoffmann and his associate Tim Styles (above left), who runs the shop he helped design, have taken the low-tech route. They’ve eschewed £10,000 brewers in favour of three manual home brewers made by the Japanese glassware company Hario: the V60 paper-filtered pour-over, the TCA-Syphon (vacpot) and the woodneck cloth-filtered pour-over drip pot.

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By providing even water temperature and distribution for the proper measure of coffee grinds, these filter brewers help a barista produce a cup of great clarity and often sweetness that unmuddies the taster’s experience. For me, it’s easier to pick up the aroma and taste of hazelnuts in the Capao Chapada Diamantina from Brazil or red berry nuances in the Blackburn Estate than it would be in an espresso. You almost want to ask Hoffmann where he sourced the hazelnuts and strawberries, which is just the sort of naïve and deceptively simpleminded question he and Penny U baristas Styles and Tobias Cockerill crave.

Everything in the cup, notes Hoffmann, is “from the roasted seeds of coffee cherries. The spectrum of flavours when they’re ground and dissolved in hot water is unbelievable.”

I’m not giving up espresso and neither is Hoffmann.  But there’s no denying that as presented at Penny U the slow quiet of the pour-over and siphon brewing processes constitutes a spiritual retreat from the humming, hissing and clickety-clack of the typically frenetic espresso bar. Seated at the six-stool counter you find yourself possessing both the time and the inclination to ask Tim or Tobias about the coffee they’re methodically brewing for you. The baristas may be answering you but they’re talking to everyone in the shop. Soon you are exchanging thoughts with neighbours to your right and left. Conversation starts with coffee but strays easily away from it. That’s the coffeehouse experience.

You don’t need to spend much time studying Penny U to notice contradictions within its dogma. The coffee is said to be about the ingredient, not the brewer, yet the Hario coffee makers, on sale in the shop, are very nearly objects of worship. The results are said to be attainable at home, yet the care and precision of the accomplished baristas seems paramount – and irreplaceable. It’s a big part of the experience. Furthermore, the no-sugar policy is a great conceit. I rarely drink my coffee with sugar. I understand their wanting and even urging us to discover the character and natural sweetness of their coffees apart from – and uninfluenced by – the flavour of the sugar and, yes, the milk. But isn’t sugar dosage a coffee drinker’s prerogative? Shouldn’t he or she get to decide if a coffee roasted by Square Mile tastes better or worse with sugar ?

Hoffmann has good answers for these challenges and you may have a few of your own. Indeed you can’t very well have a “penny university”, as the estimated 400-500 coffeehouses of 17^th century London were known, without the certainty of a good debate. These haunts were so-nicknamed for the price of a coffee and the education that went with it.

An anonymous verse from that period went:

So great a Universitie, I think there ne’er was any

In which you may a Scholar be, for spending a penny

Penny University – 5 Redchurch Street, London EC 7DJ

It was past the morning rush and my pre-caffeinated eyes coasted halfway through the coffee menu at Blue Bottle Coffee ‘s new Brooklyn roastery before getting stuck onto a road barrier listed only as SG-120. I shifted my gaze into reverse, spotted the familiar signposts espresso and macchiato and tried to make use of all available evidence: If, as I suspected, SG-120 referred in some way to a Japanese video game console, what made it worth an additional 25 or 50 cents?

The barista, bless her heart, did not roll her eyes when I asked her to explain the connection between sega genesis and espresso, nor did she make a joke about it being a tattoo removal cream. The SG-120, she explained, was the model number of the small, delicate Japanese glass in which Blue Bottle served its single-origin mini-lattes. (So I was right: it was Japanese!) Whereas the similarly proportioned coffee made with Retrofit, the house espresso blend, is called a Gibraltar, after the classic Gibraltar glass, those made with beans from a single growing region – in this instance Kintamani, Bali – took the shape and name of a different receptacle.

The SG-120 is printed on the Blue Bottle menu, unlike the unlisted Gibraltar, but it too enjoys a cult status and purposefully obscure origins. Excitedly unpacking a large shipment of brewing equipment and supplies from the highly respected and now wildly popular Japanese glassware company Hario at Blue Bottle’s location in San Francisco’s Mint Plaza (see map), owner James Freeman and his colleagues discovered that the pieces they’d ordered as water glasses were much too small and delicate for that rough-and-tumble purpose. (They probably wanted the SG-300 rock glasses or HPG-300 tumblers). The Hario SG-120s are amongst the world’s lightest, thinnest-lipped, shortest-bottomed shot glasses. They’re perfect for sake.

So what does a coffee bar do with dozens of ethereal sake glasses it can’t use? Freeman observed their 120-millitre (about 4oz) volume was roughly equivalent to that of the Gibraltar glass he was using and thought the SG-120 could be employed to visually differentiate the single-origin Gibraltars from those made from an espresso blend. His wife Caitlin inspected the boxes of Hario glasses and suggested they name the drink after the model number printed on them.

“We couldn’t call it a Gibraltar because it’s not in a Gibraltar,” says Freeman. “That would be wrong.”

An early review of the SG-120, from TheShot, a San Francisco-based coffee blog, was unfavourable: “It felt cheap and almost disposable, and its thinness and materials added no real thermal properties.”

Fair enough. That view, however, overlooks an elegance and simplicity that adds refinement to a quarter-pint latte. When you look at the SG-120 from the side it appears to float. Instead of the liquid taking its shape from its container, your impression is of a glass taking its shape from the swirls of textured milk and espresso within it. Moreover, if the glass is too hot to hold, that reflects a problem with the SG-120’s preparation: The milk should never be that hot.

My affection for the SG-120, especially now that I know what it is and know that it’s safe to drink, is shared by Blue Bottle habitués on both coasts.

“It’s the most stolen item in the shop,” boasts Freeman.

Starbucks was not seeking to buy indie cred, nor was it trying to undermine the bragging rights of small artisan coffee roasters when it acquired the manufacturer of their $11,000 dream machine. I suspect CEO Howard Schultz viewed the Clover single-cup brewer, which he’s already installed in a limited number of Starbucks stores, as one way to restore the passion and theatre of the Starbucks coffee experience (see his memo.) If so, he might have been better served by turning to Japan and the low-tech, high-drama brewer that helped inspire the Clover. It’s called a vacuum pot and home versions retail for under $50 in the US and under £50 in the UK.

Resembling some glass apparatus in a mad scientist’s lab, the vacuum pot (aka coffee siphon) consists of a lower glass globe for the water, an upper glass chamber for the coffee grounds and a filter-topped siphon tube to connect them. As the vac pot heats over a spirit lamp, the water climbs first in temperature and then in its globe, the steam pressure pushing it up through the siphon and into the upper chamber to steep the grounds. When the heat is removed from under the vac pot, the pressure drops and the brewed coffee is sucked back down into the lower chamber, leaving the spent grounds trapped in the filter.  In the old coffee shops of Tokyo and Kyoto it is a great show dramatised by the artistry and, in particular, the stirring technique of the meticulous barista.

The Clover technology borrows from the vac pot brewing process, using a vacuum to ensure complete extraction and no waste. And like the press pot, another low-tech brewer esteemed by coffee aficionados, the Clover allows the barista to control the amount of time the ground coffee stays in contact with the water. It may in fact be the best machine in the world for brewing a single cup of coffee. Unfortunately, the performance has been mechanised, too. The brew chamber is made of steel, which is cold and not transparent. There’s very little theatre.

Then there is the issue of price. Even were Starbucks willing to sell you a Clover, $11,000 is a lot to pay for a coffee brewer. You can purchase a first-rate Hario Syphon brewer in the UK for £68 from Square Mile Coffee Roasters and in the US for $90 from Caffé Vita.