Ground Control Cyclops Commercial Coffee Brewer 2018

Designers: Eric Nichols and John McFaul, Y Studios, LLC., San Francisco, California, USA
Manufacturer: Voga Coffee, Inc., San Francisco, California, USA

Ground Control is a large-scale coffee brewer designed for use in coffee shops and restaurants.  It is the first new way to brew coffee in large volumes since automated drip brewers were introduced in 1954. Winner of the 2018 Specialty Coffee Association Best New Product Award for Commercial Equipment, Ground Control consistently produces exceptional coffee and tea at commercial scale.  Ground Control powers the coffee programs of top cafes and restaurants worldwide, including Chez Panisse in Berkeley, CA.  Helen Russell, CEO of Equator Coffees and Teas, exclusive provider of coffee to the French Laundry and Per Se, shares “The best cup of coffee that I have ever had was brewed on Ground Control.”

Unlike espresso machines, which have been design forward for over 100 years, the batch coffee brewing category has unfortunately been viewed as an industrial product and it looks the part. Ground Control innovated by rethinking the entire process from the ground up, from the brewing technology through to the design.

Technology:

Instead of performing a single extraction like a French Press, Ground Control utilizes a patented vacuum technology to extract from the same coffee grounds multiple times to produce multiple layers of blended flavors. The result is a fundamentally less bitter, sweeter cup of coffee that uses 20% less coffee than other brewers, resulting in a more environmentally friendly brewing process.

Design:

The fundamental change in the brewing process also allows the addition of a double-walled glass orb on the top of the Ground Control that not only provides a means for the barista to have a quick visual check while attending to other tasks, it also showcases the brewing process to the café customers.

Ground Control is the only large-scale coffee brewer to offer a modern, high-resolution touch-screen interface.  Powered by the Android operating system, Ground Control’s touchscreen synchronizes with the system via Bluetooth, and is able to connect to the internet via Wi-Fi to share usage data over the cloud.

One of Ground Control’s most prized features is its ability to allow baristas to easily and intuitively hone in brewing recipes that allow coffees to exhibit their ideal characteristics.  Although many people believe that the quality of coffee beans is the key factor in ensuring a quality cup of coffee, the vast majority of commercially available coffee is actually ruined at the brewing stage, where poor brewing parameters using relatively primitive brewing equipment results in bitter, burnt coffee.

With drip brewers, creating the perfect recipe often requires hours of iteration, trying to hit on the right combination of grind size, brew temperature, coffee weight, and brew time.  Small changes can lead to large and unexpected results.  Ground Control, on the other hand, relies on an entirely different brewing paradigm, organized around blending three separate brews of the same coffee grinds; producing exceptional coffee is much more straightforward.  It is also trivial to extract a much wider and more precise variety of flavors, producing cups of exceptional coffee that were once only possible using much more expensive, labor intensive, and less consistent pour-over coffee.