An Urn by any other name would still be an Scourge.

Recently I wrote an article for Coffee Talk Magazine entitled: Big Coffee (August 2008). As far as articles go it certainly wasn't my greatest literary work but I believe it got the point across about newer technologies for brewing large amounts of coffee and holding it without causing detrimental effects by heating it while waiting to serve it.

During the development of the article, I inserted this photo (above) of a nondescript coffee urn and called it-in my opinion-the scourge of coffee. I found the pic on some random, third party website after Googling the word "urn". Now for those of you who either didn't read the article or don't know what I'm talking about, here is an excerpt:

You’ve probably seen them in diners, restaurants and back-of-the-house hotel operations, or anywhere the operators are treating coffee like a condiment. Many manufacturers make them to satisfy an antiquated idea (they’ve been around since the 1940’s) of how to brew coffee and how to keep it hot. They range in capacity from 3 gallons to 10 gallons. The brewing method is relatively simple and effective; the holding method is insidious. The brew style is a drip system where a loaded paper filter (formerly a cloth, reusable filter) is placed in a basket that is suspended over an internal stainless steel container which is surrounded by a water jacket…more on that later. A swivel spray head assembly is positioned over the waiting coffee and the button is pushed.

Urn style coffee brewers have been around for decades and have proven themselves to be adequate machines inasmuch as they were designed to be using the technology and coffee knowledge of the time. They are so common, like garbage cans, you rarely notice them when you see them.

So the point of the article was to show the better technologies available to the folks who wanted to do a better job brewing and serving their coffee in large quantities. Well, forgive me for having and expressing an opinion.

First of all, I don't care about urns. Having worked on them on too many occasions to count I find them cumbersome, hard to fix, heavy as hell and generally a poor brewing option, no matter who makes them. The heated, 1.5 gallon Bunn-o-matic/ Curtis/Fetco and dare I say Grindmaster/AMW systems are fast approaching dinosaur status but the urn systems are by comparison, pre-prehistoric.

Shortly after the issue was published, I received an email from Miles Small, the editor/owner of Coffee Talk, who forwarded an email he had received from the National Sales Manager of Grindmaster Corp. , Mr. Keith Enscoe.

Mr. Enscoe relayed both his and Grindmaster's disappointment with my article because it excluded their take on urns and yet showed a photo of an urn (explained above) which happened to be one they manufactured, who knew?

He went on to explain to Miles how Grindmaster had introduced an urn with new "features and benefits" and this new digital urn was called the 'Barista Series'. Re: "Gourmet" anything.

They were also apparently shocked that I was unaware of this new brewer that was voted best new product at the SCAA show in Minneapolis.

I wasn't unaware, I just didn't care.

In October, 2008 a rebuttal article, such as it was, appeared in Coffee Talk written by somebody at Grindmaster with the tag under the headline being; Commercial coffee urns are the scourge of coffee? To the coffee professional; not!

Pushing past the Wayne's World vernacular, the writer doesn't refute any point I made in my article but jumps headlong into a salesman's feature and benefits pitch that could have been in any ad and paid for. However, this wasn't the case.

Now I don't begrudge Miles trying to placate an apparently angry manufacturer that thinks he been intentionally maligned by an article that appeared in his magazine, heck, they might even buy ad space which is what they should be doing anyway. I do have a problem with letting a manufacturer bully its way into gaining a free portion of trade magazine ad space to essentially advertise its product when the premise was responding to a supposed offense.

Once again, my article was focused on brewing large amounts of coffee with newer technologies.

The "features and benefits"Grindmaster has put on their revamped urn are digital controls, pulse-brew, a coffee ready alarm, a timer, interchangeable brew orifices, air agitation, variable brew temperature, Low temp/no brew and digital coffee level sensors.

The problem is, these are not new technologies. Maybe new to the brain trust of Grindmaster and probably new on an urn, but certainly not new to the brewing industry.

To wit, digital controls on coffee brewers started in the mid nineties with Bunn's introduction of the Thermo-fresh system. Around the same time, interchangeable brew orifices were available on the Fetco 70 series brewers. Coffee ready alarms and timers evolved with the new wave of digital gadgets appearing on brewers again in the mid to late nineties as well as air agitation and variable brew temperature control. Fetco's Extractor series introduced pulse brewing, low temp/no brew and digital coffee level sensors in 2000.

In 2008 Grindmaster finally got around to putting these advances on an urn. Man, that's forward thinking.

The tag line really explains it all to me. Commercial coffee urns... . That's exactly the point. Grindmaster has a viable market out there. It's just happens to be the commercial coffee market. Those operators that don't really care what their coffee tastes like just as long as it's hot and black and in a gas station. I say explore and develop that market to its fullest extent and embrace who you are. Simply installing 8+ year old technology on a 40 year old chassis and riveting a label that misappropriates the term Barista on it doesn't make your product cutting edge, new or better, just predictable.