“Humans are good at a lot of things, like producing objects of great taste and beauty. But consistency is not one of them. In fact, growing concerns about inconsistency and badly brewed coffee, engendered by manual brewing techniques—particularly in busy shops, where harried baristas often can’t take the necessary care to properly brew each cup—are the reason even some of the most elite shops have begun, over the past couple of years, to reconsider fully analog brewing. The renewed interest in consistency has resulted in the emergence of multi-thousand-dollar hot-water dispensers like Marco’s Über Boiler, which essentially dispense a given amount of water at a particular temperature for a certain amount of time, along with flashy, expensive (and, frankly, mediocre) new automated machines, like the fifteen-thousand-dollar Alpha Dominche Steampunk, which brews up to four cups of coffee simultaneously. Some shops, like Portland’s Heart Coffee, are returning to automated batch brewing, albeit highly tuned by humans, to achieve more consistency.”

– http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2013/11/better-brewing-through-technology.html