CoffeeGeek Holiday Gift List 2019 – Under $40

Every year it’s a mission to try and find you a self contained siphon coffee maker that’s under $40, to present on this Holiday Gift List, because we at CoffeeGeek feel a coffee siphon is one of the best and most unique gifts you can give to the coffee lover in your life.

We almost didn’t make it last year – nothing on Amazon, nothing on the popular coffee equipment retailer sites. We ended up listing a highly rated Alibaba vendor who sold $35 units including shipping to the USA. A bit sketch.

This year, thankfully, there’s a few choices on Amazon under $40. We even found a 5 cup model for just $35, and it’s presented here.

All siphons pretty much work the same, and as long as the glass is proper safety glass (this one is), and it comes with the proper filters and alcohol burners and designs, they’re all going to operate almost exactly the same.

We haven’t been able to test his particular model (it’s essentially a knock off of a Hario Technica, which in itself is a knockoff of siphon designs from the 1920s), but it’s still presented here to give you an option for a fantastic Christmas gift for the coffee lover in your life. Siphon coffee is the best brewing method for coffee, outside of espresso, and this unit will let you brew up 500+ml of a fantastic cup.

Product Link – USA (Amazon)

An Espro Press  for $35! And it’s possibly their best one ever for the versatility!

This is yet another Kickstarted project by the Espro guys, and probably more work went into this press pot of theirs than any other product they’ve designed. They had several goals: make it light, make it attractive, make it useful, make it efficient, make sure it retains heat, and make it inexpensive.

They hit all the goals. This is a 10oz brewer with a new design of Espro’s double walled press filter. It’s still a vacuum insulated double wall steel construction means it’s lightweight but keeps the heat in for hours. It’s also convertible between a normal insulated tumbler for your hot beverages (fully leakproof too), to doing duty as a coffee brewer with it’s innovative press double-mesh filter, and one that more effectively seals the ground coffee at the bottom after brewing, preventing over extraction.

How they did this for $35 USD is a mystery to me. Fill the thing with blazing hot water, put some coarse ground coffee in a baggie, head out on your winter hike, and midway through, add the coffee to the water, wait 3 minutes, press, and voila, you have a brewed cup out in the wilderness, and you can screw the lid down for no leaks or mess. all in a nice sleek project with fantastic finishes. Great product.

They even have an optional tea filter to turn this into an on-the-go tea filter!

Product Link – USA (1st in Coffee)
Product Link – Canada (Espro Webstore, $42 CAD, 7 colours !!! available)

We’re big fans of permanent, steel filters for coffee siphon brewers. Easier to clean than cloth, better taste in the cup compared to paper, steel mesh is the way to go.

This is a new permanent filter designed to fit most siphon coffee brewers. It’s from Digou (who also make a range of automatic siphon brewers) and it’s available in two colours – clear, and brown. The design is pretty cool – there’s a silicone gasket for sealing the siphon tube – and this design is much better than other permanent filter options out there which sometimes let stray grinds make it into the brewed coffee.

The other cool thing about this filter is that you can disassemble it for a deep super cleaning if you like. We’ve been using one in our main siphon for several months now, and absolutely love it. A great gift for the siphon lover in your life!

Product Link – USA (Amazon)
Product Link – Canada (Amazon, $25)

Want to get into this whole manual pourover coffee thing, but don’t really want to break the bank? Then look to the company that invented the paper filter brewing method: Melitta. They now offer a nicely designed glass carafe and filter assembly for making manual pourover coffee and it only costs $13!

In fact, we can’t quite figure out the lack of love for Melitta in the specialty coffee community; so much attention paid to $100 pourover systems from Japanese and other Asian sources, yet Melitta is all but ignored by the community. It’s a shame, because Melitta is the grandmother of the pourover world, doing it longer, and better, than anyone else.

This kit includes almost everything to get you started, except for the coffee and grinder. It comes with a BPA free plastic cone drip brewer, the 6 cup glass carafe and lid, a coffee scoop, and even 5 filters to get you started. You decide the hot water temperature, you decide the pour pattern, and you decide the dwell time.

This pourover system uses Melitta’s standard #4 filters, which means you have more options here, including using bamboo paper filters (our fave at CoffeeGeek), or even buying an aftermarket permanent filter. It’s a great way to get into pourover coffee at a stocking stuffer price.

Product Link – USA (Amazon)

Breakthrough Pricing! In years past, the fantastic Hario Cloth Dripper was over $50, precluding it from our holiday gift lists. This year it’s priced at $39. Get in on one of the best ways to brew pour over coffee – the cloth drip method!

Plus the Hario Cloth Drip Pot Brewer looks fantastic. The fit and finish of it quite first rate, with lots of nice wood bits and even a wood handle for the cloth holder.

They come in two sizes, and in some ways, mimic the look of the Chemex, including a formed wood collar around the middle of a glass beaker, and a leather cord keeping the two halves of the collar in place. But what makes this different is the filter itself: the Hario Drip Pot uses a cloth filter to do its brewing.

For me, the taste from using a cloth filter (as long as it is absolutely clean) is many times better than paper. And unlike permanent filters like the Kone, there’s absolutely no sediment or grit – you just get pure liquid coffee with all the flavour because essential oils from the beans make it through the cloth. Just keep it clean between uses! The one we’re listing is the 5 cup model; the 2 cup model’s even cheaper!

Product Link – USA (Amazon)
Product Link – Canada (Amazon Canada, $48)

Want to give the coffee lover in your life one of the most unique coffee mugs ever designed?

Check out the Joey Mug. It’s double walled porcelain (to help keep the heat in, and keep your fingers cool) with an eye catching and hefty copper base to keep things stable and looking super sweet.

Available in two colours (black or white) both with a copper base, this is easily one of the best looking coffee mugs we’ve seen in a long time. The full capacity is 235ml (8 ounces) which makes it ideal for cappuccinos, americanos and traditional lattes. You make the best coffee, ever, so why not present it in a uniquely beautiful and functional cup!

Product Link – USA (Clive Coffee]

On the road, and tired of trying to find an easy solution for heating up your water for mobile coffee and espresso? Bonavita has a solution for that, and it’s $30 this year.

The Bonavita Travel kettle works super fast and is built to handle the rigors of travel. The cord isn’t removable (that’s a bummer) but is durable and easily wraps around the kettle. What’s most important is, the interior is all metal, and the only plastic to touch the water is the lid (which you can remove before pouring, if you don’t want any plastic to touch your water). It’s 900W element heats very fast, with an auto-shutoff sensor after the water is boiling. While travelling you can fit your filters inside and even an aeropress (with the top removed from the kettle).

At $30, this is the least expensive steel interior travel kettle available today.

Product Link (1st Line)

This is an amazing little brewer. We loved it when we reviewed it and since then, we bought several of them to give away as gifts this Christmas. And it’s $3 cheaper than last year!

This is OXO’s little single cup pour over device. It’s automated, in a way. Go read our full review on it (linked above) but in brief, they designed it so you get about a 3 to 4 minute brewing time thanks to precisely engineered dripper holes that saturate your bed of coffee. The device further aids the extraction by restricting the flow (somewhat) from the filter area to the cup.

Though this is essentially a manual coffee brewer, it’s kind of a “set and forget” brewer that’s near foolproof. It’s absolutely ideal for small spaces, for travel, and for the office, where you can take a pass on the office K-Cup environmental disaster, and brew an exquisite cup right at your desk, hands free. Highly recommended!

Product Link – USA (Amazon)
Product Link – Canada (Amazon, $20 CAD)

A very controllable way to brew coffee, introduced by Bonavita, and one we’ve published a good how to on (check it out). It’s also $15 cheaper than the last time we featured it!

Bonavita took the best from other immersion / flow through drippers out there, and porcelain-ized it all up. It’s basically a Hario V60 meeting a Clever dripper. But it’s even more than that.

It includes a lid for retaining heat while you steep your coffee. It also has an easy-to-slide release for letting the coffee flow through. It uses standard #4 filters, including many permanent filters. Bonavita also designs stands for this brewer, which can be found here.

This is a great brewer that gives you the best of both worlds – immersion brewing and flow through drip filter brewing.

And a super bonus for Canadians this year: we’ve found it way, way cheaper in Canada compared to the US price!

Product Link – USA (Amazon)
Product Link – Canada (Amazon, $30CAD)

The Aeropress is ubiquitous. But those in the know, know this: the paper filters that come with the device are not the way to get the best possible extraction from the device. A permanent filter, precisely engineered for the Aeropress and for filtering out fines, is.

And while there are several solutions on the market, our favourite at CoffeeGeek is the Kohi Labs ultra micro mesh filter for Aeropress. We use it every day. So much so, we even have one branded to our own logo! (no, not for sale).

Kohi Labs calls their filter material “metal fabric” which is apt. It’s an impossibly tight weave of food grade stainless steel, that, with care, will last for years. Using it, you get brighter, more accurate tastes from your coffee because the essential oils, blocked by paper filters, make it through to the cup using this. It’s easy to clean and made in the USA.

If someone in your life is an Aeropress fan, this is the perfect gift for them.

Product Link – USA (Kohi Labs)

The iconic shape of what a press pot is supposed to look like is realised in the Bodum Chambord press pot. The design, originally created by a company called Mellior back in the 1920s, was bought by the Bodum Company in the 1960s. Bodum has been producing (and subtly improving) the Chambord press pot design ever since.

The most recent incarnations of the Chambord feature a new collar on the top lid for better securing in the press, and a slightly revised filter. It still retains it’s classic, legendary look. The Chambord is an iconic, classic design for the press pot. CoffeeGeek uses 1.5l versions of the Chambord in the Lab for their community coffee samplings (those are $70 a pop!) This is the traditional press pot coffee brewer design, a true icon, as much as Chemex is for pourover.

This year, we’re featuring the 4 cup model, which has a nice squat design that seems to brew coffee even better than the tall and narrow 3 cup models.

Product Link – USA (Amazon)

This device – the Scandinavians love it (they hold the Aeropress World Championships) – and the pros in the US and Canada are huge fans too. There’s even coffee bars that use Aeropresses almost exclusively for non-espresso coffee. We have our own love-hate relationship at CoffeeGeek with the Aeropress. We love using it. We love that you can “hack” it to brew different ways. We love how it can produce a beautiful cup of coffee in under a minute.

There are so many different ways to brew with the Aeropress, it’s become it’s own industry in a way.
Also, using different ratios of ground coffee to water would probably be to your benefit. There’s plenty of sites out there showing how to get the most out of the Aeropress (Brewmethods lists a dozen choices). Regardless of how the product is pushed, we can say this: it makes damned fine coffee and it’s cheap!

Product Link – USA (1st Line)
Product Link – Canada (Amazon, $40)

For many years, we’ve listed in our Holiday Gift Lists the $300+ full “Nez du Cafe” coffee training system that the SCAA sold, but this year, we found a smaller, compact kit that contains six 5ml vials of intense aroma smells to help you identify and catalog interesting coffee aromas.

The kit includes Each Aroma kit contains 6- 5ml.vials of the following coffee tasting aromas: for vegetal notes, Garden Peas. For fruity notes, Blackcurrant Bud. For animal notes, Butter. For toasty notes, Caramel, Roasted Peanuts, and Roasted Coffee.

While this is not the full 36 aromas pro kit, it’s a great way to help learn better ways to analyse and appreciate some of the world’s finest coffees.

Product Link – Wine Aromas (US)

If you want a complete Chemex coffee service package for your home, these items must be part of it – Chemex recently introduced their handblown creamer and sugar matching set for all Chemex coffee makers.

Made from borosilicate glass, each one of these has their own unique look and shape due to its handmade nature. Cream on the bottom, sugar up top, and they nestle together perfectly. Add this to your Chemex brewer and Chemex glass kettle, and no one will mistake you for not being a complete pourover coffee Chemex nerd!

Availability on these is hit and miss, but fortunately in time for Christmas, Chemex has a number in stock, and at the web’s cheapest price.

Product Link (Chemex Store)

Here’s a variety of coffee books we heartily endorse and recommend – every single one of these is in the CoffeeGeek Library. Click the images to get to the book on Amazon. All the books are priced below $35, with some as low as $5!

Informative. Detailed. Richly done. Perfect for your breakfast nook, seating den, library, or home coffee lab. It’s the Compendious Coffee Chart in a big 24″x18″ format, ready for framing!

How many brewing methods can you spot here? Handmade & signed by artist coffee chart. Perfect for that person in your life who proudly wants flaunt their appreciation of java making techniques, and tastefully done to suit any decor, but especially a coffee focused part of your home!

Product Link (Etsy)