About five years ago, Tony Dodd read an article about all the crud that accumulates in the water tanks of popular at-home coffee brewers.
Disgusted, Dodd immediately packed up all the brewers in his house outside of Austin, Texas, and threw them all in the garbage.
Dodd’s brewer-destruction rampage started him on the path to develop a new at-home coffee cold brewer. The self-described “tinkerer” officially formed NoAir Coffee in 2021, along with his wife, Mary Dodd, and daughter, Virginia Dodd. In mid-April, the company snagged its first patent and ended a successful crowdfunding run on Kickstarter.
“When I went on that rampage and threw (the brewers) all out, that forced me to become a bit of a coffee connoisseur,” Tony Dodd said at his home in Ozark, Missouri, where NoAir is based. “After doing more research, I realized… there’s a whole world of flavor and possibilities that are there with coffee.”
“It’s not just a morning wake-up drug, you can truly enjoy this.”
After tinkering with nearly all forms of coffee brewers, Dodd set out to make his own when he realized there was no such product on the market, he said.
There’s a few characteristics that make NoAir’s system unique. Most importantly, it fully submerses the coffee grounds in water in a state of vacuum for the entirety of the brewing process. The result is a smooth, cold coffee without the stale aftertaste normally associated with cold brew, Dodd said.
The long road to discovering the NoAir cold brew coffee method
After his binge of clearing coffee brewers, Dodd set out on a period of discovery trying nearly every system of brewing coffee out there. He found something wrong at every turn.
A French Press turned out wonderful, rich flavor, but was delicate and the glass vessel shattered in Dodd’s sink within a few months. Pour overs were easy enough, but Dodd struggled to consistently get a good cup of coffee. He found it difficult to replicate the process to repeatedly get a decent-tasting cup of joe.
“I couldn’t get a good cup of coffee twice in a row,” Dodd said.
At the same time he was experimenting with different hot brewing methods, Dodd started to develop stomach issues, which led him to cold brew.
“My stomach was getting a little overwhelmed with the acid or bitterness in coffee,” Dodd said. “So that’s why I went to the cold brew, but I hated the fact that you had to compromise quality of the taste and you had to deal with oxidation.”
His first foray into cold brewing consisted of experimenting with Mason-jar brewers, a common method with kits popular on Amazon. While the cold brew gave Dodd his morning jolt without the stomach issues from hot coffee, he said he instantly noticed some drawbacks.
“I was impressed with that and it was smooth, but the flavor wasn’t there,” Dodd said. “Which is the biggest complaint with cold brew. And also the stale aftertaste.”
So the inventor did some research and, eventually, started experimenting. He zeroed in on what most information posed as the biggest problem in cold brew: Oxygen. Oxidation allows bacteria to grow, Dodd said, and over a 16-hour brewing period, that leads to the stale aftertaste that is commonly associated with cold brew coffee.
With that discovery, Dodd was hooked, and he started experimenting with new methods and inventions. The brewers got creative. One, named the Rolled Brew, used a rock tumbler to keep the brewing-concoction rotating.
The Rolled Brew helped flavor transference, but the oxidation problem, and the stale aftertaste, was still there, Dodd said.
That’s when he thought of a vacuum. If he could pump out the oxygen along with the rest of the air molecules, he could get rid of the oxidation problem.
Fully submersed coffee brewed in a state of vacuum
To solve the problem, Dodd bought a sauerkraut-making kit, which had a one-way vacuum valve that pumped out the air and didn’t let any back in. The contraption fit on the Mason jars he was already using for cold brew, Dodd said.
The vacuum system “was like voilà” Dodd said. “The difference it made, not only in the oxidation, stale aftertaste, but also in flavor transfer.”
As good as the sauerkraut maker worked, it still had a drawback. Inside the Mason jar, when the vacuum was formed, the ground-up coffee had a tendency to float to the surface of the water and accumulate. The grounds needed to stay submerged in the water the whole time for optimum flavor.
“There’s so much carbon dioxide trapped in coffee beans when they’re roasted,” Dodd said. “When you bring this solution under vacuum, all the coffee floats to the surface.”
Dodd’s solution is what he calls “the full-immersion vacuum cold-brewing process.” It’s a mouthful, but it has great results. The filter is designed to keep the grounds below the water’s surface inside the container, even when a vacuum is placed on it.
“The problem occurs when the coffee grounds stay right at the surface or a little bit above. It actually worsens the oxidation process,” Dodd said. “I designed a system where we could introduce a vacuum, so we call that the full-immersion vacuum cold brewing process.”
NoAir’s cold brew system looks like a large water bottle, but packed in are a set of features that make it unique. You load your ground beans in the container, and place the filter, complete with a seal, on top. Then, a small, clear plastic piece screws on and you fill it with water. On top of it all, an adjusted wine-topper creates a seal and pumps out air to create the vacuum.
Coffee under pressure to keep out the crud
Under vacuum-pressure, the fully-submerged grounds transfer their flavor over an eight-hour brew period, Dodd said. The process lowers the atmospheric pressure on the solution, allowing the carbon dioxide trapped in beans and grounds to escape. That allows the ground coffee to absorb more water, improving the flavor transfer.
“That’s why in our cold brew process, you can actually taste some complexity of flavors there,” Dodd said. “Since it’s under vacuum, it prevents oxidation, so there’s no stale aftertaste.”
Dodd said that while other brewers have “vacuum” in their names, NoAir is the only system on the market that brews coffee completely in a state of vacuum. There are contraptions like siphon brewers that make a vacuum during the process, but do not actually brew the coffee in a state of vacuum.
“Our brewer is the only one on the market, that we have found, and we’ve been researching for two years, that actually brews in a state of vacuum,” Dodd said.
The vacuum also helps cut down the brew time. Normal cold brew takes about 12 to 16 hours, Dodd said. The more vacuum pressure, the faster the brewing can occur. With about 10 to 12 pumps of its topper, the NoAir system can fully brew coffee in 6 to 8 hours. And if you want to stretch out that time a bit due to your schedule, just take a bit of pressure off and it will brew slower.
There’s another benefit to NoAir’s system: Bean storage. By putting your beans in the bottle and placing a vacuum on them, you can extend the life of your coffee beans significantly, Dodd said. With a rise in specialty, expensive coffees, it’s a feature of the system that has come in handy.
“The vacuum seal on the bottle works really well for coffee bean storage,” Dodd said. “It does significantly extend the life of the coffee beans.”
Patent in hand, crowd funding is a go
In 2021, while the Dodds were trying to get NoAir Coffee off the ground, they moved back to Springfield to make it a family-run business, bringing in their daughter, Virginia.
Tony Dodd is the inventor and the president of the company, while Mary runs the books and handles the marketing. Virginia holds the official title of operations manager.
NoAir just finished a run on Kickstarter, where the company raised more than $5,000 in pledges with about 115 backers. Next, NoAir plans to place its cold brewer on Indiegogo, another crowdfunding network, Dodd said.
The company officially secured a U.S. patent for its cold brew system in mid-April 2024, Dodd said. It was a long, drawn-out process that was further delayed by the effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic. NoAir applied for the long-term patent about three years ago.
In 2023, the company designed a primo version of its product, with double-walled glass and a silicon sealing system, made to withstand a hot brewing method, all while keeping the grounds submerged and in a state of vacuum. The company intends to launch its hot brewer on a crowdfunding website at some point this year, Dodd said.
Dodd grew up in his father’s food-manufacturing machine business. Think fancy, stainless-steel machines custom-made for large food processing facilities, like the Fruit Loops maker for Kellogg’s or a chocolate-bar processor for the Hershey Company.
Diving into the coffee brewing process and developing his own cold brew method was a “natural progression” from the food-manufacturing machine business, Dodd said.
“I’m just a tinkerer,” Tony Dodd said. His wife and business partner, Mary, added: “And a researcher.”
“I’m always trying to figure a way to improve something,” Tony Dodd said.
