The Clever Dripper is a great coffee maker using an immersion brew method (a bit like the method used by a French Press or Cafetiere). You’re in control of how long you let your coffee brew for, and when you’re ready you place the vessel ontop of a cup and the Clever valve underneath releases the brewed coffee directly into your waiting mug!
The Clever Dripper uses filter paper to give you a clean brew and makes it easy to clean and dispose of your used grounds into compost or for the acid loving plants in the garden.
The Clever Dripper has been around for a while now, but what’s new is the solid blue colour for the 2 cup device, or the solid red colour for the 1 cup version.
One of our most extravagant favourite products is an incredible coffee maker from a talented designer and coffee fan in Australia. We supported Mark Folker’s Kickstarter campaign to develop the Trinity ONE a couple of years ago and have admired Mark’s commitment and search for quality as he has pursued his idea.
We received a small number of the first batch of this device just a matter of days ago, and are taken aback by the result – it’s a beautiful yet functional design featuring kitchen grade stainless steel and American black walnut heartwood timber.
The Trinity ONE can be used to brew coffee by press, immersion, or drip filter method. The unique design and approach is unlike any product we’ve seen before – and if you’re interested in handbrew coffee making it’s worth looking at our feature page on Trinity ONE to see what it’s all about.
It is genuinely original! Yet the Trinity ONE works with what we know about coffee making to produce an excellent device. It is a large item and that can be a bit of a surprise when you first see it – but this can take centre stage and do its 3 different jobs: drip, press, or immersion.
We’re very impressed with Trinity ONE – it will be an elegant addition to any serious coffee shop or be a stunning home coffee making station.
The Cafe Stal is a lovely little coffee maker and really good value too. It has almost 600ml capacity in the brewing and serving vessel which also features a stainless steel removable pourover filter. The heat resistant glassware is really simple and a delightful compact size. It has an acrylic neck for helping with your serving.
You simply add your ground coffee to the mesh filter which sits in the top section of the pourover vessel. Slowly wet the coffee grounds and let the coffee ‘bloom’ for 30s to 45s, then pour hot water very slowly in spiral or zig-zag motions over the ground coffee for a couple of minutes or so.
The coffee grounds will release their flavour as both aroma while your making the coffee and as the coffee itself which collects in the lower part of the vessel.
Once you’re done, remove the steel mesh, and sit down with a friend to enjoy your coffee – or on your own for a double dose of caffeine! You can later discard the grounds for compost, rinse the steel mesh and the vessel well and it’s ready for use again.
As an introduction to PourOver coffee making this device would serve really well – as it already has a steel mesh filter and is like a tiny version of a Chemex which feels like the granddaddy of pourover makers!
Do you ever go a way for a few days and get really disappointed with the quality of coffee that you can make for yourself to start your day? Our new stock of Kalita Kantan single cup filters could provide an answer!
There’s 30 in a pack and they’re easily transportable so you can have a way to rely on your coffee wherever you go. They come folded flat – you just pop them into the shape below and put them on top of your mug – scoop some ground coffee into the filter area and pour water slowly through the coffee grounds. They will fit most mugs, but not the very largest. Simple, quick and compact.
Perhaps you want a fun way for guests at and event to enjoy their coffee – how about a sample coffee pack and a Kantan filter to let them enjoy a bit of handbrew coffee making in their places.
Ready for use – Kalita Kantan in situ atop a coffee mug
To be fair, most of our products are favourite in some way or other – we love handbrew coffee techniques and like to keep trying all the different methods we can get our hands on.
One of the simple, relaxing, first ways that we embraced handbrew coffee was with the Hario V60 – it’s a ceramic conical device that sits atop a mug or jug. Into it you place a paper filter (which you can wet to remove any paper taste that you might otherwise detect). Into the paper filter you place ground coffee to a medium coarse grind.
Simply pour a small amount (perhaps 40g) of hot water onto the coffee grounds and let them swell, or ‘bloom’ for half a minute or so. This gives the coffee grounds the chance to wet through and ensures more coffee flavour is extracted.
Then in slow swirls continue pouring water onto the coffee and allow it to drip through to the mug or vessel below – take your time in this and enjoy the process.
You’ll achieve a more delicate flavour of coffee and slow down a little while you’re at it!
V60 from Hariohttp://www.artistrycoffee.co.uk/shop/proddetail.php?prod=D0021 is synonymous with handbrew coffee making and this simple well-designed piece of coffee making kit is a standard – literally setting the standard against which other pour-over devices have to measure up to gain worthy credentials.
The Drip-In Server from Hario is a great combination item – it is a drip filter coffee maker, it is a coffee server too – stylishly serving up your favourite beverage! You can also use it for Cold Brew coffee.
If you’ve heard of the lovely classic Chemex pour-over coffee maker, we think of this as a value version – but it’s still quality as it’s made by Hario and has good pedigree as part of the V60 family of products.
As a glass serving jug with cup measures on the side, the Hario Drip-In Server looks good and sits well on a coffee or dining table.
This device can also make your coffee too – using the drip-filter method with ground coffee placed in V60 filters, of 02 size, in a plastic removable V60 frame which rests on the top of the glass server jug. Hot water is then poured-over the coffee grounds at a slow pace – first allowing the coffee to swell (or bloom) and then refilling the V60 frame and allowing the coffee to slowly drip through.
A plastic lid helps the brewing process and a stylish black handle robustly adorns the side of the server.
The Hario Drip-In Server is also great for pour-over-ice coffee making – to the process described above but with ice already placed in the jug – which the coffee pours over, cooling as it goes.
This device from the Hario V60 family is a really versatile coffee maker. If you also consider its the equivalent of a Range Server with a V60 drip filter in-built and it can serve 4 people easily you can see why we think it’s one of the best value handbrew coffee devices.
You can also find it featured as a key part of the Artistry Coffee The Drip Filter Kit.
So for many of us coffee is a part of our life whether we think about it or not!
The question do you want a coffee has probably already been said to you or by you today, even if only in your mind to yourself!
However, to start to pay more attention to what your cup of coffee contains can be the beginnings of a journey that gradually increases in intensity.
There was a point when – rather than using drip-filter by accident (i.e. without realising) or french press because it sat there (thinking it was just a cafetiere: which of course it is!) – the idea of hand-brewing coffee became more than a means to an end, it became an enjoyment in itself!
This started with a V60 Ceramic pour-over: a cup-like thing with a conical shape and a hole in the bottom. You place a filter paper within it then add ground coffee and pour hot water over the coffee which then drips through to a mug sitting below.
This is a slow coffee making process to savour: not perhaps the best method to use if you’re in a rush!
But this is where a real enjoyment in coffee making started for me and my wife. The process of thinking about the coffee and what it was doing as you were making it became interesting, and the time taken in the pour-over coffee making started to be a relaxing routine.
Starting with the same ground coffee we were using from the supermarket, we enjoyed “blooming” the coffee by pouring a small amount of hot water for about 15 seconds to let the Coffee grounds swell; then pouring hot water gradually over the coffee for another 2 to 3 minutes whilst seeing gasses from the coffee bubble up a little.
A V60 Pour-Over Coffee MakerMaking Pour-Over Coffee
The aroma from the coffee when making it, as the coffee interacts with the hot water and then drips though, adds to the pleasure – and this is heightened because of the slow process of the pour-over coffee making. We found that the coffee was much more pleasurable as black coffee than we had ever experienced before: which then took us to a new place in coffee appreciation.
This series of posts started from a fairly simple question in my head – what is the rate of cooling of water from boiling – to have some sense of what temperature coffee making is conducted at when there are no thermometers to hand! It has turned into a rather more complex investigation than first thought – but has been at least a little fun along the way. Here, were close to the end of my write-ups!
We’ve already covered that when transferring water after boiling from an electric kettle into another vessel such as a Buono kettle (in order to achieve greater accuracy for pour over coffee making) there seems to be about a 3 or 4 degree Celcius loss of temperature straight away.
So this post is about the expectation that as the water is then poured from the Buono onto the coffee grounds themselves there is likely to be another (notable?)drop in temperature.
That was the expectation and indeed has been exactly what I observed in my experiments.
In order to attempt to measure this effect, I rigged up a set-up (imperfect, but trying to get close to something realistic) where I could pour water from the Buono spout directly onto the bulb of the thermometer. That’s the closest I’ve been able to construct to something reasonably meaningful.
I conducted most of my previous efforts over a 10 minute observation window – however the idea of pouring water from a Buono kettle for 10 minutes was never going to be achievable – I did try and control it well, and managed around 5 minutes each time, which I think was a good achievement (also meant my rate of pour should have been similar on each attempt).
Top Line (darker) : Observed Temperatures in Electric Kettle Next Line (mid-tone): After being poured into Buono Kettle Bottom Line (lightest): Temperatures of the Pour
The temperature within 30 seconds had dropped to 90 degrees Celcius, but took till almost 6 minutes to drop the next 5 degrees – by which point it was almost equal to the observations of the temperatures achieved in the Buono kettle itself(with no pouring).
That line on the chart that resulted did puzzle me at first – although the greater initial drop in temperature made sense, the slower rate of decline in the following minutes than observed in the kettles did seem odd ( I haven’t worked all the way through this yet, but I think one of Newton’s Laws does help – I need to look into that a bit more, and will try and write something in a few days).
What also seemed odd is that the water poured from the Bouno (having been poured in the Bouno from the electric kettle) was at a lower temperature in the earlier moments of observations than the water in the open-top vessels.
Top Line (darker): Temperatures in Electric Kettle Next Line (mid-tone): After being poured into Buono Kettle Bottom Line (lightest): Temperatures of the Pour Yellow Line: Temperature in open-top container
OK – only for 30 seconds, but that it crossed the line, then crossed back again made me think that this science lark was just far too complicated!
But here could perhaps be the most important thing to understand from these experiments – that the pour itself is where the temperature changes the most (pouring from the kettle used for boiling, into another vessel in the first place, and from the pouring vessel onto the coffee).
And therefore different styles of pour, durations of pour, or methods of dealing with the water will mean that the temperature, in effect, on the coffee is different.
This is where the water is coming into most contact with the air (or perhaps more importantly (scientifically) the much lower ambient temperature) and so is losing the most heat.
So I guess one of my biggest conclusions is that when we’re talking temperature we may or may not be talking the same thing – the temperature of the water can change greatly quite quickly depending on how it is transferred from the boiling vessel to the coffee.
Water that is the same temperature for 2 different coffee making techniques at the starting point could actually be at very different temperatures when hitting the coffee grounds seconds later.
This coffee making really is both an art and a science!!
please note: boiling and hot water can be dangerous if not handled with care! (despite the haphazardness of some of my approaches above, I did take some care and would suggest anyone else does the same: and children should be accompanied by an adult)
I started out looking at the temperature that boiled water reaches when it is left to cool – to think about having some guide for coffee making when just getting on with it rather than trying to measure every element, every time.
I quickly realized that it wasn’t as simple as that, and the water temperature depends on lots of things that can go on from the point of boiling.
So being in semi-scientific mode (a real scientist could probably tear my methods apart), I went off on an exploration of water temperature with some kitchen table experiments.
But still more to think about: The way I usually make coffee is either to pour first into a Buono kettle and then pour onto the coffee (either in one go into an AeroPress or over time as a drip filter). So I needed some other answers
What happens to the water temperature in the Buono kettle?
And perhaps most importantly, what is the temperature of the water as it actually hits the coffee?
To answer question 4 was relatively simple – simply pour the water straight from the kettle into the Buono and take the temperature readings from there. Answering 5 is a lot more complicated (that’s for next time).
The observations showed that there’s a cooling that goes very quickly, reducing the temperature by around 3 or 4 degrees Celcius, when the water is first poured into the Buono vessel – and that this temperature difference is then roughly maintained for the duration of the observations.
Darker line: observed temperature in boiling device (electric kettle), Lighter line: temperature in Buono Kettle (poured into from electric kettle)
The observed temperatures from the Bouno kettle is the lower (lighter) line on the chart and you can see it approximately holds the relationship with the line above (the observed temperatures from the boiling kettle).
So this is logical, and in line with my first thoughts – that the initial pour into another vessel cools the water by a few degrees from boiling point (whether it be pouring into the plastic jug, the ceramic mug, or the Buono kettle). But the Buono clearly holds the temperature in slower rate of decine than an open topped vessel (this is science of some sort, but not really rocket science! Or perhaps it is!!!).
So I feel that this has all been helpful in coming to some greater understanding of what happens to the temperature of the boiled water, before it is poured onto coffee – but doesn’t get us to the answer of what is happening as the hot water it hits the coffee grounds (so that will be looked at next time….).
please note: boiling and hot water can be dangerous if not handled with care! (despite the haphazardness of some of my approaches above, I did take some care and would suggest anyone else does the same: and children should be accompanied by an adult)
My weekend coffees in the noughties facilitated then by supermarket bought ground coffee – of such better quality than my weekday ones facilitated by instant coffee – were also made to a better method than I realised at the time.
Actually it was a fairly simple and very plasticy mechanism, but one where hot water dropped slowly through a plastic container with holes in it onto the ground coffee below, and then through a mesh into the cup at the bottom. So even though I never described it as such this was genuinely a Drip Filter coffee which gave a good chance of getting the best out of the coffee that I had bought.
Oh how I now wish I had paid a little more attention – attention to the coffee I bought, the different blends I tried, the way the device made the coffee. Had I done that I might have progressed through the coffee journey more quickly, and appreciated the views along the way a bit more too.
Coffee this way was surprisingly straightforward to make – it kind of made itself while getting breakfast ready, or seeing what the kids were getting upto. Pop the grounds in, pour the water into the top container, put the lid on – then pick up the coffee in a couple of minutes. The little device still sees the light of day occasionally!
Easy for a busy Saturday morning before taking our youngest son to music school. Or now and again with the luxury of breakfast in bed on Sunday before heading off to church.
At the time the fact that the coffee tasted better than during the week seemed good enough.
Only more recently have I really appreciated how much more it’s possible to learn about coffee – and realised that if you’re interested enough you may never run out of things to learn – and that its a bit like wine: the more you know, the more you discern, the more you appreciate, the more you realise that there is still more to learn.
So journey fast or journey slowly, journey a short way or a long way – but enjoy your coffee journey.
