CoffeeSoldier

I’ve been using the K-Ultra more recently and have noticed the commonly reported difference in flavor profile that this provides in comparison to the Comandante c40. Presumably this is due to differences in the particle size distributions produced by these grinders. I have heard that the K-Ultra has a bit wider distribution and leans towards more fines. I had not seen very convincing proof of this though. I do not have access to a fancy particle distribution analyzer, but I do have a Shelbru Sifter taking up shelf-space. I decided to do a little comparative test between these two grinders with a medium roast natural Ethiopian (known for higher fines).

Notably, fines are typically defined as particles less than 100 microns, but for the purpose of pour-over at least, the 500 micron filter on the Shelbru seemed appropriate enough. You certainly wouldn’t want very many particles in the sub 500 micron range in your pour over. I set the K-Ultra to 7.6 clicks and the Comandante to 24 clicks and ground 10.0g of beans in each. I ran each through the Shelbru for one full minute. The sifted-out fines are shown for each below.

::C40 Fines:: ::K-Ultra Fines::

While it looks like a decent amount – these fines are light – I could not register them at all on my 0.1g accuracy coffee scale. The overall volume looked very similar between the two samples, and I decided to go volumetric for quantification since I couldn’t do mass. They came out very similar – each was just under ¾ Tsp using a ¼ Tsp measuring spoon.

It wasn’t really part of my goal here, but I wasn’t going to waste the filtered out coffee (the >500 micron portions). I discarded all the fines and mixed the remaining two specimens together and tossed them in the Kalita Mino. Frankly it came out a little vapid tasting. This may be because I trimmed off a little too much of the particle distribution curve that does give some nuance to the brew. This fits in with what I’ve mentioned before about the Shelbru, while it may clean up a messy grinder – for these higher end grinders it probably hurts more than it helps.

This was sufficient for me at least to say that I do not think the K-Ultra produces significantly more fines than the C40. I think that’s an important point, as low fines production is hallmark of high-end grinders and rumors that the K-Ultra produce more of these are a bit of a knock. The noted difference in flavor profiles between these two grinders almost certainly has to do with particle-size distribution (I’ve seen some unimpressive amateur analyses, but nothing of quality that I can link to for a good demonstration of this), but that difference does not appear to be a simple higher preponderance of fine particles in one vs. another.

There are plenty of travel brewing options, the aeropress, pipamoka, espro, and an eruption of practical portable espresso options lately. Unless you are either traveling a lot or using these regularly at home, they can be difficult to dial in to the brews you might be used to if you are a primarily pour-over brewer. There have been a number of foldable, portable, optimized pour-over brewers, but these tend to do best with a gooseneck kettle which is a deal-breaker for me when selecting a travel companion. Immersion options like the clever dripper have been touted for their travel-friendly simplicity, but it’s a notably different brew profile if you are used to pour-over. Two recent zero-bypass brewers have caught my fancy as work / travel options, the Ceado Hoop and the Orea Z1. Neither is really touted as a primarily travel brewer, but they are both super simple to use, do not require a gooseneck, and they are durable with high quality simple construction. In brief, either one of these is worthy of its space in your luggage, but which is the best?

Brief Rundown of devices

I’ve described the Hoop a bit briefly but only in reference to its filters. It’s a unique radial infusion brewer where the coffee grounds sit in a central chamber and water flow into the chamber and over the grounds is determined by a series of small holes that connect to a larger outer water reservoir.

The Z1 is basically a spinoff of the tricolate zero-bypass brewer but utilizes a fast Sibarist filter and has a built-in melo drip disperser which allows for a clumsier water source than a gooseneck kettle since it converts any pour into a diffuse uniform drip.

Packing

Let’s look at portability and practicality for travel first. Both are high quality food grade, high heat tolerant plastic. The z1 is Tritan and the Hoop is BPA free plastic but the resin type is not published. Both fit pretty practically in luggage, and while you can’t do that cute thing like you can with the aeropress where you slide a grinder inside of it, they certainly aren’t space hogs. The Hoop has a little bigger footprint, but if you are willing to stuff a clean pair of socks or something in it, I think it actually takes up a bit less space.
Winner: this one’s a tie

Brewing

I’ll lead with saying both can brew an excellent cup. They are very simple to brew with, but the Hoop takes the cake for simplicity if that’s what you crave when being out of the comfort of your kitchen coffee lab. The Z1 on the other hand is going to require a few pours and does offer some variables you can play with a little to tweak your brews. Both brew best on the coarser end of the pour-over range which is good news if you want to have a separate travel grinder – a middle of the road grinder will do very well with these. The Hoop is extremely flexible with how you pour the water in. You could take a large pot and just dump the water into the reservoir and you’d be fine. The z1 is fairly forgiving too, but you do need something with at least a bit of a spout. I usually use a collapsible travel kettle or a hotel kettle and these work fine, but you can’t pour too quickly or the Melodrip will overflow and slower pour rates can lead to dribbling and dripping with conventional spout kettles. I do usually make a little bit of a mess with the z1, but nothing terrible. Of note, I’ve learned that since I bought my Z1 (very early adopter), Orea sells a travel kit which includes a little cup with a pour spout. I remain skeptical about how usable this is, as I imagine this must be very hot to hold when filled with near-boiling water. The big issue with both of these is their big bottoms. That’s right, they both have weirdly large back-sides and it’s a frustrating design attribute that can really leave you stuck on the road. Neither fits on my Hario 02 carafe at home, nor do they fit with most standard sized coffee mugs. The Hoop is the bigger offender here requiring a 7cm diameter opening on the vessel below it. The Z1 isn’t much better, but enough so that I can typically find a large mug at an Airbnb or thankfully the wide mouths of the hotel paper cups typically fit. I’ve traveled with the z1 a lot and have always lucked-out with this, but I can imagine a situation that leaves me stuck with hotel coffee and it does give me some anxiety. I’ve found a nice 3D printed adapter that I’ve previously plugged for the Hoop – it’s durable and easy to travel with, but still – it’s another thing.

The Coffee Soldier's typical hotel room setup =)

With a filter in place the z1 doubles nicely as a dosing cup and fits nicely onto some grinders.

I do like how the Comandante grind cup fits perfectly onto the z1 as well for a no-mess transfer.

Winner: it’s close, but the z1 has an edge here.

Cleanup

Both are easy to clean and have just two parts that need washing off. The perforated bottom grate of the Z1 does require a little agitation to get residue fully off it, and I find the Hoop rinses off a little faster.
Winner: Hoop by a margin

Cost/Value

Orea seeks helpless coffee gear heads like online betting websites seek gambling addicts, and I think even those that like their products resent them a bit for it. At over 80 USD for the z1 not including any of the growing list of accessories for this, it is obscenely overpriced for a small plastic cup with some holes on the top and bottom. You’ll also be quite locked in to the special Sibarist filters which perform well but are hard to come by and also very expensive. The Hoop is reasonably priced, and you can in theory use Aeropress filters, but in reality, the experience and cup are only worthwhile with either Sibarist filters or Scott Rao 62mm filters currently. The Rao filters are more reasonably priced when comparing them to the Sibarist options. Winner: Hoop by a longshot

Wrap up/TLDR

Either of these makes for an excellent travel brewer. These are worth considering if you don’t have a travel solution yet or if you are looking to switch your travel brewing to a pour over method. If you’re not traveling all that often and want to keep things as simple as possible, I would recommend the Hoop but do recommend the 3d-printed step down adapter to make sure you can fit it on your cup/mug. If you travel frequently or for longer durations and want to have some options to tweak your travel brew a bit, the Z1 offers some flexibility that is a little closer to more traditional pour over methods. If you haven’t quite gotten to the point where TSA is pulling coffee gear out of your luggage and giving you WTF looks, I would lean towards starting with the more reasonable price point and simplicity of the Hoop. What am I up to these days? I travel with the Z1 and I’ve parked my Hoop at work as a perfect yeah I have enough bandwidth to pay some attention to this Zoom meeting and brew a pour-over at the same time solution.

-- I already have a recommended HOOP brewing recipe and hope to have my Z1 recipe available by next week.

Do you already have a travel favorite brewer? Do you have another pour-over on the go solution?

The SCA flavor wheel is the standard reference for Q grader cupping, but it's also a nice reference to have on hand to help in the search for nuance in your own cup. Printing this out is both nice to have as a tool, but it's also kind of pretty and doesn't look too bad on a wall.

You can buy a digital PDF for $10 from the SCA.

OR, it's pretty easy to find high resolution English language versions at least online.

Try 1: https://atlanticspecialtycoffee.com/wp-content/uploads/SCA_TasterWheel_English_8.5x11.pdf

2: https://imgur.com/a/k1sFXXM

Get pumped! This is the incredible coffee product review you’ve been waiting for! The hot new gadget that will revolutionize your coffee brewing experience! Ok, no it’s not, I’m literally taking a few minutes to dribble on about a tiny broom and dust-pan. There’s some precedent / inspiration for this at least. The Coffee Chronicler, a chap for whom I have much respect for as a coffee aficionado, once posted about one of his favorite coffee gadgets being a small dust-buster. While I agree, it’s paramount to have a quick and easy way to clean up the blizzard of grounds that come with a busy home coffee lab, I’m very much in favor of this simple device. I have a mini vac in my kitchen, but I rarely use it for counter-top clean ups.
Maybe it’s that there’s not power or a place to mount it quite close enough or that my electric grinder doesn’t fit near the area I brew at. Maybe it’s that I’m up early and I don’t want to wake the dog or trigger my introversion with a loud hum. Whatever it is, I’ve found myself much tidier using this little hand sweep. I can quickly dump the pan in the sink or the bin. The brush magnetically adheres to the dustpan and it’s small and not at all ugly to look at. I’m not pushing this particular model or brand. I assume there must be mimics; it’s just the concept that I like. This has lowered the threshold for my willingness to clean up to the point that I find myself happily doing it on the regular.

What do you use? Shop-vac? Wet sock? Lemmy know.

The Ceado Hoop has become explosively popular but it's stock filters are notoriously poor. If you are interested in learning about options for using fast Sibarist filters in the Hoop, this blog post goes into detail.

*Legend has it that Baba Budan brought coffee to the subcontinent by smuggling 7 beans from the port of Mocha in Yemen in his beard in 1670. The Yemenis carefully protected their hold on the coffee market through strict policies and exclusively exporting pre-roasted beans. This recipe pays tribute to the well-intended thief. After pouring your grounds into the filter, you will spoon (smuggle) a little back into the grind chamber to use later in the immersion phase of this hybrid brew.
Why the theatrics? Similar to the concept behind the Ninth Circle recipe, the late components of extraction tend to deliver more astringent elements. Instead of lowering the temperature to minimize extraction, we are re-introducing some fresh grounds into the immersion bath to compensate for one of the downsides of hybrid immersion, pre-extracted grounds. *

Ratio: 1:15.5

Coffee: 20.0g

Water: 310mL

Starting water temperature: 201F (208F if using melobloom technique)

Brew Time: 4:20

1. Smuggle 4g of grounds out of the filter with a spoon then zero scale
2. 00:00 Switch is closed, we bloom with 40ml, give a gentle swirl
3. 00:40 Open switch
4. 00:50 Pour 55ml (to 95ml)
5. 1:20 Pour 50ml (to 145ml)
6. 1:50 Close Switch: Pour 165ml (to 310ml)
7. Sprinkle in 4g smuggled grounds and give 3-4 gentle stirs to submerge grounds
8. 3:20 Open Switch

I welcome your thoughts / critique. I realize it's a zany approach. I encourage you to try it though as I've been using this not infrequently for nearly a year and it hasn't let me down.
Full details here.

A few things to unpack here:

First – entertain getting a Bluetooth or wifi enabled thermal receipt printer. There are options well under $100. I put one in the kitchen on a whim and use it all the time. I can print photos at low but acceptable resolution and notes from any document editor on my phone. They are ultra-fast and many can automatically snip the note for you – no messy tearing necessary. They especially excel over a pen and stack of post-its when you want to create multiple copies. Also, I have horrendous handwriting (like can’t read my own notes bad sometimes), so printing a quick “don’t forget lunch in fridge” note is fast and easy. I’d love to figure out a way to get a voice assistant to automatically print notes for me but haven’t found a reasonable solution yet.

As for the actual coffee stuff, the best info I’ve ever seen on freezing coffee is already available here so I’m not going to rehash all that – but definitely worth reading if you’ve never seen this before. I don’t decaf often, but sometimes I’ll do a 50/50 blend of decaf and regular in the late afternoon or just really want to brew a late night cup. The only decaf I’ve been able to tolerate is Ethyl Acetate or Methylene Chloride processed, but these are tricky to come across. I prefer to buy locally, but all my local roasters use Swiss water process. Since I’m not brewing it often, my decaf will start to expire, and I quickly lose interest in mixing stale decaf with a fresh roast of the week. Freezing is easy. While it's also acceptable to just throw the bag in a ziplock and put it in the freezer, the vials save time on the brewing end. You'll need a funnel to load these. I also love these for throwing in the freezer at work where I only brew occasionally and need it to be very fast.

On a recent trip to Naples, I was curious to see if I might encounter the famed Neapolitan brewer. This Parisian developed contraption was adopted via trade routes to become a culinary cultural staple of the region of Campania. The slow drip-based “cuccumella” aka. cuccuma, caffettiera napoletana, cafetière Morize, flip pot, or simply “the machine”. This polyonymous brewer had previously been billed to me as a simple and reliable brewer that sat on the spectrum between drip coffee and espresso. I had experimented with cuccuma before and frankly found it challenging to dial in a good cup. I envisioned this as more of a home brewer and didn’t expect to find it being used in any cafes, but I hoped to have a chance to taste cuccuma coffee brewed in the city that made this brewer famous. I longed for a reference point from which to tweak my own recipes as I had never encountered anyone brewing with this device. Early on my first note on the coffee scene aligned with my typical European experience – it’s hard to find anything I would refer to as bad coffee and the consistency between espresso shots from café to café was quite incredible. I enjoyed stopping at gas stations in small towns along the Amalfi coast and even in 2025, a decent shot of espresso was always available and often cost just a single euro coin. However, truly excellent coffee was not something I was stumbling into (and not surprisingly, neither was the cuccuma). One morning I put in a bit more effort and discovered Café Sansone , where not only did I enjoy great conversation with the Barista, but also a wonderfully fragrant and complex Ethiopian pour-over. I don’t believe they brewed anything with the cuccuma there, but after I sat down, I noted some on the wall for sale! It was a start! I figured this was about as close as I was going to get, but on my last night in Naples I received an incredible surprise. I treated myself to an upscale dinner this final evening and while it wasn’t on the menu, after dessert the waiter brought a piping hot cuccuma complete with the traditional paper cuppetiello spout cover tableside! I was more excited about this than he expected, and he enlightened me with the most popular local pronunciation of the gadget as a start “Koo Koo Ma”. Here’s the incredible thing, even at this fancy restaurant the cuccuma coffee frankly wasn’t that good. It was too dilute and a little astringent. I found this very vindicating. All my reading about it being a forgiving, consistent brewer had never been my personal experience, so when I received a second-rate coffee in the heart of Naples at an upscale Italian restaurant, I knew this thing wasn’t as foolproof as had been touted. When I returned home, I had newfound energy towards perfecting my cuccuma recipes and I’m pretty satisfied with where I landed. If you’re interested, take a peek at them here. Ultimately I think the cuccuma works best at brewing a cup that lies on the drip side of a Mokka Pot brew. It’s typically recommended for dark roasts, but as someone that avoids a true dark roast even for espresso, I find that medium or medium-dark roasts really shine and the cups need to be brewed with coffee forward ratios. Just like the flavor lies between drip coffee and espresso, I think the optimum cup volume does as well. A large espresso cup or tiny coffee cup works well, and I recommend a single cup dose somewhere between 150 and 200mL. I find the flavor profile a little more nuanced than what a Mokka Pot typically makes and prefer the cuccuma to a Mokka brew personally.
Have you experimented with a Cuccuma? Have you had any good or bad experiences with one?

Using my fast coffee scale for cocktail creation is efficient and eliminates the need to wash my jigger. I round to 30ml for one jigger and 15 for a half. This is easy to remember as those are the volumes of a standard espresso shot and a ristretto respectively.

Cheers!

There’s been a healthy trend toward minimalism in a lot of areas lately, and brewing is not exempt. In fact, specialty coffee enthusiasts are probably more welcome than most to simplify our morning routine when many of us are over-worked, over-tired and feel this sometimes most poignantly first thing in the morning. I’m all for the trend and think it should be embraced both within specialty coffee and other aspects of modern life. There’s a fine line however between embracing simplicity and rejecting experimentation. The best cups of coffee will always be reserved for those that tinker and strive to pander to the particular needs of whatever beans they are working with.
This isn’t a piece about how you should be brewing or a plug for my admittedly slightly faffy recipes. Rather I’d like to share some tips stemming out of personal experience for those that are interested in striking a livable balance between simplicity and regular experimentation.
My starting point with specialty coffee was with the Aeropress. While the process can be relatively simple, there is an inherent amount of faffiness to Aeropress brewing. Just look at how many recipes are out there! Awards have been given to those making slight creative modifications to timing, stirring, filtering, and even device orientation. This was the first type of brewing I learned, and I noticed early on that slight changes or little mistakes in timing really did affect the taste of my brews. I became fastidious about my planning and documentation for brew techniques to learn how to adapt different aspects that seemed to change brew outcomes. I actually moved away from Aeropress brewing because I found it to be too unforgiving – too hard for me to dial in consistently. I did, however, maintain my habits of note-taking and adjusting only single variables at a time when trying to adapt brewing techniques. From the beginning, I did this all on my phone, but I moved from a simple note taking app to a brew-timer app. The brew timer app first allows for a library of user-based brew options across a multitude of different brewers. These are all built to be dose adjustable just like any recipe app or website, and you can clone recipes to personalize them to trim away some of the labor of building a recipe from scratch. When it’s time for that bleary-eyed brew, I don’t need to even bother with my memory functions (let that Papez circuit rest just a little longer). Also, I certainly am not in the mood for math, so I just let the app tell me the net weights I am aiming for during each stage of my brew. I simply select the brew I want to use and then timers begin with moving bars I can follow if I’m feeling especially engaged to actually match the exact recommended tempo of my pours. I become submissive and follow the steps and listen for the timer beeps. Here’s the cool thing though. When doing it this way, it really doesn’t matter that much if it’s 4 steps or 12 steps. Before 5 minutes are over, either way, I’ve just marched through what I was told to do and I’m done. It doesn’t matter if it’s a recipe I’ve been doing all week or one I haven’t used in months. I prefer this to any of the timer functions built into fancy scales, and this always travels with me and doesn’t have a learning curve if I get a new scale. Once I’ve had my coffee, if I’m lucky enough to have a couple minutes, I might go back to the recipe and make some small changes in it in preparation for tomorrow’s brew. For me this process makes trying modifications or experimenting with new recipes so much less intimidating and onerous. Another thing that’s worked well for me on a number of levels is doing some planning ahead. I’m not one to come down to my brewing station, rub my hands together and start pondering what the heck I’m going to do this morning. If I’m caught unprepared, I’m headed straight to the automatic espresso machine and just pushing the on button if it gets to that point. Personally, I like to think about what beans I have on hand and what I’m going to try tomorrow just as I’m going to bed. This helps clear my mind and places a focus on pleasant thoughts. It also relaxes me a bit to know that I’ve got a plan going into the next day – even if that plan is nothing more than how I’m making coffee. Finally, mentally reviewing the outlined steps of a coffee brew is frankly pretty dry stuff, and going over this in my head a couple of times is downright soporific.

What do you do to keep things simple but still leave room for growth and experimentation with your brewing? Do you find yourself more and more getting into the weeds or parsing things down?

TLDR; New and/or complex brewing techniques can be exciting and diversify your available arsenal. Keeping things very organized can let you maintain a healthy simplicity but also allow you to branch out and easily try modifications or new recipes.

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There are a lot of v60 options out there and a lot of opinions that can boil down to some pretty nuanced preferences. In my book the very best v60 will always be the v60 03 Switch. It’s an absolute workhorse brewer that can give you a standard delicious v60 pour over or the next morning a totally different perspective on the same beans with an immersion brew. The real fun of specialty coffee brewing is experimentation though, and that’s where the Switch shines as hybrid brewing options with the Switch are matched perhaps only by the plethora of tweaks you can make with the Aeropress. If you were to only have one pour over brewer – this would be my recommendation. But… I can’t in good conscience recommend having only one pour over brewer.
It’s too often discounted as a novelty, but the Suiren (water lily) v60 is more than a display piece. I don’t think we should overlook the appearance though.

Looks: The most popular and lauded v60 is the simple plastic version, but I’m going to go ahead and say that IMO, it’s kinda ugly. Having that thing out on your countertop might signal to specialty coffee geeks that you are serious about coffee, but to most it just looks like a cheap plastic piece of junk. The Suiren is visually enticing, it’s eye-catching, customizable (you can replace the tabs with different colors – but I’m partial to the stock black and white), and just plain sparks joy. I love boring guests by going on about specialty coffee in the hopes I might find an occasional convert. People are much more likely to ask questions about your Suiren than any other v60 on your shelf.

Taste: I’m probably not winning many people over here talking about looks though. The Suiren has a bit of a reputation of sacrificing taste for appearance and that’s what I want to address here. I disagree with this notion outright. One of the biggest criticisms I’ve heard is that the open architecture allows excessive heat dispersion and that this cooler brewing temp results in a more “mellow” cup. I don’t want mellow. I want flavor in my coffee, and lots of it. Personally, I haven’t noticed a difference in the taste between this, a plastic v60, or my glass v60. Heat retention in brewers is complicated as material around your wet filter can both insulate and conduct heat away. I wanted to see some hard data on what the Suiren was doing from a temperature perspective.

Here’s my experimental design:

1. Pour 150ml of 210F water as a preheat into each brewer (Cafec Abaca filter) and measure cup temp.
2. Empty cup and pour a second 150ml 210F flush through brewer. Measure cup temp.
3. Brew 300ml (20g) pulsed (Tetsu 4:6 recipe) med fine grind immediately after above prep. Measure coffee temp in cup.

Results: Glass v60: Cold Wash – 166F , Hot Wash – 183F, Coffee – 164F

Suiren: Cold Wash – 173F, Hot Wash – 184F, Coffee – 163F

This confirmed my suspicion – despite the Suiren having an open design, at least compared to a preheated glass v60, it’s not losing any more heat. In fact, if you didn’t do an adequate pre-rinse, the Suiren appears to be more forgiving in that sense. I’m guessing an enclosed plastic v60 would produce higher numbers across the board, but I hope this at least convinces you that the Suiren should not be singled out as a massive heat dissipater due to its open appearance.
The other criticism of the Suiren is that it’s a “maximum bypass brewer” v60s in general are higher bypass, but I’m skeptical about this claim as well. Open doesn’t necessarily mean it’s leaking a lot more fluid around the bed. The channels on a traditional closed v60 allow for capillary action and can actually pull fluid away from the paper. Suiren has less surface contact and may actually not have as much bypass. I unfortunately do not have a refractometer, but others have reported refractometer readings for the Suiren, and they are not significantly different. I do not buy the high bypass argument, and I’d like to think I’d be able to taste the difference if there was a bypass differential and I just do not.

Cost: It comes in at twice the cost of a plastic v60, but right on par with metal, ceramic, and glass versions. It’s not a premium.

Cleanup: It’s the easiest v60 to clean. There’s very little coffee-soaked surface area. If there was a brewer you could get away with not even washing/rinsing – this would be it. I give it a quick hot rinse; there’s been no discoloration of my white fins, and zero issue with flavor retention. You can toss the whole thing in the dishwasher fully assembled or break it down into components if you prefer for the most thorough cleaning.

Travel: Easily the most portable v60. Quickly disassembles into fins and base. They are durable and you can break it down into a nearly 2-dimensional form that can fit just about anywhere. You could probably carry this thing in your pocket if you wanted. Also, it’s super lightweight. Easy win in this category.

Toxicity: Ugh. This section is a flamebait setup, but I want to preempt these types of comments with my take. It’s a very popular movement right now to avoid any contact with plastics in the brewing process. There is growing and difficult to deny data that microplastics are toxic/neurotoxic. I have not seen any convincing data to imply that high quality food safe plastics are contributing to this though. Regardless, the contact area on this is pretty minimal – that’s the whole point, it suspends the filter with as little material as possible.

In Sum: It's an awesome brewer and a beautiful piece of gear. If you already have a v60, should you add this to your collection? That’s a tough call – use the info above to inform your decision. Trying to decide which v60 to get? I’d still start with the Switch, but if you find yourself brewing a lot of cups that you want to keep fast and simple and you are not always using hybrid methods, the quick, lightweight, easy cleanup justifies this as a second v60 worth having.

Tried the Suiren? What are your thoughts?

TLDR; The Hario Suiren is more than a piece of kitsch. It’s a legitimate brewer with some real advantages. It brews an excellent cup on par with other v60 brewers and deserves more attention.

Sharing here first! _ I'm excited to finally share a recipe I've been working on for quite awhile.

Web- Link

This pays tribute to Tetsu’s Devil and Coffee Chronicler hybrid recipes. I find these alterations are worthwhile. For me this more consistently achieves the hybrid balance between v60 nuance blended with the body of an immersion brew. The key here is allowing for a traditional bloom phase and a prolonged immersion tempered by just a bit of ice to drop the temp during immersion.

Ratio: 1:15

Coffee: 20.0g

Water: 305mL (This will nicely fill an 11-12oz mug)

Grinder starting points

Around 600 microns

Comandante: 18-22 clicks

Ode Gen 2: 5.3

Starting water temperature: 201F (207F if using melodrip for bloom)

Brew Time: 4:05

• Bloom Pour — 0:12 Switch is closed Pour 55mL Leave Kettle off heat source after pour
• Swirl then wait — 0:30 (0:42) Gentle swirl, just enough to assure grounds are all wet Allow degassing
• Open Switch – 0:10 (0:52) Let it start to drain
• Pour 65mL (120mL) – 0:11 (1:03)
• Wait – 0:24 (1:27) Water should be just starting to dive under bed
• Pour 65mL (185mL) – 0:12 (1:39)
• Wait — 0:22 (2:01)
• Close Switch – 0:02 (2:03) Water should be just above bed level
• Pour 120mL (305mL) – 0:15 (2:18)
• Add Ice Cube – 0:06 (2:24) Recipe calibrated for 8-10g ice cube Add in carefully -avoid splash
• Swirl – 0:06 (2:30) Gentle swirl
• Wait – 0:45 (3:15)
• Open Switch – 0:50 (4:05) Avoid overdrainage. Close and remove just after water disappears under bed.

Notes: I’ve been toying with this on a regular basis for over six months and it’s become my go-to method. These times should be fairly accurate but will vary depending on your beans of course. This recipe assumes a standard Hario tabbed filter. This works in either the 02 or 03 switch. If you are deviating significantly, try altering grind size. Nearly everything comes out nicely with this. Shortly after the ice-cube melts the immersion temperature drops to right around Tetsu’s 160F immersion temp. If your ice cube exceeds the 10mg mark, subtract out a bit of volume from the immersion pour. I’ve tried putting the ice cube in before the immersion pour, resting an ice cube on a melodrip and pouring over that, but neither of those produced as good of a cup as the drop-in method.

I’ve taken the liberty of uploading this recipe publicly into the brew-timer app. It’s admittedly a faffy recipe, but the brew-timer app makes everything so straightforward. I’m a big fan.

I'd very much like to hear any of your thoughts and feedback if you give it a try. If you don't have a switch but have been thinking at all about trying immersion or hybrid brewing, I really think you would have a good time with the Hario Switch. ---