Using the CAFEC Flower Dripper DEEP 27

We interrupt posts about living in Japan to post about products in Japan.

Most people i talk to casually about coffee call me a coffee snob. That's really not true (not entirely anyway). I received an education in coffee working at coffee roasters back in the day - i'm not deeply knowledgeable about all aspects of coffee production and brewing, but i'd like to think i have a decent foundation. And so i counter that i'm simply more aware of what coffee i enjoy and what i don't compared to the average person.

Anyway a key takeaway from my time on the cafe floor is that brewing coffee is a process of operationalising science. At the start of every day, the goal is to achieve a consistent taste every time you brew the same coffee. We do this by using aspects of the brewing as a proxy - how quickly does water drain between pours? What's the total brew time? What was the extraction level of dissolved coffee compounds in the final brew? Once the standard is set, other brews throughout the day are calibrated against that standard, within an acceptable variance (a brew that's 2 seconds faster or slower is fine, but if its 20 seconds its probably not).

This became a habit i carried over into my daily coffee brewing routine because i can't stand the idea of brewing randomness into my coffee. I only brew and drink coffee once or twice a day. Leaving it up to chance because i don't know what my baseline is will ruin my day if the cup comes out tasting poorly.

Getting to the CAFEC Flower Dripper Deep 27

All this is to say, i got a new coffee dripper, brewed a bunch of times on it, and have some things to say.

The Deep 27 dripper is a single cup dripper designed by CAFEC, a company that makes primarily coffee products. (As a side note, I looked up the parent company on the Tokyo Stock Exchange... it's not inspiring.) Its supposed to brew better single cups, because the deep cone allows for a deeper coffee bed, even with less coffee, and thus better extraction.

I'd seen this dripper in Loft before and was intrigued, but procrastinated on action by filing it at the back of my head as something i may buy some time in the future. A few weeks later a friend mentioned this same dripper to me saying it brewed some of the best coffee he'd tried.

Strong words.

But with such an endorsement, i re-filed this dripper from "procrastinate on this" to "do it now", went out to buy one, and started brewing on it.

What have i found (so far)?

This is entirely preliminary, but is probably what i'd use as a baseline when testing the dripper further in future.

The dripper does well on finer grind settings. Whatever you grind for your 1-cup v60, grind finer than that. The flow rate on this dripper is much faster than other cones, probably because of its steep angle. It was common for my brews to finish in the range of 2:00 - 2:30.

Less pours performed better than more. I tried 3-pour and 5-pour brews. The latter came out less sweet than the former, and frequently had this hollowness in the middle.

The flavour profile is more texture, more roundness, and less acidity. I brewed an Ethiopian coffee, and didn't get the same acidity i typically get from Ethiopian coffees. The coffee was heavy on my tongue, and less bright. Not unpleasant, but it felt like i was losing some of what made the coffee interesting. On the other hand, i brewed an El Salvador with tasting notes of chocolate and orange, and this profile made it stand out a little more.

The paper filter is very paper-y. This could be my imagination, but i felt that the paper taste on the deep 27's filter papers was particularly strong, and it interfered with my sensory experience when i tried to smell the coffee while brewing. I ended up rinsing the paper twice before every brew.

Some data if you're interested for whatever reason - i use a 1zpresso K max grinder, and used a 3-pour brew recipe (bloom + 2 pours) on the same El Salvador coffee. I didn't purge my grinder between brews so that might have influenced the results slightly, but the coarser the grind, the slower the drawdown, it seemed.

4.9 was the sweet spot for me, as a notch finer led to harshness, and a notch coarser was less sweet.