- Today I wanna do something a little bit different.
Think of this as my daily driver but for coffee.
It's the brewing method that I'm using right now.
Something that I'm favoring right now.
It's not the best brew method,
it's not the ultimate brew method.
It's just something that I'm enjoying and in this one,
it led me to an experiment that I think is worth sharing
that I think is super interesting too.
So right now I am brewing a lot with this is,
it's Hario's switch.
It's Hario's answer to the Clever coffee dripper.
Now the Clever I've been using a lot at home
because I'm trying to work on my brew guide for the Clever.
And one of the challenges with
this brewer is the drawdown time.
Now the way it works is very simple.
You put a filter paper in, you put coffee and water in,
you let it steep, because at the bottom,
there's a little stopper that only opens
when you put it on a cup and then it drains out.
I really like steep and release brewers,
I like them a lot.
This combination of infusion at the start
where the coffee and water just hangs out together
with this kind of percolation paper separation phase.
I just like the end results a lot.
Now in my research and testing,
I thought it would be interesting to compare
the Clever to the Hario's switch.
Now the way that works is a little bit different
to how the Clever works.
This has a kind of metal ball bearing,
acting as a kind of stopper right at the bottom.
When you push the switch, it pops the ball bearing up
and your coffee drains out.
But really, it is a glass V60 in the base here
and I thought that was interesting to test.
But it led me to test with other filter papers
to try and find faster draw downs.
And that led me to an interesting result.
I know you probably have questions about this jumper,
you are gonna have to wait to the end of the video for that.
To illustrate my point, to start us off.
I'm gonna brew a simple brew with this thing
using the tabbed bagged Hario filters.
I think that's a good benchmark.
And I'll talk you through how I brew the switch.
It is different so far into how I'm brewing the Clever
so it's not a kinda one for one here.
I'll be brewing 15 grams of coffee to 250 grams of water,
and I'd be running a two minute steep
a little stir and a drain.
Let's do that now.
(buzzing sound)
Now I kind of do a bloomer phase at the moment,
which is just add two to one, and then give it
a little swirl just to kind of get rid of
any pockets of dry coffee before I infuse as a whole.
Now as I said, I do like infusion brewing,
you can just let coffee and water steep
and you're not worried about evenness of extraction.
As long as all of the coffee is kind of getting wet,
there's no pockets of dry coffee anywhere,
you're having a pretty even extraction.
And that's good because with percolation like a pour over,
or espresso, you're worried about evenness,
you're worried about channeling,
all of those things are a concern.
Generally I've been grinding pretty fine for this.
Just a little bit finer in some cases
than kind of my cupping setting because I've been
sort of steeping for just two minutes
before beginning the drawdown process.
What I'll do then, I'll give it a little stir
one way or the other like in a V60,
and then I'll drain it out.
I'll flip the switch and away we'll go.
So with this and actually the drawdown is pretty fast
and then it begins to slow down
and almost choke a little bit.
And you think it's gonna take 30 seconds to drain
but it doesn't, it takes much, much longer than that.
And what's likely happening is very fine particles
are plugging the filter paper up
making it difficult for the liquid to pass through.
And I had wondered if that's the case,
how much of the problem is the paper versus the bed?
If this could happen faster would it
still taste really good?
So we're done.
That is a about a two minute 10 drawdown phase,
we're at a sort of four minutes 25 total brew time,
which is a pretty long slow brew time.
And there's something about a slow drawdown
that's just infuriating to me.
It's just maddening to watch
this thing happened very slowly.
But if I wanted that bit to go faster.
Well, the question I had to answer was how much extraction
am I doing in the infusion phase
and how much am I doing in the percolation phase?
So what I'll need to do is replicate this brew,
but skip the second stage.
Lemme do that now.
Everything just the same, 250 grams,
and a two minutes steep.
And as before, at two minutes
I'll give it that little stir.
I'll let it rest for sort of 15 seconds
to have some of that bed fall to the bottom.
And then I'm gonna make a terrible mess.
I've never done this without making a mess,
so I'm just accepting at this point.
What I'm gonna do is try and decant the liquid
from the top of this, through this V60 paper here
to sort of, you know, clarify it a little bit
to strain out whatever fines are suspended in there,
but sort of skip the step where it flows through the bed.
So wish me luck.
And it's about normal.
So you can see here, there's the bed
that we're trying to avoid, nice and flat.
One should note at the bottom there, which is good.
And a terrible mess as usual.
While this drains I'll clean this up
and we're be back in just a second.
So we now have two brews,
we've got the regular immersion plus percolation phase
and then we've got the just immersion phase
with a little bit of straining happening there,
just to get rid of the fines and that kind of stuff.
These we can then test and measure to see
the difference, both with tasting,
which I think is very important,
but also, with one of these, it's a refractometer.
This measures the speed of light through coffee,
or more usefully gives you a refractive index of the liquid,
it tells us how much stuff is dissolved
in the coffee liquid and we can calculate back from that
how much of the ground coffee we extracted
into the liquid that we're gonna drink.
So a little stir.
You do wanna stir your filter coffee if you're testing it
much like you wanna stir your espresso.
If you don't know what I'm talking about,
there's a video up here.
You can take a drop,
place on the center.
And away we test.
And the absolute number is not super important here.
Yes, this is a percentage that suggests a good extraction
but that's not really the point.
The point is the difference between the two.
So here, about 1.35, it's coming up pretty consistently.
Let's compare it to the other one.
Oh, big difference.
Huge difference, actually.
Now you might argue that 0.3
is not a huge difference of anything,
but it turns out in brewed coffee that is a big difference.
But let's taste them.
Is this a wild variation?
That is very nice.
That is very well extracted, super balanced.
Nice clarity, nice acidity.
It's yummy basically.
This based on this should be pretty bad.
And it's not great.
But it's so,
it's so much better than it should be.
It's so much better than it should be.
If you brewed a V60 and produced that strength
and had that extraction, it would taste really bad.
This doesn't, this has some texture and body and mouthfeel.
It just feels a bit empty.
I'm increasingly of the belief that
there is something particularly useful
about infusion brews for having
what feels like a nice texture,
nice mouthfeel to your coffee very easily.
I think this kind of makes sense of those moments
when someone grinds quite costly for a French press,
but still has a pretty good result.
I think something about the infusion brewing
that has a kind of tolerance of grind size
that can kinda quite easily
get you to something pretty good.
I think that's interesting.
But this cup is, it is unquestionably better, right.
There's no question at all in my mind.
This is more complex, sweeter, more enjoyable,
better finish, everything about it is better.
This is just surprisingly not bad.
It's just not great either, though.
So now I wanna talk about the Sibarist papers.
These are really interesting,
I actually made a very rare patreon only video
comparing these and a few other
kinda third party V60 filters,
so I have looked at them before.
But they are fast flow filters.
They allow coffee to drain
through the paper much quicker by being more porous.
When you brew with these you get a little bit
of sediment in the cup.
They're closer to a very fine metal filter
than they are paper in some ways,
kinda halfway house between those two.
Like a fine metal filter and a paper filter,
that's where they are.
They don't do the clarity of cloth,
but they still taste kind of like a paper filter.
They're really interesting.
They're also really expensive.
And I'm also aware, the Hario switch
is a little bit expensive.
And I'm very lucky that I can play with these.
And I hope my experiments yield some interesting learning.
So I should acknowledge that these are expensive,
both the brewer and the papers.
Before a brew with these though, and talk about
why I think it's so interesting.
There's a couple things to take care of.
Firstly, this video has an ad on it,
which means it also has a grinder giveaway.
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Everything the same as before.
A little swirl.
And we'll let this steep, again for two minutes
before we stir and flip the switch.
And then go.
And we're done.
A little bit under 45 seconds, which is,
which is pretty fast.
Now this leaves me with a whole bunch of questions.
If this drains really fast,
are we missing out on contact time?
Are we reducing our contact time
and therefore dramatically reducing our extraction?
For 45 seconds, it's nearly a minute and a half
faster as a brewer or shorter as a brew
than with the regular Hario papers.
What's that gonna do?
And also, if these papers are more porous
am I likely to see some bypass happening?
Is liquid flowing out of the paper
because it can quite easily
instead of down through the bed?
Is that gonna drop my extraction lot as well?
There's only one way to find out.
Let's measure it.
Now like I said, this does have
a little bit more sediment in the brew.
So having stirred it, I'm gonna just decant
a little bit through a new paper,
just to clarify it and take out any of that sediment.
I don't need much liquid,
but I do need to strain it properly
to get a good refractive index reading.
Alright, let's get a little sample droplet here.
It is, it seems lower, but barely any lower.
That additional contact time didn't dramatically increase
our extraction, which is kind of notable.
And if there is some bypass happening,
well it's not really damaging to the brewery overall.
How's the taste?
Yeah, very good.
It does have that nice immersion extraction profile
that I really like.
It's just very tasty, nice clarity, nice acidity.
Would I go a little bit finer?
I might actually just to kinda bring it
to a more balanced extraction point
or something closer to the Hario paper.
It would need maybe one tiny notch finer on a grinder.
I really wouldn't worry about this longer brew time
from a finer grinder or a longer drawdown
because these drawdowns are so fast because of these papers.
And so you get I think a great result
from a very enjoyable brew method.
It's kinda easy to dial in.
You get this nice emulsion percolation combination.
You can go pretty fine, get pretty high extractions,
get great tasting cups of coffee,
that happen pretty quickly.
And I don't mind a little tiny bit of sediment in my cup.
I don't mind that at all actually.
It still tastes pretty clean.
There's still some nice fresh crisp acidity
to the cup if that's what you're into.
I'm a little bit impressed.
And again I will say they are expensive.
I know they're expensive to buy.
They're a new company starting up doing a new thing
that can often mean what you're doing is more expensive.
I hope they grow, I'm kinda into what they're doing.
I don't wanna use Sibarist for everything,
and sometimes I do want more clarity
and more filtration than they offer.
But I do like using them as a kind of
steep and release filter in this
particular setup with the switch.
Would I recommend exactly the same thing for my Clever?
No I'd recommend a slightly different thing
but I will make a video about that very soon.
I do really like the Clever dripper
as a brew tool 'cause it is so cheap,
so easy to use, and it makes great coffee,
but that's for another time.
I did say I would tell you about
this delightful Christmas jumper and now is the time.
Per 10 100,000 we decided
we would do an ugly coffee Christmas jumper.
We worked with artists Michael B Myers
on kind of pixel art, so you have everything from
like an AeroPress, to a drip pot,
a takeaway cup, pour overs, wagner kettles, latte art.
This isn't a snowflake, this is a coffee flour.
There's portafilters on my sleeves.
These are knitted to order.
So this isn't printed this is actually knitted
and they are a single run.
Once they're gone, they're gone.
I know they're a little bit expensive,
but we wanted to do it right and have them knitted
and that way they're just so much more awesome
than like a printed sweatshirt.
But if you wanna know more,
there's a link in the description down below.
But for now, I'll hand it off to you,
have you used the Sibarist filters yet?
Have you tried them?
Have you tried the switch?
Are you a Clever dripper fan?
Are you waiting for that video?
I'm sorry it is coming soon.
I would love to hear from you down in the comments below.
But for now I say thank you so much for watching
and hope you have a great day.