- Today, we're gonna be talking about two brewers
and a new category of brewing called no bypass brewing.
Now, if you're not familiar with no bypass brewing,
don't worry, we will explain that very quickly.
But let me introduce you
to the two things that we're looking at today.
We have the Tricolate brewer
and we have the NextLevel brewer.
There were no no bypass brewers for ages,
and then suddenly there's two.
It's a bit like when there's movies
that seem to be the same movie
but released at the same time,
like movies about asteroids, or magicians, or volcanoes,
or, you know what I'm talking about.
But before we evaluate these two brewers,
I do wanna get into the concept very quickly
of no bypass brewing.
What is it?
Why is it important?
Why should you care?
Do you want another brewer in your life?
It's a concept around pour over coffee.
Now, if you take a traditional pour over cone like this one,
when you brew a pour over with this,
you have a bed of coffee at the bottom of the cone,
you pour in water in the top,
and most of that water flows through the bed of coffee,
dragging with it the delicious soluble flavors
down into the cup below.
But some of the water finds it easier to kind of go sideways
through the paper filter and around the bed of coffee
because the coffee's providing quite a lot of resistance.
That water doesn't really get involved
in the brewing process,
and we call that water bypass water.
It's not huge issue.
We should be aware of it.
Our techniques should allow for it,
but it it doesn't make it impossible to brew good coffee
with a pour over brewer.
But what if you didn't have bypass?
That's the question that these brewers are trying to answer.
And if more of the water went through the coffee,
then you'd have more solubles taken out of the coffee
down into the cup below.
And so the idea behind no bypass brewing
is to let you do a more effective and efficient extraction.
You'll get more solubles out of your ground coffee.
And that will also mean that the cup below
would be comparatively stronger.
You've got more stuff in that water.
The cup's gonna taste stronger.
There are other brewers that are zero bypass.
An AeroPress press is zero bypass.
Espresso is zero bypass.
You have a kind of column of water
passing through a puck or a bed of coffee.
And that's the way that these are gonna work too.
By not allowing the water to escape through the sides,
by forcing it down through the coffee
as the only escape route,
you have this zero bypass effect.
But if you make a coffee with an espresso machine
or an AeroPress,
you know that water without a little encouragement
doesn't really wanna go through the coffee bed.
You've got to add some pressure.
Otherwise, it takes a really long time.
And that's part of brewing with these brewers.
All the things you think about with brew time
are gonna go out of the window.
Here, your brews may take anywhere from five minutes
up to 10 minutes in some cases.
So if you're in a rush,
that might disqualify these brewers straight away,
but don't throw them out just yet
because the coffee you get by extracting more
does taste different.
It doesn't just taste stronger,
it tastes different.
'Cause if you take a sort of a high extraction brew
and you just dilute it back to normal strength,
it doesn't taste identical
with a normal, traditional kind of pour of a brew.
So you have to first decide,
do you want this new style of coffee?
Not that you have to do that.
I will say these brewers
allow you to brew lower extraction yields if you want to,
but the kind of the trick of them,
the unique part of them
is that they let you brew these higher extractions.
So if you look at each of these brewers,
you'll see that their approach to the problem
is pretty much identical.
Now, the Tricolate, I think, is the earlier brewer.
I think it started development in 2018,
I heard about it in 2020,
and I heard about the NextLevel brewer here in 2021.
And pricing wise,
they're both around 50 to 60 US dollars,
depending on where in the world you are,
and shipping and all the rest of it.
But the way they work is simple.
You will have in the bottom here a filter bed
where your paper will go,
and you'll put your coffee on top of the filter paper
and make it nice and even.
And then you'll put these little shower screens on top,
pour water on top,
and they will help distribute the water evenly
across the coffee bed.
And that column of water will build up
and then drain down.
They're kind of the same,
but they have a couple of key differences
that will really inform which one of these
might be the best for you.
So what we'll do now is brew some coffee with them,
and then we can drink some coffee,
talk about the high extraction yield stuff,
talk about the sort of nitpicks of these brewers,
and then at the end of it,
you'll know if you need one of these in your life.
And if you do, which one fits you.
Now, I'll start with the Tricolate first,
and I'm gonna brew differently in each one for a reason.
The kind of philosophical idea behind each brewer
is slightly separate.
If you look at the kind of way
that they want you to use their brewer,
then Tricolate are pushing one particular angle
a little harder.
The idea, basically, you can use
and should use way less coffee.
So instead of using 60 grams a liter
that you might use in a pour over,
here, we're gonna use 45 grams per liter.
That's the kind of big selling point.
If you think about how much coffee you might save
over the course of a year
by dropping from 60 grams a liter to 45,
then you can pretty quickly work out
that you might save the cost of the brewer
within 150 or 200 cups,
depending on the cost of your coffee.
Now, the construction of the brewer is very simple.
You have this base piece
that does actually come out like that
and sort of snaps back into place.
You don't really need to take it out
other than for cleaning occasionally,
but you absolutely wanna make sure
it's locked back in properly.
To get a filter paper in there,
so you just drop one in the top.
This whole process might require slightly more patience
than I sometimes have, if I'm honest.
And then you would want to rinse the paper
once it's settled at the bottom,
and make sure that it is properly seated
right in the middle,
and all the edges are nice and flush.
So I've got 15 grams of coffee here.
I'm gonna grind it relatively finely.
Finer than I would grind for a pour over
quite substantially,
but not espresso fine,
but certainly much finer than pour over.
And I'll be brewing, in total, about 333 grams
of water into that.
With both of these brewers,
you have to be quite thoughtful
about prepping the bed of coffee before you brew.
It needs to be as level and even as possible.
If you've got a very fancy grinder,
life's probably all well and good,
but with cheaper grinders,
because you're grinding that bit finer,
clumping may be an issue.
And so I would recommend potentially,
getting out your little WDT tool,
if you have one of those,
just to declump your coffee before you brew it
if your grinder does kick out some clumps
at these finer grind settings.
Now, I've seen recipes for the Tricolate
that go as low as 10 or 12 grams of coffee.
And that's interesting,
that's a good thing.
That's a very shallow bed.
And the way that you're gonna deal with this
will very slightly depending on the bed depth.
You wanna kinda mess with it less
the thinner the bed is, generally speaking.
Here, we have a sort of small to medium bed of 15 grams.
And for 15 grams,
I'm gonna add about 45 grams of bloom water.
A very gentle swirl to mix.
Wait 30-35 seconds,
and then I'm gonna add the rest of the brew water.
And then once that's added,
one more gentle swirl.
And I will say the nice thing about both of these brewers
is that you don't need a fancy pouring kettle.
You can just use a regular kettle
if that's what you have at home.
But what you can quite clearly see
is a bed of coffee at the bottom
and a column of water above it.
And that's just gonna move down and through.
And that's gonna take a while.
This brew might take five,
five and a half minutes to complete.
And so while it's doing that,
we may as well talk about the next brewer.
So the next level encourages you in a different route
around your brewing.
It says grind 30 grams,
so like a much bigger dose as your sort of recommended dose.
And grind a little coarse than you would do here.
The goal actually is to use less water in the brew,
so we're gonna brew half a litter,
but only about 360 grams of the water,
maybe 370, are gonna go through the coffee.
And because that gives us a higher yield,
but we stop earlier,
we'll get pretty close to a kind of normal extraction
of 20-21%.
And we'll just dilute that down
to kind of normal drinking strength afterwards.
So it's a philosophically very different approach.
You can brew identically to this, right?
You can brew finer, higher yields,
you know, do all of the same sort of stuff here,
but it just seemed worth brewing
the way they encourage you to brew
to kind of compare and contrast.
So prepping this brewer is a little bit different.
So this, this sort of side walls of the brewer
actually come off,
and then you're gonna place your filter on top of that.
And then you're gonna give it a little rinse.
Then you're gonna put the brewer together.
And then we add the coffee.
And now, this is quite a bit coarser.
This is close to where I would grind
for a two cup pour over,
which is what they recommend.
The interesting implication
is that I'm gonna use 25% less water,
so to get the same extraction,
does that imply that a V60 has about 25% bypass?
Maybe, if you're wondering why this is suddenly brewed
and this took me so long,
there's a reason for that.
(machine hissing)
I too constantly wonder if I've had too much
or not enough caffeine.
So a really very similar process,
boiling water, three times the weight.
So we're gonna do a 90 gram bloom,
give it a gentle swirl.
And then after a short bloom phase,
we're gonna get up
to about 380 grams of water, maybe 370.
The rest will add in the brew afterwards.
In all brewing, excessive agitation
seems to cause some clogging,
so you kinda wanna do the least possible agitation
to get what you want at the end,
which is a flat bed of coffee.
And I will say, with both of these brewers,
if you have an obsession around flat beds
with pour over brewers,
that kind of gets worse with these,
where you really interrogate the flatness of everything.
Obviously, to have these be leveled when you're brewing
is really important,
that will help you get a flat bed.
So, you know, just be mindful of your setup.
You know, don't have things at an angle.
Make sure everything's put into place properly.
That stuff does have a noticeable impact on taste.
Undrinkable.
So your bed at the end should be relatively flat
even you shouldn't have too much kind of stuff
to freak out about with the Tricolate.
Give it a knock,
and most of it comes out pretty cleanly.
You'll then need to rinse this stuff out,
pop out the base if you wanna do that,
but to clean, fine, not incredible, but perfectly fine.
The next level encourages you to take off this piece
before knocking out, like so.
You still need to clean this.
That doesn't shortcut that part of the process.
And then this should knock out relatively easily.
You'll see that this is a white piece here,
and it's slightly kind of porous as a material,
which means that you do get some staining
and discoloration with the white version of this brewer.
It's kind of a weird choice.
You can get aggressive in the cleaning
and sort of undo a bit of that,
but over time, this will certainly stain and discolor.
Now, I owe this brewer another about 120 mils of water.
So now we've got two similar cups of coffee
in terms of strength,
but very different cups in terms of extraction.
Here, low dose, high extraction
to get to our kind of normal strength of filter coffee.
And here, we had that high extraction, but with less water,
and then some bypass sort of done separately
to get us to a normal strength from a normal dose.
So this is the kind of more unusual cup,
that kind of high extraction yield.
Typically, this coffee and this setup
has been extracting 24 to 25%,
sometimes a little bit more.
And here, a kind of normal brew achieved in an unusual way.
And it's interesting in that they have similar strength
and in some ways similar texture.
Here, it feels like there's a lot more going on,
but to the point that it feels a bit
like a crowded room sometimes.
You don't have the kind of clarity,
starting to get into pretentious words here,
but kind of clarity of acidity
or of some of the flavors,
but you get a lot of texture in an interesting way,
and you get a lot of flavor,
it's just harder for me to pick it apart.
In the lower extraction brew,
you maybe miss out on a little bit of sweetness,
you miss out on a little bit of texture,
but what's there kinda has a bit more space,
and that's pleasant.
And I think it certainly suits some coffees
more than others.
I will say now,
and I think this is important,
that I think you could achieve broadly
the same extractions with both brewers, right?
If you started with the same coffee,
I'm not sure if you got them both to 23 and a half percent,
I'm not sure I could taste the difference
between which one was which.
You know what I mean?
I think they brew
in a technically, very, very, very similar way.
You could have made this cup with this brewer
and vice versa.
Let's get to summarize before I talk too much.
The fundamental difference between the two of them
seems a little simplistic,
but it's ultimately size.
This is a bigger brewer,
and that changes the use cases for it
compared to this brewer.
Because what attracts me to higher extraction yields
are the efficiencies of it, right?
And there's certainly times
when I've got maybe 12 grams of coffee left
at the bottom of a bag,
with this brewer,
I can just make a bigger cup of coffee with it quite easily.
I probably couldn't get 12 grams to work
as easily in a brewer like this.
But if I need to brew larger volumes of liquid,
this is a better brewer.
If I'm brewing for two thirsty people,
this maybe isn't as well-suited to that as the NextLevel.
In terms of design,
I enjoy some aspects of the NextLevel more.
It feels a little bit more premium,
aside from the fact that it does discolor.
I like the idea of kind of pulling the brew chamber off
to make sure that the paper is seated first,
and then placing the chamber on top.
Sort of dropping the paper into here,
potentially using the back of a spoon
to poke it around, as they recommend,
if it's not quite seated,
is a less joyful experience.
Now, both brewers can feel a little bit finicky.
That's kind of a shared attribute
of these kind of no bypass brewers.
They feel frustrating sometimes
in that the brews can be quite slow,
and you'll have maybe waited four and a half minutes
to work out that your grind
isn't entirely where you want it to be,
as it's either finished,
or is nowhere near finished at that point.
They're slow enough
that I don't wanna reach for them every single day,
but I do think they're interesting options to have around
as part of your kind of brewer collection.
I think there are certain coffees
that lend themselves better towards these high yield things.
I think coffees with tons of sweetness
that aren't overly developed in the roast do better.
And the more developed coffee is in the roast,
the kind of lower overall extraction I'd be aiming for.
Now, it interests me that the recommended dose here
is about 30 grams,
because if you take the diameter of the sort of brewer
and scale that dose down to this,
well, that's like a 20-ish gram dose on this brewer,
which, you know, they claim to be able to brew
half that amount.
So I don't know, you know, with a bit of skill and effort
if you could get good results from smaller doses,
but I think in both cases,
the thinner the bed,
the harder it is to get a very even result,
not to have channeling issues,
not to have it be a bit of a finicky, fussy experience,
especially when you wanna be manipulating those,
swirling those less
with those kinda smaller doses.
Now, what we haven't done today in this video
is get into recommended techniques.
Is there a perfect way of using these?
That isn't really something I wanted to address
in this video.
I wanted to kind of cover the concepts of no bypass,
to look at these two brewers in a kind of objective way.
There are recommendations on YouTube.
I'll leave some links to both the official ones
and some other creators who have some interesting recipes
and ideas around these brewers
should you want to explore them further.
As for which one I would pick,
kind of both or neither.
I sort of want a hybrid of the two to exist.
I want some of the sort of design features
and ease of use around this incorporated into this.
Probably closer to this in size.
I just want the kind of paper bit of this
to be slightly more joyful,
and it to feel maybe a little bit more premium.
It's not bad in its construction
and it's a good food safe plastic,
but it just doesn't quite have
the kind of premium feel of this.
Though saying that they do do other colorways
of the Tricolate.
They have this kind of nice orangey one.
They do a kind of very blue one
that's kind of intense.
I quite like this color.
I think it's pretty nice.
Now, I wanna hear from you.
Do you own one of these brewers?
Do you even own both?
Do you have a favorite?
Does your experience match with mine
or did you have a very different one to me?
I wanna hear from you down in the comments below.
But for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching
and I hope you have a great day.