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Coffee Equipment for Beginners | What kind of coffee dripper is suitable for novices learning about coffee? Which brand of V60 dripper is good? What are the advantages of the V60 dripper?
New-style drippers emerge every year in endless variety. They come in all shapes and forms, and each has its own strengths: some drippers can alter the flow rate of the brew; some drippers can achieve zero bypass; some drippers can even change their shape!Although there are countless types of drippers in all shapes and sizes, if an experienced high-end enthusiast were to recommend a dripper to a beginner, chances are that dripper would almost certainly be the "V60" invented by Hario!
And Front Street Coffee counts itself as a "veteran" V60 user—after all, the vast majority of beans brewed in our stores use it, with thousands of uses every year. SoThis leaves many friends puzzled: with so many types of drippers out there, why does everyone favor the V60 so much? So today, Front Street Coffee will reveal: what exactly makes the V60 stand out from the crowd!
The Origin of the V60The V60 dripper was invented by the Japanese company Hario, which was founded in 1921,mainly dedicated to designing and producing heat-resistant glass instruments and equipment for scientific research institutions. To date, it has won hundreds of design awards, and the V60 dripper is its most famous invention. After World War II, Hario took advantage of the properties of heat-resistant glass and the glass-processing techniques cultivated through manufacturing chemical products to beginsiphonproduction, and formally entered the household products field. Coffee equipment was one of the key R&D areas at the time—for example, the sharing carafe that often appears in Front Street Coffee's articles and images is a Hario product.
But at that time, slow immersion extraction was the mainstream brewing method in the Japanese coffee market—after all, what Japanese people pursued was a cup of coffee with high concentration and high body.So at that time, the vast majority of coffee equipment was developed around this concept! Either it was very cumbersome to operate, or the flow rate was slow and the extraction time was long. But Hario did not want the hassle of making a cup of coffee, so it set out to develop a dripper that was simple to operate and had a shorter extraction time. And so, Hario began its journey of creating the V60!In 1964, a Hario designer first tried using a laboratory funnel to extract coffee, but since it was only an experiment at the time and not used commercially, not many related records were kept. In the years that followed, several products were developed based on this funnel, but they did not receive much of a response. It wasn't until 2004 that Hario tried attaching several toothpicks to the original funnel-shaped device as flow guides, and found that the effect was extraordinary. So the following year, based on this experimental prototype, they redesigned a dripper and launched it for sale! And that dripper is the now universally known "V60"!
V60 The name "V60" comes from the cone angle of the dripper, because the 60° cone angle forms a"V" shape, so Hario simply named it V60—simple and easy to remember.
Compared with fan-shaped and flat-bottom drippers, the conical dripper has a distinctly different advantage: its wide-top, narrow-bottom conical structure not only gathers the coffee grounds together but also guides the water flow, allowing hot water to converge at the center before dripping into the server. This structure increases the contact area between hot water and coffee grounds, allowing the flavor compounds in the coffee to be extracted more effectively.
But we need to know that Hario was not the first company to invent a conical dripper, so the V60's success is not due solely to its conical structure. And here, Front Street Coffee has to mention the V60's other two major features! Because it is precisely these two features combined with the dripper's conical structure that have kept the V60 competitive even today, 20 years later! Let's start with the V60's most distinctive feature: the spiral flow-guiding ribs covering the entire dripper! Many friends think these ribs merely add ventilation for the coffee grounds when they degas, because the original ribs were designed for that reason. But that's not all! We can see that unlike other drippers, the V60's flow-guiding ribs are not straight lines but winding spiral lines.
The presence of the flow-guiding ribs causes the hot water around the edges to flow along them!A straight line is the shortest distance, and the spiral design undoubtedly lengthens the path of the hot water flow. Simply put, it plays a guiding role, making the hot water pass through more coffee grounds and extract more coffee compounds. Whether it's the conical structure or the protruding spiral flow-guiding ribs, the V60 is reinforcing the extraction of coffee grounds by hot water! Why?Because the V60 has a relatively large drainage hole. The size of the hole changes the seepage speed of the coffee liquid, and the V60's hole is famously large. The large hole greatly increases the flow rate, so the coffee's flow speed largely depends on changes in other aspects. Under the V60 dripper's fast-extraction framework, the brewed coffee, because its extraction uniformity is relatively not as high, ends up with a strong sense of layers!
Why do we say that? Because, as Front Street Coffee said earlier, the original extraction methods and equipment tended toward slow immersion extraction, which caused hot water to "demand" from the coffee grounds over a long period! All the coffee grounds would dissolve out roughly the same amount of substances, so the coffee tasted full-bodied, silky, and very balanced. The V60's fast extraction, by contrast, shortens the extraction time, so the hot water cannot make all the coffee grounds release the same amount of substances. As a result, some flavors in the coffee are more prominent while others are faint and elusive. The layers are distinct and very pleasant!This kind of extraction is very suitable for the light-roast coffee that has just become mainstream, so the V60, "born at just the right time," immediately became a huge hit!
To this day, the V60 remains a top contender among drippers. Not only because the mainstream of this era is light-roast coffee, but also because it can make a cup of layered, delicious coffee in the simplest way. So if you are a beginner friend who wants to buy a dripper for pour-over coffee, the V60 really is a good choice~- END -
