Revisiting the CAFEC flower dripper deep27

This has been sitting in my drafts for a while now in a half-baked state. This morning i picked up the deep27 to test against a coffee i'd been having trouble with. I loved the result so much that i immediately opened this post and finished it. If you have one of these cones, i hope this information is useful to you. If you don't have one of these cones and this post somehow convinced you to buy one, well - here's my Amazon affiliate links for the cone and the filters (Amazon Japan. I'm not sure if this redirects to the relevant page in each region, but feel free to try). You don't have to use it, of course, but feel free to if you're so inclined.

After an initial experimentation phase (you can read about it here), this dripper fell by the wayside a little bit. It's felt harder to figure out than, say, a v60 is, and couldn't make more than an individual serving of coffee at a time. Some mornings - especially the ones where i needed coffee before i could make coffee - i felt that it was more trouble working with this dripper than it was worth.

I've tested this dripper on and off over the past few months, though, and have come to a few more conclusions since then that i think clarified the dripper a bit for me.

What opinions still hold?

First, i'm going to start with what's stayed the same.

1. I still think the paper taste is way too strong for my liking. I'd still rinse the paper twice before using it. Even if the flavour doesn't actually end up in the cup, smelling the paper while i'm brewing really messes with my brain and the brewing experience.
2. I still think grinding finer with this dripper is a good idea. The flow rate on this dripper is fast, and increasing surface area by grinding finer is probably the most important lever to achieve the extraction you want.

What's changed / what's new?

My main takeaway is - the key variable for this dripper is agitation. I previously thought less pours performed better, and that this brewer provided more texture and roundness with the tradeoff of less acidity. While that's not necessarily wrong, i no longer think that's my default framework for this dripper.

Instead, my default framework is now like this: grind finer, and focus on agitating the coffee bed as much as possible.

When it comes to agitation, the narrow cone does 2 things. First, it restricts churning on the coffee bed. The coffee doesn't really have much space to be agitated, and settles very quickly. Second, it restricts the way you pour. The small opening means you can only really pour in very small circles, which also reduces the amount of agitation you can introduce.

With other drippers like the v60, agitation is sort of a background variable when i pour - i don't actively think about it unless the other parameters are already figured out and the coffee still doesn't taste right. In the deep27, however, it's the main thing i focus on. I have to be intentional with introducing agitation by pouring aggressively, with as thin a stream as i can achieve while still being aggressive. The constraints of the cone make over-agitation less of a concern - it's quite hard to cause over-agitation when the cone is actively fighting against it.

And since i'm trying to introduce as much agitation as possible, less pours isn't necessarily better. This will vary according to the coffee you're brewing, but i've personally settled on 4 pours rather than the 3 that i used before.

And even then... its still not enough. The coffee i've been brewing would still come out round but somewhat flat. This led me to introduce 2 swirls of the cone after every pour to further increase agitation. An added positive (and this is just a theory - unproven - but feels like it could be plausible) is that the swirls collapse channels in the coffee bed that occur each pour due to the narrow bed, leading to more even extraction.

My new recipe

• Bias to grinding finer first, then adjust coarser if needed. As a reference point, on my 1zpresso k-max, this is usually in the 4.9 to 5.2 range.
• 4 pours
• 15% - 50% - 20% - 15% split (So if you're brewing, say, 13g of coffee to 220g of water, the pours look like this: 33g, +110g to 143g, +44g to 187g, +33g to 220g)
• Pour aggressively, ignore trying to wash grinds down the side of the cone (this will slow the pour and reduce the amount of water you're actually using to agitate the bed)
• swirl the cone after each pour

I found that front loading the pouring worked well in getting a good extraction and expression of acidity. The low volumes in the 3rd and 4th pour create mouthfeel.

The brew might be fast - don't worry about that. I was regularly getting 2:10 brews. They tasted really, really good.

Final thoughts

This recipe has consistently delivered a fuller sweetness, nice and bright acidity, and a thicker mouthfeel compared to my v60 brews. The caveat, of course, is that i generally prefer light roasted coffees. I haven't tested this on darker roasts, simply because i don't have any darker roast coffees, so your mileage may vary on those.

An anecdote, and the catalyst for me finishing this post: I'd struggled for days with an extremely light roast that drained extremely slowly - think brew times of >5mins when it should've been closer to 3, where going coarser would negatively affect the brew - regardless of how i poured. The resulting cup would be... not too bad, actually. But you could tell that it wasn't complete. There'd be one single floral note, and not much else.

I put this coffee through the deep27 and it brewed like magic, opening up the single tasting note into more complex flavours.

The only think holding me back from turning this into my daily brewer is the cone capacity. To brew anything more than a cup means brewing twice - not very compatible with my everyday morning workflow.

This dripper is a great option for when i'm brewing a coffee that might be less developed, or might otherwise struggle on a flat bed or v60-like cone brewer. But i think until there's a way to brew a larger amount at a time, it'll be a tool in my toolkit but not my daily driver.