"Welcome to Five Senses Coffee"

Say hello to our newest addition. I first came across these little drippers at the 2008 Seattle Coffee Fest, but it wasn’t until I saw them in action at Café Myriad in Montreal that I had the chance to appreciate how good they actually are. It’s such a simple idea that you can’t help but kick yourself for not coming up with it. They tick a lot of the boxes that need to be ticked when you’re thinking individual brewers. They’re simple, cheap, virtually unbreakable, and commercially viable, because you don’t need to sit and nurse them through a brew. Lastly, the concept actually works.

It’s a free standing, one cup filter (which is often called a pour-over) with one very important addition — a valve that keeps your brew from drawing down until you activate it by sitting it on a cup. What’s so good about that? Well, the way the valve works means that you can control all the variables of your brew independently of each other. You know the ones I’m talking about! No matter which brewing method you’re using, it always comes down to the same variables — grind size, the amount of coffee you dose, water weight, water temperature and the amount of time that the water and coffee are in contact.

With a traditional pour-over, trying to control the amount of time that the coffee and water are in contact with each other can be very frustrating. Because there’s nothing to stop the water coming out right away, you have to compensate by adjusting your grind size, hopefully slowing down the flow of water. Therein lies the beauty of the Clever Coffee Dripper! I have no problem calling it clever, because the addition of that one little valve solves this problem and opens up lots of room for experimentation. You can adjust one variable at a time, while keeping all the others constant, and test your results.

Another feature worth mentioning is the free-standing part. This allows you to set the entire brew up on scales so that you can accurately measure your desired dose of coffee and water. It also means that in a café, the Clever Coffee Drippers can be lined up on the back bench with timers, making it totally feasible to have several in action at once. It’s perfect for home, but honestly, would work beautifully in a café. The syphon craze has certainly sparked our interest, but the commercial reality of a syphon can be somewhat daunting. Now that we have the Extract Mojo on hand at Five Senses, we can take it one step further, eliminate some of the trial and error and accurately measure our extraction yield as well as TDS (total dissolved solids), making it much easier to accurately calibrate our grinder.

It’s so easy to use that you really don’t need instructions, but this video might satisfy your curiosity, and here’s our how-to just in case…

1. Insert filter and rinse with hot water.
2. Add coffee freshly ground for filter (about 35gms).
3. Add hot water (about 320mls, 30 seconds off boiled).
4. After about 30 seconds, use a spoon to gently submerge the grinds, which will have floated to the top.
5. Let it steep for about 3.5 minutes. Set a timer to make sure that you steep for the right amount of time, because this is important!
6. Sit the Clever Coffee Dripper on a glass or cup.
7. Watch it work its magic!

Abid Clever Coffee Dripper from The Other Black Stuff on Vimeo.