V60 Dripper 02

Most brewers are designed to control you a little. A narrow spout, a restricted base, a shape that meters the water whatever you do with the kettle. The V60 02 does none of that, and it is why some people never get on with it.

Hario's V60 02 is a porcelain pour-over cone with a single large drain hole, wide enough that the tip of the paper filter pokes through, so the dripper never throttles the flow. Three details do the brewing, and Hario's own manual walks through each. The cone is steep, which stands the bed of grounds deep rather than wide and slides the water toward the centre, keeping it in contact with the coffee longer on the way down. The ribs spiralling up the inside wall are raised and twisted, so the paper cannot seal itself against the ceramic and the air pushed out by the swelling grounds has somewhere to go. Then the hole, doing nothing to slow anything down.

What that leaves is your pour. Because the flow is never restricted, the speed of the kettle sets the strength of the cup: Hario compares the effect to brewing through cloth, and says pouring faster or slower is what makes the coffee lighter or heavier. The starting point from Hario is 10 to 12 grams of coffee per 120 millilitre serving, a 30 second bloom, and the whole brew finished inside three minutes.

Each one is thrown in Arita, a pottery town firing porcelain since the early 1600s, by a local maker rather than a machine. The classic pair is white and red, catalogued VDC-02W and VDC-02R, and a second line runs to eleven colours, among them a Saddle glaze that sits lighter on the raised edges of the ribs and pools darker in the troughs between them.