Reducing Waste June Update - Brew Methods

Hello all 5 of you who read this blog,

A quick update on our ongoing efforts to reduce waste in and around our shops. 

After a lot of testing and some hemming and hawing, we took the plunge (mostly) and will be transitioning from Clevers/Kalitas to the Walkure Bayreuth coffee makers. We've been using the Clevers and Kalitas for almost all our manual coffee brewing for years now and this is a hard thing to switch. Both those brew methods use paper filters which, compared to metal filters, gave us a really clean, bright cup of coffee. Finding something reusable that didn't make the coffee taste bad was hard. We tried a number of metal filters, all of which led to either a super muddy, bland cup of coffee or something that took lightyears to brew through. Don't get me started on wooden and cloth filters. 

We then stumbled upon this ceramic brewer which uses a ceramic filter, something I had never heard of, nor thought possible. I have to be honest, I had zero faith that this was going to be any good. The holes seemed too large to keep the grit out and I didn't understand at all how this could possibly result in anything but a massively muddy cup. 

Boy was I surprised. Apparently the magic is that the ceramic filter uses the coffee itself as a sort of filter to keep out most of the grit while letting in a lot more flavor and oil that you normally don't get with a paper or cloth filter. The cup is still clean and clear, but somehow with a bit more body. Win/win. 

By the end of this week, almost all of our manual brewing will be done on these. I say almost because we'll still be holding onto a few Clevers just in case. 

Looking ahead, after all my bitching about a lack of reusable batch brew options, I found a company out in Utah that can custom make metal filters. So we'll probably order 1 and see how it goes. Stay tuned. 

- B