Types of Coffee Drippers and Their Characteristics: How to Choose the Right One for You

Introduction to Pour-Over Coffee Filters

As a coffee beginner starting with pour-over coffee, you'll discover that pour-over kettles, filter cups, and filter papers are quite important. While you can use other containers to hold your coffee without a serving pot, without a filter cup, it's like a skilled cook trying to make a meal without rice—you can't filter the coffee grounds, which means you can't drink it.

With the arrival of the third wave of coffee, pour-over coffee has gained increasing popularity among coffee enthusiasts. Consequently, various styles of coffee filter cups have appeared on the market. As a coffee beginner, facing such a dazzling array of filter cups can be overwhelming. So what types of coffee filter cups are there? FrontStreet Coffee will introduce several common and popular filter cups below.

What filter cup is best for pour-over coffee? Conical filter cups, trapezoidal filter cups, origami filter cups, cake cups...

Understanding Coffee Extraction

For coffee brewing, we first need to understand the sequence of flavor extraction. The first flavors to emerge are fruit acids and floral aromas; followed by caramel sweetness, roasted nut flavors, and rich body; finally, bitterness appears. Bitterness masks sweetness, and sweetness masks acidity. With too long extraction time, bitterness masks all flavors; with medium extraction time, rich sweetness is most prominent, but the delicate changes of the refreshing acidity in the early stage become less obvious; with shorter extraction time, there will be obvious floral and fruit aromas, with refreshing sweet and sour notes, but the body is reduced.

Secondly, it's important to know that each filter cup, due to its shape, filter holes, and groove configuration, will have different effects on the extraction's taste. Each filter cup has its own design advantages, basically making trade-offs in controlling water flow speed, ribs, and venting.

Conical Filter Cups and Their Characteristics

The representative of conical filter cups is undoubtedly the V60 filter cup—economical and practical, and probably the most commonly used filter cup in FrontStreet Coffee's stores and FrontStreet Coffee's factory.

The V60 filter cup gets its name from its 60-degree conical design. This angle guides water flow to the center, extending the contact time between water and coffee. The large-diameter filter hole at the bottom allows you to control the flavor extraction time by changing the pour size. The spiral ribs (venting grooves) allow air to escape upward from all sides, maximizing the coffee grounds' degassing process. If you enjoy the floral and fruit aromas in the early stages of coffee, along with sweet and sour flavors, this type of filter cup can easily achieve short extraction times.

Trapezoidal Filter Cups and Their Characteristics

Trapezoidal filter cups are relatively classic pour-over filter cups, with brands like Kalita and Melitta offering such products. In design, they feature a fan shape that's wider at the top and narrower at the bottom, with an oval appearance at the top. The cup walls have many straight ribs with consistent spacing between them, designed to increase venting and water flow speed. Because the bottom has three small circular holes, water flows out relatively slowly, making the entire process a semi-immersion extraction. Due to the longer extraction time, the water temperature should be slightly lower (try 85-88°C). If you still want some early-stage aroma, consider grinding the coffee coarser, using less coffee, or simply switching to a conical filter cup!

Origami Filter Cups and Their Characteristics

The origami filter cup became famous in the coffee circle when Dou Jianing used it to win the World Brewers Championship. Its unique origami design and beautiful colors have made it a must-have for coffee enthusiasts. It fits perfectly with cake-shaped filter papers, allowing for even distribution of the coffee grounds and moderate flow rate during extraction. When used with conical filter papers, the origami filter cup has a faster flow rate. It can be said that using the origami filter cup for pour-over brewing with different filter papers combines the flow characteristics of both conical and trapezoidal filter cups, offering high versatility and easily handling coffee beans with different flavor characteristics.

Cake Filter Cups and Their Characteristics

The flat-bottom design of the filter cup creates an evenly distributed flat-bottom structure for the coffee grounds bed. With the same amount of coffee, the flat-bottom structure creates a thinner grounds bed, allowing water to flow through the coffee grounds in a shorter time. The flat-bottom structure also ensures more even extraction. The filter cup has three small filter holes, making the water filtration speed slower, which makes the cake filter cup tend toward immersion extraction after pouring. The cake filter cup itself doesn't have ribs (venting grooves) for venting, requiring the folds of the cake filter paper to replace the flow-guiding ribs. The cake filter cup uses the special design of filter paper folds to replace flow-guiding grooves, not directly fitting against the filter cup, reducing the direct contact area between filter paper and filter cup, and creating the maximum extraction area.

FrontStreet Coffee has mentioned these common filter cups—quickly choose one that suits you, brew a cup of pour-over coffee, and slowly enjoy this quiet and leisurely time!

Important Notice :

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