Liz Clayton is a long-standing pal of Sprudge and a top drawer New York coffee photographer/gal about town (her daguerreotypic oeuvre also includes woof-woofs, meow-meows, and deli sandwiches floating in space). First mocked on this website for her work at twitchy.org, she’s been covering both tea and coffee as of late for Serious Eats and today has brought us a brand new feature, this lovely survey of ceramic coffee drippers with clarion instructions and still-life photos (think of Counter Culture’s Pro Cone as a resting piece of fruit). Read on as she extrapolates the Bonmac’s place on America’s culinary honey-do list, categorizes the “telltale fingerhook” of the Beehouse dripper, and explores the Hario V60’s “unusually large hole”.
In a world revering hyper-speed transmissions, bullet trains, and instant gratification of every kind, the back-to-basics ideologies of “slow coffee” have been a little bit of a tough sell.
You’ve likely seen the highly manual array of brewers migrate—pretty much all from Japan—to the front bars of the best cafes: a small army of ceramic cones perched on a rack above what’s soon to be your own custom cup of coffee. But as the choices multiply—and don’t these things look just like the plastic Melitta cone in the back of your cupboard anyway?—which one is the best for your brew?
