In an event packed with big, shiny brewing methods, one booth at the New York Coffee Festival stood out as the next small thing in soup-to-nuts brewing: Beanscorp Company’s Cafflano portable brewing system from Korea.
The Cafflano Coffee Brewer combines everything you need (outside of the consumable stuff, that is) to brew a single cup of pour-over coffee: a manual grinder, filter, portioned pourer, and insulated cup, all nested snugly together in a very portable form that’s about the size of a medium-sized thermos. So long as you have beans and brew-temperature water, you can put together a fresh-ground cup of coffee wherever your travels take you.
Don’t let the first-blush simplicity fool you, Beanscorp takes great pride in the precision, adjustability, and quality of materials used in all of the components.
Start with the grinder: it’s a ceramic burr grinder with indexed fine-to-coarse adjustability to adapt to user preferences and coffee types. From there the coffee can be ground directly into the built-in filter/dripper made with finely perforated steel (rather than a cheaper mesh basket—think Kone rather than your parents’ Braun). Preheated water can be poured using the 270-milliliter cap, which uses a precisely molded spout to allow for pour control down to a single drop with steady, pre-caffeinated hands. Once brewed, the coffee will travel to the double-walled stainless steel tumbler (to keep your java warm) that has a capacity of 250 milliliters (a “small” cup stateside) from the bottom of the filter (450 milliliters to the brim). There’s even a lid for the tumbler that stores on the kettle/pourer.
For brewing, Beanscorp team recommends 15–20 grams of whole bean coffee per cup, depending on the grind and taste preference. There’s even room for a few doses of measured beans for travel when your Cafflano is closed up.
The team is also quick to point out the eco-friendliness of a single-cup brewer that doesn’t involve pods or paper filters. And they take user health seriously, using FDA-approved steel and BPA-free plastics (so you don’t have to worry putting hot water into that cap).
You can draw a precise line from their pride in the Cafflano construction details to the Beanscorp team’s background in various parts of semiconductor production and marketing for a large Korean electronics manufacturer. As friends and co-workers who had an interest in coffee, they decided to take their technical knowledge to brewing. Two years of R&D (and one unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign) culminated in the Cafflano Klassic, which debuted in January 2015.
The public reception was encouraging from the jump-off: after raising almost $50,000 in crowdfunding from the public, they were awarded “Most Innovative Product” at The Cookshop & Housewares Association show and “Best Domestic Coffee Equipment” award at SCAE Nordic World of Coffee. And we can vouch that throughout the NYCF weekend, the demos were well-populated with curious visitors.
The system is available for retail purchase at their site, cafflanoshop.com, with a $99 MSRP.
D. Robert Wolcheck is a Sprudge contributor based in New York City. Read more D. Robert Wolcheck on Sprudge.
