For the past few months I have been going through coffee brewing items. For years I have brewed about 50 ounces of coffee in a press-pot for my morning consumption. Then I started to read of a few studies that said that unfiltered coffee can raise your cholesterol levels. I don’t need that. So I started looking for alternatives.

I started with an Aeropress. This is a neat process. The only problem I had with it is that I could never get a great cup out of it. It seems that you have to either live with making twelve ounces at a time or you brew a concentrate that is then diluted. Just didn’t work for me.

Then I picked up a pour-over setup from Hario. This was definitely a step in the right direction as the flavor could be dialed in pretty effectively. You just change the size of the grind and the water’s contact with the grounds changes. Finer leads to longer pours and greater extraction. But still it was not approaching the press-pot experience.

A couple weeks ago I started reading a tumblr blog by Jason Dominy. He uses a Clever Coffee Dripper which is a pretty simple and, well, clever fix. The device is a filter basket that has a valve placed at the bottom of it. You put in a normal cone filter and put your water and grounds in. Set up a timer and four or so minutes later, put it on a cup and out comes the coffee. So basically the filter basket out of your Mr. Coffee but set up so that the valve in the bottom of the basket is released when the unit is placed on a cup.

This process gives you control over the residence time your water is in contact with the grounds without having to vary the grind size.  Now it is even better than what you can do with a press-pot as the coffee for a press-pot must be ground exceedingly coarsely so it can be filtered out with the screen. The Clever Coffee Dripper allows fine, independent control over all of the variables of the brewing process–time, grind size and temperature.

My first cup out of this system was really good. The second was better and the third better still. I’m not necessarily finding the mouthfeel that you can get from unfiltered processes, but the taste is getting there. I really recommend this process.