My Current Daily Driver: Hario Switch + Sibarist

today i want to do something a little bit different think of this as my daily driver but for coffee it's the brewing method that i'm using right now something that i'm favoring right now it's not the best brew method it's not the ultimate brew method it's just something that i'm enjoying and in this one it led me to an experiment that i think is worth sharing that i think is super interesting too so right now i am brewing a lot with this it's the harrio switch it's harrio's answer to the clever coffee dripper now the clover i've been using a lot at home because i'm trying to work on my brew guide for the clever and one of the challenges with this brewer is the drawdown time now the way it works is very simple you put a filter paper in you put coffee and water in you let it steep because at the bottom there's a little stopper that only opens when you put it on a cup and then it drains out i really like steep and release brewers i like them a lot this combination of infusion at the start where the coffee and water just hangs out together with this kind of percolation paper separation phase i just like the end results a lot now in my research and testing i thought it would be interesting to compare the clever to the harrier switch now the way that it works is a little bit different to how the clever works this has a kind of metal ball bearing acting as a kind of stopper right at the bottom when you push the switch it pops the ball bearing up and your coffee drains out but really it is a glass of e60 in the base here and i thought that was interesting to test but it led me to test with other filter papers to try and find faster drawdowns and that led me to to an interesting result i know you probably have questions about this jumper you are gonna have to wait to the end of the video for that to illustrate my point to start us off i'm gonna brew a simple brew with this thing using the tabbed bagged hario filters i think that's a good benchmark and i'll talk you through how i brew the switch it is different so far into how i'm brewing the clever so it's not a kind of one for one here i'll be brewing 15 grams of coffee to 250 grams of water and i'll be running a two-minute steep a little stir and a drain let's do that now now i kind of do a blooming phase at the moment which is just add two to one and then give it a little swirl just to kind of get rid of any pockets of dry coffee before i infuse as a whole now as i said i do like infusion brewing you can just let coffee and water steep and you're not worried about evenness of extraction as long as all of the coffee is is kind of getting wet there's no pockets of dry coffee anywhere you're having a pretty even extraction and that's good because with percolation like a pour over or espresso you're worried about evenness you're worried about channeling all of those things are a concern generally i've been grinding pretty fine for this um just a little bit finer in some cases than kind of my cupping setting because i've been sort of steeping for just two minutes before beginning the drawdown process what i'll do then i'll give it a little stir one way and the other like in a b60 and then i'll drain it out i'll flip the switch and away we'll go so with this initially the drawdown is pretty fast and then it begins to slow down and almost choke a little bit and you think it's going to take 30 seconds to drain but it doesn't it takes much much longer than that and what's likely happening is very fine particles are clogging the filter paper up making it difficult for the liquid to pass through and i had wondered if that's the case how much of the problem is the paper versus the bed if this could happen faster would it still taste really good so we're done that is a about a two minute ten drawdown phase we're at a sort of four minutes 25 total uh brew time which is a pretty long slow brew time and there's something about a slow draw down that's just infuriating to me it's just maddening to watch this thing happen very slowly but if i wanted that bit to go faster well the question i had to answer was how much extraction am i doing in the infusion phase and how much am i doing in the percolation phase so what i'll need to do is replicate this brew but skip the second stage let me do that now everything just the same [Music] 250 grams and a two minutes deep and as before at two minutes i'll give it that little stir i'll let it rest for sort of 15 seconds to have some of that bed fall to the bottom and then i'm gonna make a terrible mess i've never done this without making a mess so i'm just accepting at this point what i'm going to do is try and decant the liquid from the top of this through this b60 paper here to sort of you know clarify a little bit to strain out whatever fines are suspended in there but but sort of skip the step where it flows through the bed so wish me luck that's about normal so you can see here there's the bed that we're trying to avoid nice and flat one should note at the bottom there which is good and a terrible mess as usual while this drains i'll clean this up and we'll be back in just a second so we now have two brews we've got the regular immersion plus percolation phase and then we've got the just immersion phase with a little bit of straining happening there just to get rid of the fines and that kind of stuff these we can then test and measure to see the difference both with tasting which i think is very important but also with one of these it's a refractometer this measures the speed of light through coffee or more usefully gives a refractive index of the liquid it tells us how much stuff is dissolved in the coffee liquid and we can calculate back from that how much of the ground coffee we extracted into the liquid that we're gonna drink so a little stir you do want to stir your filter coffee if you're testing it much like you want to stir your espresso i don't know what i'm talking about there's a video up here we could take a drop place it on the sensor and away we test now the absolute number is not super important here yes this is a percentage that suggests a good extraction but that's not really the point the point is the difference between the two so here about 1.35 is coming up pretty consistently let's compare it to the other one all right oh big difference huge difference actually now you might argue that 0.3 is not a huge difference of anything but it turns out in brewed coffee that is a big difference but let's taste them is this a wild variation that is very nice that is very well extracted super balanced nice clarity nice acidity it's it's yummy basically this based on this should be pretty bad and it's not great but it's so it's so much better than it should be it's so much better than it should be if you brewed a v60 and produced that strength and had that extraction it would taste really bad this doesn't this has some texture and body and mouth feel it just feels a bit empty i'm increasingly of the belief that there is something particularly uh useful about infusion brews for having what feels like a nice texture nice mouth feel to your coffee very easily i think this kind of makes sense of those moments when someone grinds quite coarsely for a french press but still has a pretty good result i think something about the infusion brewing that has a kind of tolerance of ground size that can kind of quite easily get you to something pretty good i think that's interesting but but this cup is it is unquestionably better right there's no question at all in my mind this is more complex sweeter more enjoyable better finish everything about it is better this is just surprisingly not bad it's just not great either though so now i want to talk about the siberis papers these are really interesting i actually made a very rare patreon only video comparing these and a few other kind of third-party v60 filters so i have looked at them before but they are fast flow filters they allow coffee to drain through the paper much quicker by being more porous when you brew with these you get a little bit of sediment in the cup they're closer to a very fine metal filter than they are paper in some ways or a kind of halfway house between those two like a fine metal filter and a paper filter that's where they are they don't do the clarity of cloth but they still taste kind of like a paper filter they're really interesting they're also really expensive and i'm also aware the harrier switch is a little bit expensive and i'm very lucky that i can play with these and i hope my experiments yield some interesting learning so i should acknowledge that these are expensive both the brewer and the papers before i brew with these though and talk about why i think it's so interesting there's a couple things to take care of firstly this video has an ad in it which means it also has a grinder giveaway right now for every sponsored video i'm giving away five bereza encores trying to give them to people who could really do with a great grinder in their life if you can afford a grinder right now and you need one please just go and buy one from a local business support your local businesses right now now more than ever but if you're out of work down in your luck if life is hard and a grinder would improve your life enter the competition down below you need to be in one of the 39 countries around the world where we can get you a grinder and warranty it afterwards with baratza's support so if you're not in those countries i'm sorry we'll try and do something for you in the future click the link down below it's free to enter and i wish you the best of luck and this is possible because this video does have an ad in it it's sponsored by morningbrew morningbrew is a witty useful relevant newspaper that appears in your inbox monday through saturday and it's free i've actually been signed up for nearly two years now and it is a great way to start the day it's easy to wake up and just become instantly overloaded by news finance tech all of this kind of stuff going on but i like having something i can sit down and read and enjoy with a cup of coffee and that's exactly where morning brew comes in and i like it not just because it's digestible neat pieces of news i can consume in that five minutes over coffee but because it doesn't take everything too seriously it's fun as well there are book recommendations in there and often little trivia games and other things just to get the brain going in the morning and like i said it's free so if you're interested in business or tech or finance click the link down below it takes less than 15 seconds and you can subscribe to morning brew today thanks to them for sponsoring this video everything the same as before we'll swirl and we'll let this steep again for two minutes before we stir and flip the switch and then go and we're done a little bit under 45 seconds which is which is pretty fast now this leaves me with a whole bunch of questions if this drains really fast are we missing out on contact time are we are we reducing our contact time and therefore dramatically reducing our extraction at 45 seconds it's nearly a minute and a half faster as a brew or shorter as a brew than with the regular hario papers what's that going to do and also if these papers are more porous am i likely to see some bypass happening is liquid flowing out of the paper because it can quite easily instead of down through the bed is that going to drop my extraction a lot as well there's only one way to find out let's measure it now like i said this does have a little bit more sediment in the brew so having stirred it i'm going to just decant a little bit through a new paper just to clarify it and take out any of that sediment i don't need much liquid but i do need to strain it properly to get a good refractive index reading all right let's get a little sample droplet here it is it seems lower but barely any lower that additional contact time didn't dramatically increase our extraction which is kind of notable and if there is some bypass happening well it's not really damaging to the brew overall how's the taste yeah very good it does have that nice immersion extraction profile that i really like it's just very tasty nice clarity nice acidity would i go a little bit finer i might actually just to kind of bring it to a more balanced extraction point or something closer to the harrier paper it would need maybe one tiny notch finer on a grinder i really wouldn't worry about this longer brew time from a finer grind or a longer drawdown because these drawdowns are so fast because of these papers so you get i think a great result from a very enjoyable brew method it's kind of easy to dial in you get this nice immersion percolation combination you can go pretty fine get pretty high extractions get great tasting cups of coffee that happen pretty quickly and i don't mind a little tiny bit of sediment in my cup i don't mind that at all actually it still tastes pretty clean there's still some nice fresh crisp acidity to the cup if that's what you're into i'm a little bit impressed and again i will say they are expensive i know they're expensive to buy there are new companies starting up doing a new thing that can often mean what you're doing is more expensive i hope they grow i'm kind of into what they're doing i don't want to use subarus for everything and sometimes i do want more clarity and more filtration than they offer but i i do like using them as a kind of steep and release filter in this particular setup with a switch would i recommend exactly the same thing for my clever no i'd recommend a slightly different thing but i will make a video about that very soon i do really like the clever dripper as a brood tool because it is so cheap so easy to use and it makes great coffee but that's for another time i did say i would tell you about this delightful christmas jumper and now is the time at tens hundreds of thousands we decided we would do an ugly coffee christmas jumper we worked with artist michael b myers on kind of pixel art so you have everything from like an aeropress to a drip pot a takeaway cup pour overs bueno kettles latte art this isn't a snowflake this is a coffee flower there's porta filters on my sleeves these are knitted to order so this isn't printed this is actually knitted and they are a single run once they're gone they're gone i know they're a little bit expensive but we wanted to do it right and have them knitted and that way they're just so much more awesome than like a printed sweatshirt but if you want to know more there's a link in the description down below but for now uh i'll hand it off to you have you used the siberis filters yet have you tried them have you tried the switch are you a clever dripper fan are you waiting for that video i'm sorry it is coming soon i would love to hear from you down in the comments below but for now i'll say thank you so much for watching and i hope you have a great day

Channel: James Hoffmann

Views: 1,035,298

Keywords: james hoffmann, james hoffman, jimseven, coffee, square mile coffee, square mile coffee roasters

Id: QjIvN8mlK9Y

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/JORGA]

Eagerly awaiting the clever dripper guide!

[u/elmtube]

Isn’t this the same as inverted aeropress?

[u/blingboyduck]

I've been using the Hario Switch for Several weeks now!

My current method is actually a two stage immersion with half the water each time.

i.e I brew twice but only use half the water each time (and I re boil the kettle each time).

[u/iamstillsleeping]

Ok, I am honest: I don’t fully understand the video. James tried making coffee with the Hario switch and liked it with the normal Hario filters, but the drawdown time was too long. But why did he test the other filters? They were faster, but were the tasting results better? Is the longer drawdown time (although it tastes good) such a disadvantage that he switched over to very expensive filters? I would argue that good coffee takes its time but I think that’s not the point he is trying to make, is it?

[u/BobbieTurns123]

Whats the best value for money poor over v60? The Hario decanter seems alright but is there better alternatives, cause I have only seen James use it.

[u/Krauser_Kahn]

Why is that thing so expensive? Makes me want to make some kind of DIY V60 plug to achieve the same result.

[u/hillsanddales]

I guess one thing to test might be a shorter steep with the Hario filter vs longer steep with the Sibarist, for the same total brew time.

[u/Evning]

How does that filter paper compare to cafec’s?

Base on james statement that those filters are expensive. I am just going to assume i cannot afford to use those filters. But cafec’s dont cost much more than hario’s

[u/hpapagaj]

Clever dripper 25€ vs Switch 40€. What are the main differences, which one to buy?