There’s simply no way to beat the efficiency and simplicity of your electric coffee maker. Waking up to the smell of brewing coffee can sometimes be the most sublime part of your day. We get it.
But just like the ancient art of brewing the perfect cup of tea, there are benefits just as profound to getting hands-on when it comes to your daily cups of coffee. We think using a dripper to make your daily brew is a definite upgrade for your coffee experience and worth considering.
Things to Consider Before Buying a Dripper
Before we get too deep into one of our favorite coffee drippers, here are a few things to consider. If you struggle just to get to work on time every morning or always find yourself in a morning rush, then you may need to work on some time management skills to make a dripper work for you.
But if you’re a seasoned multi-tasker, or if you want your morning cup to be your first act of mindfulness in the day, a dripper is a great tool. If you want to make the most out of every cup of coffee, we think drippers are indispensable.
The most important part of making your daily drip coffee is time. A full pot of great drip coffee doesn’t just happen. It takes more than a few minutes to make it perfect. But in return, you get a brew that’s loaded with flavor and allows greater control over the process.
The other thing to consider is that you’re going to have to buy some special equipment. None of it will empty your wallet, but there is a bit of a financial commitment on the front end. Still, for the true coffee fanatics out there, it’s worth every penny.
So with all those things in mind, if you think a dripper coffee maker might be something you want to try, we’ve got a product that might be a great place to start.
Blue Bottle Ceramic Coffee Dripper Overview
This elegant pour-over coffee maker is a triumph of simple engineering in the coffee industry. It promises to give a more flavorful and aromatic cup of coffee thanks to a few design elements that were years in the making.
We like the look of the Blue Bottle coffee dripper as much as we like its function. It looks like a simple coffee cup, not like a kitchen appliance you accidentally left out on the counter.
The Blue Bottle Ceramic dripper is designed to ensure that water moves over the entire bed of coffee grounds quickly. This makes a more aromatic and flavorful cup of coffee and makes the best use of those expensive beans that cost you a fair amount of your take-home pay.
The Blue Bottle is ceramic, which means that you don’t have to worry about any nasty plastic-based chemicals leaching into your perfect cup of coffee. It’s also a nice-looking addition to your coffee-making tools.
This classic coffee dripper will take all kinds of filters, but if you’re environmentally conscious, there are reusable filters or bamboo filters that fit nicely into its unique design. So if you’re looking for perfect coffee with almost no adverse environmental impacts, you’re covered.
Things We Like
Here are a few of our favorite things about the Blue Bottle Dripper:
- Interior ridges ensure thorough brewing
- Controls coffee flow rates to maximize flavor
- Flat bottom keeps water in contact with beans longer
- BPA-free
- Thin design guides water to beans
Room for Improvement
Things we’re not so excited about:
- A bit pricey
- Ceramic can crack
- Water drains quickly for weak taste
Features and Benefits of the Blue Bottle Dripper
There are plenty of pour-over drippers on the market. Take the time to look through the wide variety of products available before making a final decision. But we like the Blue Bottle because of some unique design elements that are worth noting.
Unique Ceramic Design
The design team at Blue Bottle worked with engineers and Japanese ceramicists (that’s a mouthful) for over a year to design their unique pour-over dripper. The result is a smaller, thinner design that distributes the water evenly across the coffee beans.
A series of ridges built into the sides of the dripper also help to control the water flow. By forcing the water to navigate these small ridges, the water stays in contact with the beans longer and spreads out over the surface of your grounds more evenly.
The Blue Bottle also has a flat bottom design that forces the water to sit at the bottom of the filter before letting the coffee drain out into your pot or cup. It’s one more tiny design element that works to keep your water mixing with your coffee.
These little details ensure that the hot water stays in contact with the beans longer than a regular coffee brewer. The result is a tastier, more flavorful, more aromatic cup of coffee that drips cleaner than coffee you get from your electric brewer.
Special Bamboo Filters
Some coffee filters you’re using can impact the taste of your everyday coffee. A bleached white paper filter might impart just a bit of a sterile taste to your coffee as it drips into the pot.
But Blue Bottle has special bamboo filters designed to work specifically with the Blue Bottle dripper. The goal is to make sure the only thing you taste is the beans you’re brewing. There’s no papery or chemical after-taste with these filters.
The filters sit perfectly inside the Blue Bottle dripper to help make sure the coffee is working with the design elements of the dripper. These filters are for more than just keeping the grounds from dripping into your cup.
Controlling the Flow
That year spent working with coffee professionals like engineers and ceramics experts ensured that the Blue Bottle dripper was designed to keep the water in contact with the beans for a long time. But they also built this marvel of coffee engineering to get a daily cup to you as quickly and expertly as possible.
The experts at Blue Bottle designed their dripper to provide a constant flow rate for the perfect cup. The nozzle’s single hole is built to an exacting width of 4.45 millimeters, so the coffee flows continuously and evenly into your cup.
Keeping Things Hot
One drawback of some dripper systems is that the brew time involved in making a single cup of coffee means that you end up with a lukewarm final product. And that’s not perfect.
Every element of the Blue Bottle Dripper keeps the water moving quickly and evenly through the coffee grounds. That ensures that the hot water you pour into the dripper will end up nearly as hot in your cup. Now that’s perfect.
Free Ceramics
The ceramic design of this dripper means you pay a bit more on the front end. But it also guarantees that nothing from that dripper is going to leak into your cup of coffee. Ceramics make sure your coffee is just coffee.
There are no BPAs or plastic residue to find their way from the dripper into your cup. And with the special bamboo filters designed for the Blue Bottle dripper, you won’t be getting any nasty after-taste from the filters.
Portion Control
Coffee isn’t cheap. That’s why hoarding those beans can be an important financial decision as well as a lifestyle choice. Being able to brew a single perfect cup instead of a larger brew that might end up tasting a bit off after day two is a selling item for anyone OCD about their coffee.
But with the specially designed dripper and a bit of time, you can make a pot without spending your morning slowly pouring water into a dripper. Blue Bottle gives you a solid coffee to time ratio. You’ll have as much or as little as you want.
No Burned Coffee
This is a plus of any dripper coffee system. We’ve all had that cup of coffee that has sat on the burner just a bit too long. Burned coffee is like burned toast; it’s just not something you should spend your morning fixing.
The dripper will allow you to control not only your portion size but also won’t force you to throw out a pot when you forget to turn your coffee maker off. It’s all about conserving those beans and brewing the perfect pot of coffee.
Finding the Right Dripper
We like the Blue Bottle because it’s a thoughtfully made product designed to deliver you what you need the most in the morning; a great cup of coffee. But there are so many to choose from. Take the time to look around.
We also like the Bee House pour-over dripper. This nice-looking dripper comes in at about the same price point as the Blue Bottle dripper, but it’s a bit bigger than the Blue Bottle if you need a lot of coffee in the morning.
If you want to keep some money in your pocket, consider the Hario dripper. This dripper does the job well, and its price point is a bit more comfortable than our other options.
There are so many products for coffee drinkers to choose from, but you can’t go wrong with the Blue Bottle dripper or any of our other recommendations. If you love coffee, investing in one of these small drippers is going to guarantee you the perfect cup every day.
Happy Caffeinating!
