During the process of planning and building Blueprint, we managed to take a few “coffee” breaks on Monday mornings. From the early beginnings of Blueprint, we all agreed that we wanted to make every cup of coffee to order, but exactly how and with what equipment loomed for a number of months.

After debating different approaches, we agreed that using one brew method was our ideal solution. We all have our own preferences for different brewers based on style, size, and application, but what we agreed on was that any worthy brewer should be able to make great coffee taste great. Focusing on selecting the perfect brewing method for each coffee seems like a distraction from making sure we select the proper extraction profile for each coffee. While different devices may tend to highlight certain aspects of the coffee more or less, we can also easily highlight those aspects by understanding brewing and the device.

So, we lined up all our favorites – the Chemex, the Kalita Wave, the Hario V60, and the Beehouse #2. After calibrating all devices to be brewing at 18.5% extraction using a 1:16 brew ratio, we started tasting methods against each other. In the end, we were persuaded by the flexibility of the Hario V60. Not only did it produce a great cup using 350g of water (about 12 fl. oz or your Starbucks “Tall”), but it also produced twice that quantity with just as much quality in the cup.

Just because you’ll see us brewing and selling V60’s in the store doesn’t mean we don’t love any of these other brewers. The V60 just turned out to be our most practical solution. It will let us focus on the coffee itself, making sure each extraction hits the sweet spot and lives up to its fullest potential.