The Making of our V60 Papers Video & the Bunch of Mushroom Coffees Winner

We’ve now heard back from the winner of the bunch of mushroom coffee products and can confirm that it will be going to Vince from the UK! We hope it’s fun to recreate the side-by-side taste test.

Onto the testing for our V60 paper video update, posted last Friday on YouTube. Here is Šárka's account of the testing:

Getting to revisit the Hario V60 paper filter video was an exciting project. The coffee filter market has changed quite a lot since 2018, and we now have more options than ever. And those options are accompanied with loads of opinions about which filters are “the best.” Because there has to be the ultimate “best,” right? Well, turns out maybe not.

The choice of paper filters was based on a mix of attributes such as popularity, accessibility, and just pure interest (I wonder if you can guess the wild cards). For parts of the testing process I have decided to make my life a little easier and use our trusty Aiden from Fellow. Specifically when testing for variances in extractions and strength between different filter paper brands. With a couple of magnets it is easy to trick the Aiden so you can brew with a V60 inside the chamber (check out the pictures). The idea was to get consistency in water dosing and flow rate. It also allowed me to keep an eye on the timer and time individual stages of the brew. These were broken down into Bloom (B), Pour (P), and Draw down (DD). The Aiden was profiled to fit James’ Ultimate V60 recipe as close as possible using 30:500 coffee to water ratio. Light roasted washed coffee was dialled in on our Weber EG1 to 21% extraction using the Hario filter papers to establish the grind size. The Hario filter acted as a control for most of the testing.

I was looking for variability (or lack there of) in extraction percentage and time whilst using different papers. From this test we found that, for the most part, different filters didn’t have a massive impact on coffee’s extraction. Yes, you can see variability in Graph 1, but for most of the filters it is within 0.2% of the average. The exception being the Kinto filters, and the Sibarist Fast filters. Their extraction results correlate to the average draw down time during brewing - therefore to the overall brew time, with the Kinto having the second slowest draw down, and the Sibarist Fast winning the race by around 35 seconds from the overall average (check out Graph 2).

As James mentioned in the video, the Kinto filters were made out of cotton pulp and were the thickest out of all other filters weighing at 1.6g per filter. The Sibarist Fast on the other hand were much lighter, weighing right below 1g on average (they are also made from abaca pulp like the Cafec papers, the difference being the layering and thickness of fibers). All other filter papers were made out of some form of wood and paper pulp with the weight of individual paper filters between 1.147g to 1.33g (you bet we weighed them).

The thicker the paper, the more resistance for the water, therefore longer contact time and vice versa. At least with coffee present in the brewer. I did a draw down test without any coffee using the Hario Switch for better time control. The results are interestingly not all in correlation with what we saw when we brewed coffee with these filters. The Kinto paper was, without coffee, the 4th slowest with the Cafec T90, Cafec Abaca, and Cafec T92 taking the top 3 (Graph 3). Now, I am not a paper expert, but there is something at play when we add coffee to the mix.

Hario Slim: Kinto vs Hario

To me, the most interesting finding was the results of our exploration of using a low quality coffee grinder with different papers. James talks about this during the second tasting. But I want to get into this a little bit more. The difference between brewing using the Hario papers and Kinto papers was not only in the numbers (the extraction was around 1.5%!) But they were visible in the carafe, and the taste speaks for itself. The Kinto brew was sweeter, clearer, and well balanced. The Hario brew on the other hand was visibly cloudy, with a lot more body and detectable unevenness in extraction (these brews would not go above 19.5%). After a couple of trials with the Sibarist Fast I decided to not waste these papers on comparative tasting for this test. There was no way I was getting anything remotely useful from that. The brews were under extracted by a mile and I would had to completely change my style of brewing and grinder.

I think it is important to caveat, that we had to set a benchmark for this testing. We didn’t use each filter to its highest potential, and we didn’t use different techniques and coffee roast profiles to suit each individual filter paper. We needed consistency so the data could be compared in the end. The choice of control for this was pretty clear to us - the Hario V60 papers are probably the most popular, the cheapest, and we are also updating a video that features Hario V60 papers only.

So, what to take away from this testing? There can be the ultimate best option for your circumstance - beans, water temperature, grinder, brewing technique etc. But is there an overall objective best? I believe that in the world of bleached V60 paper filters specifically, the playing field is fairly even and you should go for what suits your coffee and your preference the best.