it’s not that easy
The Hoop brewer makes you appreciate how fun other brewers always have been.
Sun is starting to rise earlier each day, the golden morning glow shining warm light to set a Valley of Peace-like mood for the introduction of our protagonist.
You hear some handgrinder crackling in the back as mellow strings mimic the visual environment of our wide-bodied, brute looking lead.
It’s simple nature promises a new era of ease and peace. You give it all you have, the finest of coffees, all the water it wants.
And then it stalls again.
it is what it is. what else is there to say
This is not a story of ease and joy,
this IS a story of simplicity and a brute antihero, and it’s brutal simplicity will bring you to your knees: again and again.
You really don’t know what to say after a month of fighting with the unfun fun that is Hoop Coffeebrewer by ceado. The Hoop is a famously dog-bowl-esque plastic brewer that is, both in total and at it’s ‘base’, a much wider dripper than usual. It won’t fit most of your cups and carafes (which is crucially important because absolute accurate leveling is the way to go when gravity is the ONLY thing moving your brew along, most servers with spouts won’t work) and it won’t fit your brewing habits.
a) the talking stage
Dialling in this brewer is just as dry a process as it sounds. Logially derived from the fact that it’s designed for zero engagement during the ever lasting draw-down-phase, you feel helpless watching the ‘brewing’ happen. The brewer is designed for you to dose coffee and water into separate chambers, so that the water can supposedly filter into the main chamber at a consistent rate.
The concept of the brewer (derived from ceado inhouse research to develop a standardized way of testing their grinder burrs) wants you to not mess with anything else other than grindsize, ratio and water temperature. The dialing in, much like with most automated commercial espresso machines, is a process of altering one variable at a time and watch it play out.
There’s two considerable downsides compared to dialling in espresso:
- one brew can easily take as long as 6 minutes (compared to 35 sec)
- slower brew results in cooler endphase since the open chamber design leads to the ‘brewing water’ being more exposed to heat loss than in any other style of brewing coffee => ANOTHER variable affected by a changed flow rate
In this process, you don’t really learn a lot until the end of each brew. Brews can stall minutes into the brew and there’s no real way of accelerating it. When you feel like you got to know the Hoop a little bit, it will remind you of how little you understand it quite yet. Feels like the Doggo wants you to fall in love with it just to push you away whenever you get to comfortable around it.
For each individual coffee the way it grinds, reacts with and absorbs water, naturally affected by the bean, roast, day off roast etc., is a little bit different but with anything above 10 grams of coffee, I found these minute differences to be ‘do or die’ in the water’s struggle with gravity and an increasingly saturated and tightly covered filter paper. If you have seen the instagram videos of the cut-in-half V60, you know how huge a difference this if from the stream and flow in pourovers.
B) Making it work
Every now and then, you’ll be able to hit the spot and the spot can be so sweet. Researching the limited in-depth takes on this niche brewer will quickly have you realize that the easiest way to make your coffee shine is at absurdly large ratios (1:20 and beyond) despite the manufacturer advertising 15g to 250g of water (1:16.667). Getting used to those ratios is not that easy since studies have proven that concentration preference is quite a priority in coffee preferences (SCA 2019). In my one month of giving it a chance, I found that it is very difficult to get your grindsize right for the official recommended recipe (15:250 w/o ANY interaction), such typical ratios are much easier around 10 or 12 grams of coffee.
On top of all of that, it makes you want to give up a lot. You know how you kinda learn what kinds of recipes and routines work for what kinds of coffee in any usual brewer? Yeah that doesn’t really work here because to even get anywhere close to a nice cup of coffee, you have to nail - which is to say end up within a one minute-window rather than two minutes slower or faster than what you were going for - the brew time which is only moderated by the way your coffee grinds and how it reacts with water. This can be very different for coffees I would use very similar pourover recipes for which I can finetune by adjusting the way I pour.
So initally I don’t see any other area of deployment for this silent dog bowl outside of professional uses where someone spent a lot of time dialing in coffees and wants to have the illusion of total repeatability (illusion, since your coffee won’t grind exactly the same every time depending on environmental variables and won’t react with water the same way based on days off roast etc.). There is really no romance and no joy in this on-off-relationship that is oppressively dictated by simple practical constraint.
C) After all, the sun rises again
No matter how hard and long the emotional winter, the good days will come. They come faster if you ditch the Pupper and go for the Hario Switch or CleverDripper for highly controllable brews. Eventually, they will come with the Hoop as well but if you use it as a brewer instead of a testing tool, don’t listen to what its parents, ceado, have to say. Trust that you’re a good judge of character.
The only way I was able to make the official recipe work very well was WDTing the hack out of it. Incidentally realizing that this was the best way to ensure eveness and actual repeatability in the resulting beverage was the only thing reconciling with the Hound of brewers. Aggitating and trying to settle the crust as with V60s or cupping bowls didn’t work out since the brewing chamber is the only thing about this Beast that is unusually narrow. Right now, and I don’t know whether this makes any sense or whether the Pitbull just got to my head, I am WDTing a lot: which is to say, use your basic manual WDT tool to work the grounds before pouring and to rapidly dissolve the crust after you’re done watering the outter chamber.
And this worked with one coffee. One Kenya Washed was super nice and sweet and fun and and then you try to do the same thing again and you can’t make it work with another Washed Kenya and a Washed Ethiopia no matter how much you change the grind setting or the WDTing. It will stall around 100-120g beverage weight and ruin your day.
Even when it works it’s still not as fun and now it’s not even a zero engagement brewer anymore. It’s just there. It’s simple Labrador-eyes almost make you forget how incapable and lost it made you feel. You might forgive it for muddying your living room. But it’s better to not get one in the first place. Stay away from the dog bowl.
(adopt, don’t shop: you’re more than welcome to borrow mine if this review hasn’t put you off)
SCA (2019): Flat vs. Cone: Basket Shape is as Important as Grind Size in Drip Brew Coffee - 25 Magazine, Issue 8 (https://sca.coffee/sca-news/25-magazine/issue-8/english/flat-vs-cone-basket-shape-is-as-important-as-grind-size-in-drip-brew-coffee-25-magazine-issue-8)