Oliver Strand Recently, Bryan Waites adjusted the two slow-drip coffee makers that he brought from Japan and set up on the counter of Caffetteria SoHo, a coffee bar that opened in Manhattan last month. Before, it took around 14 hours for each one to produce 1.5 liters of coffee, which is served iced. Now it’s 18 hours.
It takes that long because the water that passes through the slow dripper is at room temperature, which slows down extraction. Cold-brewed iced coffee is catching on, though it’s almost always New Orleans-style, a steep-and-strain method that takes about 12 hours.
Japanese slow drippers are different. They’re beautiful objects (a cold-brew system is usually just a plastic bin with a filter), and the form has a function: unlike New Orleans cold brew, where the grounds soak for the full cycle, the slow dripper metes out water so that for every drop that falls onto the saturated grounds, a drop of coffee spirals down the hand-blown glass tubes into the waiting carafe. New Orleans cold brew works a like a big French press; a Japanese slow dripper is like making coffee with a filter cone and an eyedropper.
The slow drippers at Caffetteria SoHo are the second set I’ve seen in New York. Blue Bottle Coffee in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, has a bank of five large slow drippers along one wall. There’s a connection: Waites and his partner, Aaron Nice, both worked for Blue Bottle Coffee in San Francisco, where they helped open the coffee bar at the Mint Plaza location, which has a pair of slow drippers. Even though Waites and Nice are no longer affiliated with the company, they use Blue Bottle Coffee beans for all the coffee at Caffetteria SoHo.
The slow drippers at the two coffee bars aren’t the same. Blue Bottle Coffee uses slow drippers made by Oji, and the water passes from the globe through a network of tubes and nozzles before dripping onto the grounds: the water goes for a journey, then becomes coffee. Caffetteria SoHo uses Kaltia, and the water goes directly from a nozzle to the coffee before swirling down a corkscrewed glass tube: the water becomes coffee, then goes for a journey.
“It allows for the decanting of the coffee,” Waites said. “The end product is a very smooth, non-acidic cup that allows you to taste the subtle flavors that are usually masked. It lets you get to the sweetness of coffee.”
Oliver Strand A Kyoto at Caffetteria SoHo.In part, it’s because the coffee is extracted so gently. The coffee grounds are held in a glass column that has a filter on the bottom, where you’d expect it. But there’s another thin filter on top that prevents the water from agitating the coffee and overextracting it.
James Freeman, the owner of Blue Bottle Coffee, likens a glass of slow-drip coffee to drinking aged rum or bourbon. “It has an alcoholic heat without a harshness,” he said. “There’s a slipperiness and a smoothness. I think the texture alone differentiates it from other coffee preparations. We use coffees with a lot of fruit in them, like pulped naturals.”
I tasted it, too. At Caffetteria SoHo I had a glass of Kintamani, a coffee from Bali, and it had the shadowy amber color and intensity of a Sicilian amaro. It can be ordered to go, but it’s better in a glass, especially if you linger at the counter in the front. All of the woodwork at Caffetteria SoHo is from a single walnut tree from upstate New York, a subtle nod to a luxuriant but minimalist Japanese aesthetic.
And what do you call iced coffee from a Japanese slow dripper? A Kyoto.
The name was first used at Mint Plaza, and it took. “Sometimes I’ll get the random Osaka,” Nice said. “But I’ll know what they mean.”