"Don't Reinvent the Wheel, Just Break It."

- Me! Hahahahaha July 27th 2024

In 2015, before all this Melodrip shit, I started prototyping tools for controlled agitation brewing. It became a habit of mine to shop the kitchen, plumbing, and hardware isles for any device or utensil that could distribute, hold, or drain water in a unique way so I could modify how I poured water over coffee, i.e. make pourovers. I wasn't even thinking of making Melodrip the product, just wanted to pioneer a new approach and share it with the world.

At that time, I was intensely focused, coffee mad in the head, hotly contrarian, and had nothing but pour over techniques and theories running through my veins (I'm not much different now, just only micro contrarian hehe).

I soon amassed boxes of measuring cups and baking ramekins with drilled holes, broken pieces of showerheads and gardening cans all to prototype the form factor and usability for showering hot water. (No you shouldn't make a kettle with a showerhead, I done did it already and it's not accurate or aesthetic ya dummy) I video recorded how ground particles reacted and stratified under various types of pouring styles and pour heights. The coffee industry was undergoing a huge moment of invention and innovation then, especially in the enthusiast space. 'Refractometers' and 'Pushing Extraction' were buzzwords and there were only a few grinders specifically designed for filter coffee, none of which were actually affordable to me at least.

So naturally, there was a lot of gatekeeping, and at my first SCA Expo in 2017 I showed my first pre-production melodrip to a prominent Coffee Industry figure. They looked at me with a smug grin and told me "It's been done, and doesn't work. It only underextracts coffee, move on".

I wasn't exactly devastated because I simply wanted to start a discourse and see if they'd like to use it for experimentation. I said to them, "You can't just replace every pour with a shower or you won't fully saturate the grounds evenly, it should be an additional part of the brewing process". They asked "well what does it do?" I told them it "maximizes the Flavor Clarity of the brew". This conversation was uncomfortable, not because I was nervous meeting one of my coffee heroes (which I was), but because I've only had conversations about Flavor Clarity in my head and it sounded awkward in real life, coming out of my mouth. I can never forget their facial expression, but it was spot on! 'Flavor Clarity' has the perfect combination of weird and snob that only a true coffee nerd can understand.

They looked at me perplexed, as if I was coming from another universe of pretense that miles away from the coffee meta at that time, and that's because it was! At that time, Flavor Clarity didn't appear in common speak around brewing conversations that I knew of. There was no SSP MP, Titus Brew Burrs or any products that claimed "High Clarity", "Low Fines" Etc. Home brewing was basically conical country my boy, unless you had serious cash to spend on a Mahlkonig shop grinder or a Baratza flat burr. Shit was desolate in grinder land.

This conversation ended with them handing over a business card (probably half pity, half bug repellent, 1% intrigue) because they were, and still are, a coffee nerd - and I respect them to this day for this.

For years, I was in my hermit cave, brewer's cup comps on repeat, studying, analyzing, measuring, theorizing, and documenting how various types of agitation effected extraction and percolation of coffee grounds with alternative pouring methods. I created my own philosophy, vocabulary, and ideology of brewing that was not only existed completely in my lab, but solely in my brain.

Through this intense period of research, I developed a unique affinity for a specific flavor profile using controlled agitation methods which ultimately resulted in the development of my own preferential "Taste", which to this day are the same attributes I look for when evaluating a well-brewed pour over coffee. I think our tools, environment, history, and memories shape our Taste in things, and this pivotal era in my life while creating melodrip and the entire philosophy behind controlled agitation brewing, cemented my Taste foundation that was used to navigate the decisions integral to the Melodrip Method and flavor profile of the COLUM Mini Dripper as well.

Although this intense lab era completely consumed my life with it's emotional ups and downs, it was the most memorable, because it's how my idea of Flavor Clarity was conceived. At the time, it wasn't common to describe brewed coffee with terms like Clarity, Transparency, and Flavor Separation. Even in the time of thriving Hipsters and Coffee Snobbery, Flavor Clarity in coffee, or cleanliness was pretty damn high brow. These terms were mainly used in cupping rooms in regards to the presence of defects or amongst entirely different beverage circles where ABV was a thing.

The flavor clarity I became obsessed with had to do with several sensory attributes of a brew, both Soluble and Insoluble. In the ILLY Science of Quality book (Don't ask where, I received and deleted this PDF years ago), there was a study that demonstrated the way fines in a shot of espresso can create a barrier between the soluble flavor compounds and our tongue's flavor receptors inhibiting our potential to taste accurately. This led me down a rabbit hole of buying a centrifuge and separating suspended fines from various pour over brews of varying agitation methods. I found that greater agitation combined with higher fluid-to-solid ratios i.e. pouring long and hard, during a given time, regardless of coarse or fine grinds, would result in more discharged fines (insoluble sensation) in the resulting brew. I became particularly sensitive to this, and could taste it a mile away.

I also learned to sense insolubles in these various types of brews (on my tongue) with poorly brewed V60s, that produced what I still refer to as "Fake Clarity", where high levels of bypass combined with high agitating long pours with both coarse or fine grinds can result in light bodied, low extraction yield brews, that due to the low intensity of flavor give the perception of "clarity" or flavor separation, even though the combination of the brewing style allowed a noticeable amount of fines to pass through the filter paper and actually impact the sensory ability of the tongue.

If you can sense insolubles on your tongue, your ability to taste is suppressed. Period. That weak long pour v60 shit ain't clean to me.

Controlling agitation reduces the amount of fine particles suspended in the total fluid in the dripper during the brewing process. Even when fully saturated, coffee fines continue to stick to larger particles, though any type of agitation can help to separate them. Furthermore, the more fluid to solid ratio in your dripper, the greater the potential for fines to separate and suspend during agitation.

Here's a short description of what's going on: The more you agitate via Pour or Stir (A), the more finer particles can be suspended (B), the longer your pour, fluid ratio becomes greater than solid increasing fines potential to suspend (C), and because the dripper is constantly draining post saturation (D), and the settling speed of particles is several seconds long during and post pour (E), brewed coffee can pass through the filter paper before a substantial secondary filtration by the slurry can be fully structured and formed into a proper cake (F) allowing for fines to discharge through the filter paper. That's a mouthful! Of course it is, this shit is as complicated as you want it to be.

As a result, fine particles can be discharged through the filter while (A)(B)(C)(D)(E) occur simultaneously. Don't think of this as snapshots or a sequence. I think of all pour over processes as temporal phenomena that's constantly changing through the span of a pour and post pour, so it's not easy to graph or illustrate entirely. Also, the primary filter (i.e. paper, cloth, or mesh) will continue to change in filtration efficiency across time based on (A)(B)(C)(D)(E) phenomena as well. This knowledge was integral while developing my products, especially recipes for Melodrip.

And this is why gatekeepers denied low agitation brewing early on because they had no Idea what this was when I explained all of this this to them - especially in 2015.

This kind of pour over conversation didn't exist on any blog, website, or research paper online, and it wasn't a topic that was readily available on social media either. I don't expect for this conversation to happen much even today, and I hope it doesn't. It's hard to document/record true coffee phenomena across time, a pain to dissect and compile, and when was the last time some insane nerd knowledge really helped improve your morning cup?

Also, because of yours truly, there are many controlled agitation (melodrip 'influenced') tools to experiment and explore with just by playing around. Especially in a time where the best tasting grinds can come in well under the price of a phone and the number of products available to achieve high levels of Flavor Clarity are at an all time high!

Just brew ya'll.

At that time, I scoured the web and videos for inspiration and even to this day, no one has come close to covering pour over based science and practical knowledge as the working Japanese masters. The only literature I've found to trust are those written by authors such as Ishiwaki Tomohiro's コーヒー「こつ」の科学―コーヒーを正しく知るために, Taguchi Mamoru's コーヒー　おいしさの方程式, and Yukihiro Tanbe's コーヒーの科学 「おいしさ」はどこで生まれるのか. Yeah, you're probably not going to get value in Japanese coffee nerd reads, but everything I was against and bullishly challenged in my coffee journey, somehow appeared as a true-ism in one of these books. All the trendy bullshit that happens online discovered by your favorite coffee influencer has appeared in one of these books in one way or another more than decades before reddit and instagram ever existed. Mind you, coffee science was a thing in Japan before most of you were born.

And guess what, even some of what I ramble on about in the passages above are probably in one form or another strewn across the pages of one of these books.

So of-fucking-course I didn't actually discover the concept of Flavor Clarity - no one is that delusional (I am, but only in an entrepreneurial sense).

Though,

It is how I found it,

and the tools I invented to uncover it,

and the moment I was searching for it,

that allow me to own it.

And now, almost ten years and multiple shower heads, drip assist tools, and clarity burrs from other companies later, the concept of "Flavor Clarity" is now a starting point when it comes to achieving a great tasting cup of pour over coffee.

Just Sayin'.

Truly Yours,

Ray Murakawa