My SOLO and HARIO V60 comparison with two coffees

To start with, my view of drippers and most filter papers is that there is no universally better or worse option—only different characteristics. You can analyze almost any dripper-and-filter combination in terms of three things:

1. Bypass
2. Flow rate (how fine or dense the filter is)
3. How evenly the coffee bed extracts (flat-bottom or cone-shaped)

A brewing recipe is really about balancing those three. For example, a cake filter is flat-bottomed, which can make extraction more even. In a cone, coffee at the tip has the highest extraction. But as I’ve said before, a degree of uneven extraction can be a friend to coffee flavor, not an enemy. Too much uniformity can make a cup dull. That’s also why the Clever Dripper is hard to get wrong but is less often used by pour-over enthusiasts: it protects the floor, but ruins the ceiling. If you only have cone-shaped filters but want more even extraction, use less coffee. If someone else brews 15 or 18 g, try 12.5 g: a thinner bed, less water, and a shorter brew time can reduce the extraction difference between the top layer and the cone’s tip.

The same thinking applies to bypass and flow rate: tools are fixed, but people can adapt.

Back to the SOLO Dripper: it has a narrower cone and more upright sides than the V60, and its inner wall is smooth. In the official pictures, it’s often shown with folded-corner cake filters. As with the V60 and the cake-style drippers from Kalita and Brewista, this is a high-bypass design. Because the SOLO is straighter-sided, it may form a more pronounced coffee bed wall than drippers with wider cone angles (see photo three), which can reduce bypass to some extent and allow fuller extraction. But if you want fuller extraction, I figured, why not use a no-bypass filter? That led to the comparisons below.

1. First comparison:
   SOLO + Sibarist B3 vs V60 + Sanyo T92 vs HARIO V60 + standard bleached V60 paper.

   I used Alo Peaberry. The Sanyo paper lost badly; it filtered out too much of the coffee’s flavor, so I wouldn’t use it. The SOLO and V60 were about even.

2. Second comparison
   SOLO + Sibarist B3 vs HARIO V60 + standard bleached V60 paper.

I used Deborah Enigma. In a blind tasting, I still couldn’t tell the two apart.

All right, the first setup used a dripper at eight times the price and filter papers at dozens of times the price to reach the HARIO’s level. It’s a bit of a hobbyist indulgence. On the other hand, on my first time using the SOLO, I could brew at the same level as I do as an experienced V60 user. Aside from the price, it seems to have no drawbacks. Getting an even coffee bed with the V60 isn’t easy.

Going back to what I said at the start about drippers and filters: for someone like me, who uses good beans and brews 12.5 g at a time, these drippers may not make much difference. They’re all good.

Back to Peng Jinyang’s approach: he uses one coffee roasted three ways—which, to me, is already a bit like blending—and two different water temperatures to create different flavor extractions. Then he uses the SOLO with a no-bypass cake filter to pursue the same goal as controlling the temperature at the kettle spout: controlling every source of uncertainty. Every layer of flavor is designed rather than generated randomly by temperature variation or uneven extraction. A champion can pursue that; the rest of us can be a little more relaxed!