Why the 4th ratio of the 2nd series is what I use to test new coffees

Coffee is Biohack is the original desktop and the country’s most popular productivity tool. While we’re losing sleep over the switch to daylight saving time, the caffeine-addicted WIRED Reviews team is writing about our favorite coffee brewing routines and appliances that will keep us alert and maybe even happy in the morning. Today, reviewer Matthew Korfhage explains his lifelong love of drip coffee—and why the Ratio Four never leaves his desk. In the following days, we’ll add other Java.Base stories about other WIRED writers’ favorite brewing methods.

As with any A worthwhile vice, your morning coffee routine can take on the air of religion. Like many religions, it is often born as much by chance as by moral conviction. My cult is good old fashioned drip coffee. This is what I drink first thing, before I even think about making a shot of espresso.

I’m WIRED’s chief coffee writer and have developed a deep fondness for many types of coffee, from espresso to Aeropress to cold brew. But “coffee” to me, deep down in my soul, still means a hot cup of pure drip. Fortunately, this is the coffee arena that has seen the most transformation thanks to technology in recent years. The drip coffee from the Ratio Four coffee maker (now quietly in its second generation) sounds to me like the purest form of coffee, a liquid distillation of what fresh coffee beans from the grinder smell like.

My love for filter coffee began when I was a teenager traveling and studying in India, which was probably my first glimpse of adult freedom. This is where I drank my first full cup of coffee that I remember finishing. In Jaipur, filter coffee was a thick, black drink usually mixed with milk and sugar. I decided that if I was going to drink coffee, I was going to drink it straight away and learn to love it on its own terms. A new friend, who was putting jaggery in his own drink, laughed at my insistence that I didn’t want sweetened milk. Then I downed a very thick, strong, caffeinated cup that made my hair stand upright. If I had made a mistake, I refused to admit it.

I carried this preference back to Oregon, where I would drink terrible black drip coffee in restaurants all night and in office break rooms. Black coffee became a moral requirement, even though it was not a matter of taste.

It wasn’t until years later that I discovered that drip coffee could actually be every bit as enjoyable as a rosé espresso.

Drip lift

This was partly a technical problem. Aside from the classic Moccamaster, only recently have home drip coffee makers been able to produce a truly excellent cup. For years, I didn’t keep one in my house.

What woke me up to the possibilities of distilling was a new wave of coffee shops in Portland, first the third wave coffee pioneer Stumptown Coffee and then Heart Coffee Roasters in particular in Portland. The Norwegian owner of Hart Roastery, Willy Yeli-Loma, explained to me at length about the aromatic purity of light roasted infused coffee – the fruity aromatics of the first Ethiopian that can smell like peaches, nectarines or blueberries. He told me that Scandinavians have long appreciated this, and have developed lightly roasted coffee into a pure craft. Finally America caught up.

However, I’ve never been able to get the same flavor or clarity in a homebrewer. Not until recently. To get the best version, I had to walk down the street to Hart’s and get my coffee from the guy who roasted it. Or I had to spend a very long time spraying water over the coffee in a conical filter. I rarely wanted to do this when I was still asleep, already late for work.