Why the Ratio Four Series Two Is What I Use to Test New Coffees

Coffee is the Original desktop biohack and the country’s most popular productivity tool. As we lose sleep over the switch to Daylight Saving Time, the caffeine-addicted WIRED Reviews team writes about our favorite coffee-making routines and devices that will keep us alert and maybe even happy in the morning. Today, critic Matthew Korfhage explains his enduring love of filter coffee and why the Ratio Four never leaves his counter. In the coming days, we’ll add more Java.Base stories about other WIRED authors’ favorite preparation methods.

As with any Although it’s worth it, a morning coffee routine can take on the character of religion. And like many religions, it is often born as much by chance as by moral conviction. My name is good old-fashioned filter coffee. It’s what I drink first, before even thinking about making espresso.

I’m WIRED’s senior coffee editor and have developed a deep fondness for the many variations of coffee, from espresso to Aeropress to cold brew. But “coffee” to me, deep in my soul, always means a steaming cup of pure juice. Fortunately, it is also the coffee sector that has been most transformed by technology in recent years. The filter coffee from the Ratio Four coffee maker (now quietly on its second generation) seems to me to be the purest form of coffee, the liquid distillation of the smell of my coffee beans fresh from the grinder.

My love for filter coffee began when I was a teenager, traveling and studying in India – perhaps my first taste of adult freedom. This is where I had the first full cup of coffee that I remember finishing. In Jaipur, filter coffee was an intense, jet-black brew, usually mixed with milk and sugar. I decided that if I was going to drink coffee, I would take it straight and learn to love it on its own terms. A new friend, pouring jaggery into his own brew, mocked my insistence that I didn’t want sweetened milk. I then drank a cup so thick and strong and so caffeinated that my hair stood up perpendicularly. If I had made a mistake, I refused to admit it.

I brought this preference back to Oregon, drinking purely black and terrible drip coffee at all-night dinners and filthy office break rooms. Black coffee had become a morality clause, although it was hardly a matter of taste.

It wasn’t until years later that I discovered that filter coffee could actually be just as refined a pleasure as a pinky espresso.

Increase drip

It was partly a technology problem. Aside from a classic Moccamaster, it’s only very recently that home drip coffee makers have been capable of producing a truly excellent cup. For years, I didn’t keep any in my house.

What introduced me to the possibilities of drip was a new wave of coffee shops in Portland, the first third-wave coffee pioneer, Stumptown Coffee, and then especially Heart Coffee Roasters in Portland. Heart’s Norwegian roaster-owner Wille Yli-Luoma explained to me at length about the aromatic purity of lightly roasted immersion coffee—the fruity aromas of a premier Ethiopian coffee that might smell of peach, nectarine, or blueberry. The Scandinavians have long enjoyed it, he told me, and have turned lightly roasted coffee into a pure craft. America was finally catching up.

Yet I could never get the same flavor or clarity on a home brewer. Not until recently. To get the best version, I still had to walk up the street to Heart and get my coffee from the guy who roasted it. Or I had to spend way too much time running water over coffee through a cone filter. I rarely felt like doing this when I was still fuzzy from sleep, already late for work.