Kettle gicleur and Hario Japan

At WBUR'S CitySpace event, one intrepid coffee enthusiast brought attention to my foray into kettle gicleurs. We called them Kettle flow restrictors but they were essentially snap in Teflon pieces to adapt the hot water flow out of the Hario beehive or buono kettles. It was high temp Teflon precision machined and designed to narrow the flow rate so you just tip the kettle to a 45 degree angle and get a perfect slow flow without all the balancing of the kettles. It took away the focusing so hard aspect and allowed you to get it just right. This made a lot of sense for v60 because there is no real restriction beyond grind/dose and flow rate of water, pour too fast and too much water will run through.

Mind you, this was a time when dark roasts were still everywhere, roast dates were rare, and labeling coffee like a French wine label was considered novel. Many of the leaders we now think of as legends were advocating batch brew and were quite skeptical of per-cup brewing. The push was toward buying a high-end drip machine, not standing there with a kettle and doing it manually like we did. It was a wild moment where experimenting with pourover sometimes felt like we were swimming upstream.

That kettle flow restrictor really was a thing for a while and we sold a ton of them until it just faded for us. More people started copying us and selling them so we just stopped. It was a heck of a throw back though for one of the dozens of coffee attendees to bring up something from a specific time frame like that. Check out our shelves from that era, selling siphon!

Back then, we were part of a wave in 2008 to that brought Japanese coffee gear from Japan like siphon, kettles, and v60 by hario into the thoughts and hearts of a lot of coffee people who were pontificating about our American coffee scene and what to do next in coffee. While we definitely were the voice evangelizing it in the early years, we inadvertently got involved in bringing a bunch of gear in through varying channels as we advocated for it and for a while we were trying to establish a gear business based on the demand we were seeing.

I even made a trip to Japan and visited Hario headquarters but could not convince them to sell to us. I am pretty sure I wrote in barista magazine about the trip and do still have the photos on my Flickr which I've included below in this post. Check out the glass violin from the Hario headquarters museum!

I think in the end though the demand and attention sparked Hario into opening hario usa but it was the first wave of gear into the states before so many start ups and others began making competing gear. Now there is a huge selection of gear options that solve the problems we identified and an explosion of quality kits to noodle around with. Gone are the days of gear smuggling in suitcases from Tokyo mega coffee stores.

Shout out to that attendee for bringing me back to that headpsace for a bit.