Drip Bar, a Mobile Blue Bottle Café, coming to Los Angeles
Posted by TheShot on 31 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: Beans, Foreign Brew, Home Brew, Machine
The coffee culture export trade is in high swing, whether it is Stumptown Roasters opening in Amsterdam or Blue Bottle Coffee following Intelligentsia‘s footsteps and invading L.A.: Drip Bar, a Mobile Blue Bottle Café | NBC Los Angeles. Yes, that last article cites the tiresome caffeine-riff cliché abused by many an unimaginative coffee writer — calling Bay Area Blue Bottle fans “caffeine-starved locals” — but the article notes a second attempt to bring Blue Bottle to the tanned, spackled, and collagen-injected masses down south.
Drip Bar, a mobile/portable café concept scheduled for introduction in L.A. this May, plans to pour Blue Bottle Coffee using Hario V60 drippers. Should we be surprised that in a town where you have to drive everywhere, your coffee should now come on wheels?
As we wrote last October, the spiraling Hario V60 dripper became all the rage at Intelligentsia as a Clover brewer substitute. Many other coffee shops have since followed suit in declaring the Hario V60 dripper as the greatest thing since the double boiler — including SF’s Ritual Coffee Roasters, who was among the first in the Bay Area to offer a Hario V60 drip bar.
We have our own Hario V60 and Buono drip kettle for home use. We even got a friend to translate all the Japanese instructions for us. Good coffee, to be sure. But the professional coffee world seems to chase short-attention-span fads on a level that rivals many Japanese consumers — with a heavy copy-cat hype that ebbs and flows with the coffee growing seasons.
When we first encountered a Hario V60 drip bar, last December at Intelligentsia’s Monadnock location in Chicago, we asked the barista if he liked it that much better than a Chemex brewer or a typical Melitta bar. While continuing his pour with a Buono kettle, he slowly responded with a resounding, “Well…?” So while the V60 is a fun new coffee toy, and it produces great coffee, let’s just say we’re not ready to throw our old Chemex brewer out the window just yet.
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