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Initial ThoughtsAble Kone Mini
There’s a certain segment of the pour over fandom world that wants oil.
As in oils, lipids, and fats that can be extracted from ground coffee and hot water. The problem is, some oils, fats and lipids – all of which contribute to taste, body and depth in the coffee cup – can be blocked by paper filters.
Three common filter materials do allow more of the oils to pass through, along with a greater amount of the extracted lipids and fats that all contribute to the taste and balance of a cup of coffee: cloth, metal, and nylon weaves (the latter often referred to as “permanent” filters).
While it’s been easy for some time to find filters designed from metal and nylon weave for the Melitta pour over system, finding one for the Hario V60 filter system has been a lot harder. The ones that did exist up to now were crude metal-mesh designs with not much engineering or even thought behind them.
This is changed now with the introduction of the Kone Mini, a filter from Able Brewing designed to work in Hario V60 systems. It’s an intriguing product that fills a niche. But before we get into it, we published a blog post on CoffeeGeek a few months ago introducing the Kone Mini, and it has a small interview segment with Mark Hellweg, the owner of Able Brewing; in it, he gives some details about how the product came about and future plans for Able and the Kone filters. Check it out if you haven’t already done so.
Out of the BoxAble Kone Mini
The Kone Mini looks like a standard current generation Kone filter, just scaled down. Looking closer, you see there’s a bit more to it. The design of the graduated square-to-circle hole pattern sizes and placement is unique to the Mini’s size. The angle of the sidewalls is also slightly different to account for the Hario V60’s 60 degree walls (hence the 60 in the V60 name).
The product is meticulous in its design and manufacture. It comes completely polished and shiny, with all its matings (welds) smooth and finished nicely. The bottom has a flat nub, which the company calls a “safety nub”, which also helps it to balance slightly on the counter if you’re just filling the filter with coffee outside of the V60.
The top of the Kone Mini is encased by a grey polymer ring that serves several purposes: it keeps the Kone Mini’s shape for years; it provides an easy grip area when handling the filter; and it provides the buffer spacing that keeps the filter away from the side walls of a filter holder. In theory that seems good, but in practice, it presents some problems for the filter with the V60, which I’ll detail later on in this review.
The Kone Mini is dishwasher safe, but also extremely easy to hand clean, especially right after use.
The filter is 10.15cm in diameter (4”) by 7.75cm tall (3”) and weighs 24.5g.
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Using theAble Kone Mini
For me at least, the very first thing I noticed about the Kone Mini was it wobbles in every one of my Hario V60 brewers. And this is a slight problem if you’re going for specific World Brewing Championship styled pour overs. I’ll get to this a bit more below.
Because the top polymer ring is so big in relation to the Kone Mini’s size (the ring is the same thickness as the standard Kone’s), the only part of the filter that actually touches the Hario V60 filter holders is that polymer ring – at least when the filter is perfectly balanced inside. There’s a good bit of movement, or wobble, of the filter to the point where it can sit a bit angled to one side. Is it enough to disrupt the brew and cause under and over extraction? I don’t think so: we’re talking only one or two degrees of change in the vertical axis here.
Where it could be a problem is if you do certain pour over techniques that include maxing out the top slurry volume during your pour: in other words, if you’re maxing out your pour into the top filter so the liquid is almost level with the top of the filter. When you do that, you actually can risk some of the liquid (with ground coffee) spilling over the side of the filter’s polymer ring.
Topping Out
This is about as full as I would go with the Kone Mini, because of the wobble.
I just spent 3 paragraphs writing about this (along with a photo), but at the end of the day, it truly is a minor issue. I do think that if Able decides to revisit the Kone Mini’s design down the road, making the polymer ring smaller on the Mini, or perhaps finding another top-ring solution so the sides of the Kone Mini actually touch the vanes in a Hario V60 filter holder might be a mild upgrade.
Brewing NotesAble Kone Mini
There is a learning curve with the Kone Mini. If you’ve had a lot of experience with the standard Kone, you’ll be a lot closer to using this product well out of the gate, but if your only experience is with using paper filters in a Hario V60 system, understand you have to approach this product a bit differently.
First, it does require a slightly larger grain (or particle) size from your ground coffee compared to what cloth or paper filters typically use. Able’s redesign of the hole pattern and the new design of the holes, going from square to round, do help, but it’s still easy to “stall” this brewer if you aren’t using a good grinder or have dialed in the right grind particle size, even easier than a standard Kone, because of the smaller size of the filter.
It took me some time to really dial in the filter; I was using three different grinders with it, including an Apex Grinder (literally the best brew grinder in the world, in my opinion), a Baratza Virtuoso Plus, and a Time More Chestnut C2 hand grinder.
Our parameters for testing were as follows:
Testing the Kone Mini
Our main test rig, when we didn't require a scale for head to head brews, was this dual brewer stand custom made by Clive Coffee for us a decade ago. It allowed for near head to head comparisons when using preset volumes of coffee and water.
The Virtuoso Plus is a really fantastic grinder that produces an excellent grind particle size. I did have to dial it up about 3 clicks coarser than my preferred cloth filter brews, settling into about 18 clicks off the finest setting (your grinder may vary). Average brewing time was 3:42, measured across 3 samples. Cup taste was well developed.
It took a bit more time to dial in the Time More Chestnut C2 grinder, but part of that is because the Chestnut we’re using still has very low mileage and the burr set is still breaking in. The sweet spot for the Kone Mini and the Chestnut C2 was at 18 or 19 clicks in from finest, but it depended on the coffee as well; in a few cases, I went to 20 clicks to get a proper brew time in our 3:45 target range. Average brew time across 3 samples was 3:54.
On the Apex Grinder, I have it set for 1 click finer from the middle setting for the Kone Mini, and it produced the best brew of the three grinders. My average brew time was fast – about 3:18 average – but the cup taste was as good, if not better than the Virtuoso Plus.There were also fewer fines left in the cup.
Long Term Use of the Kone Mini
On top of formal testing and timings, I used one Kone Mini as my exclusive V60 filter system for over two months, doing approximately 70 brews with it. It’s been in the dishwasher dozens of times, banged about, and definitely not treated with kids’ gloves.
The Kone Mini can handle the abuse, no problems and still looks relatively new. It’s lost some of its initial shine and polish, but holding the filter up to the light shows very minimal blockage of the holes and no damage to the product.
The Kone Mini doesn’t deliver a “clean cup” like paper or cloth filters do. It will produce sludge at the bottom of the cup, which is why I prefer to brew into a secondary vessel (like a Hario V60 carafe) before pouring the brewed coffee into my drinking cup. This way, a good 95% of the “sludge” that passed through the filter remains in the bottom of the brewing vessel, and not in the cup I’m drinking from.
Loading Up for a Brew
Loading up the ground coffee in the Kone Mini. Dialing in the grind is very important for this device.
The cup quality is first rate once you get your grinder dialed in. The extractions taste fuller and more flavourful than they are from paper filter brews in the V60 system. I did a couple of informal side by side tests, even re-adjusting the grinder for the paper brew to make it as fair as possible, and there’s just more body and depth in the Kone Mini brews, side by side with the paper brews. A caveat though: I’m particularly sensitive to “taste” of paper filters in brewed coffee, it always stands out to me, and in a less than pleasant way. To minimize this, I flush paper filters with a lot of boiling water before using them to brew coffee, but I can still taste it.
Clean up is an absolute breeze, which is why this filter would be preferable to many over using cloth filters. A quick rinse under the kitchen sink tap and a spray with the spray bar gets all the coffee and grit out, especially if you do it right after brewing. If you’ve left the coffee in the filter for a while after brewing, a rinse under the sink faucet followed by a trip to the dishwasher gets everything sparkly and clean again.
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ConclusionAble KONE Mini
I’m surprised there aren’t more quality permanent filter designs for the Hario 60 system. They do exist, but “quality” isn’t a word I’d associate with them.
A lot of science and engineering has gone into Able Brewing’s permanent filter solution for the Hario V60, and overall it works quite well. You do need to really find a sweet spot with your grinder (which takes time and may need to be revisited with every new coffee you use), but once dialed in, you’ll get a very full and properly extracted cup. There is some sludge that will pass through, but if you brew into a secondary vessel first (like a carafe), you can hold back almost all that solid matter when pouring into your cup.
The Kone Mini isn’t perfect — we’d like to see it actually resting up against the vanes in a V60 filter holder instead of wobbling on it’s polymer top ring — but it’s the best permanent filter solution available today for the Hario V60. Highly recommended.
A rare permanent filter option for the Hario V60 system, one that can produce a fantastically rich and deep cup of coffee, once you figure out the grind.
