“You will never want to not be upgrading”. Now that saying can be used either as a positive or a negative, depending on the agenda of who’s saying it to you. It’s mostly associated with tech (because it’s the most obvious area of application for it) but when you really think about it, that applies to almost everything – even ourselves and yes, coffee. At the end of the day, being stagnant about something is almost as bad as chasing every upgrade you don’t need.

Now I haven’t been upgrading my coffee equipment as often as some, partly because I’m holding back and mostly because the upgrades that I do want to make cost a lot of money. However, I still want to make some incremental upgrades but it’s more to appease my curiosity as to how exactly these things can affect the coffee brewing (and ultimately drinking) experience. The latest purchase/upgrade: A Lilydrip with another V60 dripper.

The Lilydrip is the GIO, designed to work with cone drippers and carried by The Good Cup Coffee Company of Cebu, and I’ve been using it with a larger capacity ceramic V60 that I bought specifically to use with the Lilydrip. In a nutshell,: Lilydrips transform your cone drippers to something akin to a flat-bed brewer; and the different versions cater to what you aim for from a flowrate standpoint.

The reason I wanted to try the Lilydrip GIO (aside from, you know, Philippines) is that it’s touted to allow brew times similar to what you usually do with a V60, but at finer grind settings. So essentially less surface area for the water to need to penetrate to extract coffee, but the said water also passes through the coffee fast enough to prevent over extraction (or something like that). I want to try this because as much as I like my Timemore C2, like I said in my thoughts about it a few months ago, it still coughs up a lot of fines at medium coarse to coarse settings. However, with the steps being big for the C2, some beans may induce choking at medium fine to fine settings. This Lilydrip should help with that by helping me maximize on the strengths of the grinder.

Like I always say: I am unqualified to be reviewing this stuff and cannot be fully trusted with how the coffee I brewed taste – so take these thoughts with a grain of salt. The brews have more or less been along the lines of what they say to expect using the Lilydrip GIO, dare I say it – actually sweeter at times. This was compared to brews using my old (red) ceramic V60 01 at various pour methods and even the 4:6 method with the Tetsu Kasuya V60 (the latter being designed specifically for that method). So I can say, at least from my experience, that the Lilydrip GIO does work.

Another pro (yes, the taste was the first pro) is that I can focus more on the pour and not so much with needing to agitate the slurry like what I used to do with V60s.

You still cannot go espresso fine with the grind because it will still become bitter. I’ve so far found grinding within the 15 to 13 clicks range with the Timemore C2 has been the sweet spot (pun intended) for me, aiming at a total brew time of a range within 2 minutes 15 second to a max of 2 minutes 45 seconds. This varies per beans and tasting preference. Maybe it can be pushed to 12 clicks, but that might already be too fine for some.

Again, this isn’t a review and not even thoughts from a qualified coffee person. If you want to purchase a Lilydrip (whatever version it is), I can say that it adds an interesting dynamic to manually brewing coffee. Do you need one? Considering it’s not too expensive (even if you want to purchase the full range), it’s easy to recommend people to try it with their cone drippers. Provided you’re using good coffee in the first place, then things like the Lilydrip will help you “upgrade” your equipment without breaking the bank.

Disclaimer: This post is not sponsored or endorsed by Lilydrip nor The Good Cup Coffee Company

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