Introducing the Ceado Hoop
Like many of you, I’ve seen the Ceado Hoop here and there, and never paid much attention to it. But when my friend Alessandro of Aroma Cofffee in Bologna brewed a Hoop of a Prodigal coffee for me this summer, I was intrigued, and only then realized the genius of the Hoop’s design.
After tasting the coffee Alessandro made, I reached out to my friend Cosimo Lombardo who now works with Ceado. Cosimo and I had a wonderful conversation about the Hoop as well as some of Ceado’s other projects (more on that in the future.) I immediately signed up to sell The Hoop due to its impressive combination of quality and simplicity.
How to brew using The Hoop
To brew coffee, the barista pours water slowly into the outer chamber of the Hoop, and the Hoop does the rest. The brewing chamber is “no bypass” (hat tip Jonathan Gagné) and the design ensures the slurry never rises too high. Both features decrease the potential for astringency.
The Hoop may be the perfect manual brewer for cafes, as baristas can simply pour and walk away, knowing that four minutes later, the Hoop will deliver an excellent extraction.
There is no need for a prewet, a bloom, or a spin or swirl. :0. Just pour slowly.
If the coffee blooms to form a thick crust, one may want to use a WDT tool (or fork, or whisk) to submerge the crust after pouring. Very fresh or dark roasts will likely require WWDT (wet Weiss Distribution Technique) to break and submerge the crust.
The Hoop has every attribute of a great manual dripper:
Requires no skill
Takes scant barista time (this is especially valuable to cafes)
Offers low risk of astringency
Makes even extractions easy to produce
Offers near-perfect consistency
Just pour the water in the outer ring and four minutes later, enjoy some incredible filter coffee.
Deep bed, shallow slurry
Like the Pulsar, Tricolate, and Filter3, The Hoop is a no-bypass brewer, which means astringency is easy to avoid, and The Hoop produces high extractions using a relatively coarse grind. The small-diameter brewing chamber provides a deeper bed than most no-bypass brewers. Only Filter3 has a deeper bed.
The genius of The Hoop lies in allowing the barista to pour all of the water at once, while limiting the rate water enters the brewing chamber.
Three brewing dynamics help limit astringency:
sufficient bed depth
maintaining a shallow slurry
introducing water to the brewing chamber in such a way that it does not damage the integrity of the coffee bed
Sufficient bed depth is important because coffee beds act as filters that clarify brews. Deeper beds are better filters, and mitigate astringency. In a deeper bed, a smaller percentage of channels reach the bottom of the bed, limiting the amount of astringent particles channels deliver to a brew. A shallow slurry decreases astringency by limiting the (water-column) pressure on the coffee bed. The more pressure exerted on a coffee bed through suction or pressure, the more it will exploit a given channel.
Optional upgraded filters
Each Hoop comes with a pack of 100 standard filters from Ceado. The standard filters require a coarse grind to achieve the recommended 4:00 brew time. I offer optional upgraded filters as an add-on for those who want to use a finer grind to achieve higher extractions with excellent flavor clarity in the same 4:00 brew time.
The upgraded filters, as well as my personal “how to” guide to the Hoop, are available only through www.scottrao.com
