Dripkit Is High-End Pour Overs Made Easy
By: Casha Doemland
You're an avid camper, and you've yet to find a seamless way to make the same perfect cup of coffee you do at home while on the road. Sure, you could settle for flavorless instant coffee or a sludgy pour of muck, but why torture yourself when there’s Dripkit?
Founded by Ilana Kruger and Kara Cohen in 2016, Dripkit is high-end coffee made easy. Together, with the help of a Kickstarter campaign and NYC design studio Prime, Dripkit does all the prep, so all you have to do is pour. "Prime has worked with some of the top direct-to-consumer brands, and collaboratively we went through 500 prototypes to get the brewer where it is today," shares Cohen. "The graphic design, however, was all done in-house.’
Currently, Dripkit is made mostly of paper, but “because of the very thin coating on top, like most coffee cups, it's not recyclable in a practical way," says Kruger.
Yet, with bioplastics continuing to make headway in the sustainable packaging market, Dripkit strives to produce a biodegradable solution by 2021. According to Cohen, the journey has already begun as they've developed one compostable sample already.
As far as design, it’s the David Hockney of coffee with minimalist linework, shapes and muted tones designed by Creative Director Marian Shelley featured on both the packet and brewer. Each kit contains a single-use brewer with 14 grams of coffee with no prep or clean.
So, how do you use this no-fuss contraption? Start by holding the brewer with the baby blue tab up, then pull it off. Next, you'll push the dark blue handle and the brown semi-circle together to open your pour over. Place over your mug, add hot water at least twice and, voila, your cup of joe is ready for sipping.
Dripkit switches up their roasts seasonally with La Basa, ethically traded and sourced from a family farm of 11 brothers and sisters in Huehuetenango, Guatemala. The coffee is a medium roast with balances notes of dark cherry, brown sugar and a hint of citrus.
"Coffee is a lot like wine, " begins Cohen. "Carefully grown, picked and processed beans make a huge difference in quality and taste. So we make sure to source from small family-owned farms and co-ops that put care into the production process. Additionally, it's important for us to support the economies of coffee producing countries, but it's not completely altruistic because it's the best coffee."
The coffee is then roasted in Bushwick, Brooklyn to maximize flavor. From there, the beans travel down the block to Dripkit’s studio, where they're ground and sealed to order.
Now, it's all in the consumers' hands. Subscriptions are mailed out monthly in packs of 10 or 20 and arrive at your doorstep with no additional fees. It's the dummy proof way to ensure a perfectly-poured coffee is right there waiting for you every morning, without all the fuss.