Video Overview | Glowbeans The Gabi Master B Drip Master
Functioning much like the showerhead of an automatic brewer, the Gabi Master B Drip Master from Glowbeans is designed to rest atop your desired manual drip brewer to deliver an even, thorough saturation of your coffee bed. It provides a gentle flow of water with minimal agitation, has chambers that allow you to focus your pours, and is extremely easy to use. See the Gabi in action as Steve shares on this handy drip master.
Transcript
Hey folks, it's Steve with Prima Coffee. Today we're taking a look at the Glowbeans Master B Drip Master. This is an accessory for pour-over brewing which acts just like a shower head in an automatic brewer, gently raining down your hot water onto your brew, giving you a nice, smooth, even extraction. So, the way that this works, it's...you can sort of see that it's split into two different reservoirs. The overall reservoir volume is about 100 milliliters. The central reservoir holds 60 milliliters, the outer reservoir holds about 40. And that's a rough estimate. Essentially, the way this works is it acts like a shower-head. We have a series of holes poking through the bottom here. Each reservoir has plenty of access to all those holes. You will set this on top of your brewing device. I've got a Kalita Wave right here.
Glowbeans The Gabi Master B Drip Master
Two-section reservoir for targeted brewing
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Set it right on top, fill it up with water in a few different pours or focus on different parts of the reservoir as you like. And that's basically just all you need to do. The benefit here is that you have lower agitation than a single stream pour as you would get out of the gooseneck kettle like this. But you also get very even thorough extraction all around the brew bed. The hole pattern goes from the center to the complete outer end of the Gabi. And, I mean, it just gives you a very even, sort of, gentle showering effect over the entire brew bed. That just gives very good, clean, even results. And again, that lesser agitation seems to give a lot of clarity of flavor to your brews and also we found allows you to grind a little bit finer than you might. So if before you were grinding somewhat coarse because maybe the fines clog up the filter or you just need to try to hit your brew time, you can actually take your grind finer with this and still hit your target brew time, still hit your target extraction and actually get cleaner flavor out of it in much of our experience.
So I'm actually going to go ahead and brew with this. I have a 185 steel Kalita Wave. I'm going to do a 500-milliliter brew. So I'm adding about 30 grams of ground coffee. And it's a little bit finer than I might normally grind for this brewer. I'm just going to tap to settle. And then I'm going to stick my Master B right on top. Now I have a series of little slots, concentric slots, that correspond to, basically, different, sort of, circular brewers. Very easy to sit on top of your manual brewing device. And I'm just going to start by pouring a full 40 milliliters right into that center reservoir and that's just to get my bloom kick-started. I've actually found, personally, that I don't really need to have too long of a bloom when using something like this. I don't let it sit for too long and really I only give it about 15 seconds. So I'm about to hit 30 seconds here on my timer. And then I'm actually going to overflow the center reservoir which will actually flow out into the outer reservoir and I can just basically pour until that's full.
Now, the Master B is made of Tritan plastic, so it's BPA free, it's heatproof, it's shatter resistant. It's a pretty sturdy device. Very simple, lightweight, easy to pack into a travel setup if you like. The overall diameter that's usable on brewers is about 13.5 centimeters, so that fits most pour-over cones like the Kalita Waves. It fits most V60s. It fits the smaller Chemexes, the three…and most six cups will work. Some of the hand-blown ones or some of the older ones might be a little bit too wide. It sort of depends. In our testing, most six-cup Chemexes do, in fact, fit with the Master B. Because it's plastic and because it's an open reservoir, we recommend using hotter water than you would normally use for your brews. There's going to be some cooling because it's exposed to the air. It also has to go through the plastic and plastic, it's not pre-heated, typically, when brewing. So you're going to lose a little bit of heat to the plastic and to the air as you're brewing, so we recommend targeting maybe three to six degrees higher than your actual slurry temperature or water temperature just depending on how you brew.
Just basically aim a little bit hotter. Using water right off the boil is great. It gives you a target temperature somewhere between 200, 205 degrees usually, in our experience. Obviously, depends on the air temperature, but it's very, very easy to compensate for a little bit of temperature loss using this device and the benefits are pretty clear still in the cup. One thing that we've noticed as well is that you do probably need to agitate a little bit if you're aiming for a flat bed. Basically, fill up a few times, let it drain all the way through and then once you have an empty Master B and a bit of a slurry, just pick up your dripper, give it a slight little circular swirl and you'll get a nice flatbed at the end of your brew. Overall, it's a really great accessory for brewing. It's not quite as fancy or precise as manually pouring with a gooseneck kettle, but it does open up the world of manual brewing to a lot more people. It's a fairly cheap accessory. It gives really great results in the cup. Again, it gives really…it seems to give these really nice even extractions that we're really impressed with.
It doesn't seem to add too much time to your brews. I mean, certainly, you can just compensate by changing your grind, changing how much water you're pouring and when. But the benefit of having that even shower all over the brew bed is pretty impressive. One thing we can probably compare it to, if you're familiar with the Melodrip is a tool that has a sort of similar approach except that it's a manual tool and it can get much closer to the brew bed. A lot of people have asked us what the difference is with this and the Melodrip. Essentially, we can say that this is kind of like the Melodrip on training wheels. You can't get that close to the brew bed. You can't really target specifically where your water hits on the brew bed because we only have two zones for brewing. We still get pretty good results. It still has somewhat of the same principle where the idea is, you have a gentle shower of water which minimizes the agitation in the brew bed and cleans up your cups. It gets a lot more clarity out of it.
We can't really say that they're that similar. It seems like the Melodrip is a more versatile tool but it's also more hands-on. So the Master B is essentially, it has some of the same benefits, maybe not all of them, while being a little bit of a simpler tool to use. Overall, really impressed with this guy. We never really thought that adding a simple shower head to our manual brewing approach would be this impressive of a change, but we're pretty happy to have it on. Again, very simple tool to use and it gives you lots of benefits in the cup over straight manual pouring. So that's the Master B dripper. Thanks for watching. Hey guys, thanks for watching. If you want to see more videos like this and find some helpful articles, be sure to check out our learning center. If you have any questions about products and need some support, get in touch with our sales team. We'll be very happy to help you. Thanks.
