The forthcoming April Hybrid brewer. All images courtesy of April Coffee.
After building a devoted following for its original April Brewer, Danish coffee company April Coffee is launching a sibling device called the April Hybrid.
Designed by roaster, competitive barista and April Coffee Founder Patrik Rolf, the Hybrid manual brewer includes an open/close valve in its base, allowing users to alternate between percolation and immersion at any time within a single brewing routine.
While aesthetically similar to the glass April Brewer, the April Hybrid upper structure and base are both of distinct design and are not interchangeable with parts from older models.
“The Hybrid glass brewer and base are unique to the Hybrid product,” Rolf told Daily Coffee News. “We have redesigned the walls of the brewer to adapt for the change of flow rate that comes with immersion brewers. [It is] a different experience, even if the valve is completely open.”
In designing the Hybrid brewer Rolf considered how to maintain balanced brewing within the single-wall glass structure while dealing with temperature declines that occur naturally in any manual brew.
Fluted-wall, flat-bottom filters inside the brewer offer a relatively fast exit flow compared to brewers with smaller holes or conical filters, although Rolf said the speed of brewing was not a primary consideration.
“Our focus has never been speed of brewing, but quality of brewing,” said Rolf. “Those two don’t always align. There has been a clear focus on ‘faster’ brewing lately but I still don’t see the benefit with that. Instead I am looking for consistency, and where in the brew we can have certain flow rates. That’s how we impact brewing quality.”
The April Hybrid joins a field of steep-and-release “immersion drippers” that found its first wave of popularity in the late 2000s with products such as the Clever Coffee Brewer and the now discontinued Bonavita Immersion Dripper.
Japanese equipment maker Hario expanded on the concept with the Hario Switch conical hybrid brewer about five years ago. Last year the NextLevel Pulsar added an adjustable valve to the flat cylindrical zero-bypass format.
The April Hybrid is the first to add a steep/release valve to a brewer that utilizes Kalita-style basket filters.
Revealed online a week before the World of Coffee trade show in April’s home city of Copenhagen, Denmark, this past June, the Hybrid was initially released in a limited run of 250 units.
“We brewed over 2,000 individual brews in our stores that week, and that was a great opportunity to learn more about the product,” said Rolf. “We even sent three of the first prototypes — those were 3D printed and only production samples — to Elysia Tan after she asked us, and she ended up winning the Singaporean Brewers Cup with it.”
Since then, the brewer has undergone slight modifications to its color and shape in preparation for the current worldwide release.
“It’s still based on a new-generation version of the April flat-bed glass brewer. Nothing has changed there,” said Rolf. “But we made a push to make it even more April-specific and show how we adapted a function that originates from Chinese tea brewing equipment into the April Brewer universe of flat-bed brewers.”
Rolf, a two-time World Barista Championship finalist, used the original April Brewer in becoming the second-place winner of the 2019 World Brewers Cup.
Meanwhile, eight-year-old April Coffee recently moved into a larger headquarters just outside of Copenhagen, where it has upgraded from a 15-kilo to a 35-kilo-capacity Loring roaster.
From the new headquarters, April Coffee is also readying a manual grinder designed as a companion to the manual brewers.
“It’s been three years in the making now and this year we are finalizing the last production samples,” Rolf said of the grinder. “We are looking to show the world what we have around April 2025. A good bet is to visit SCA [Expo] Houston to be the first to see it.”
The April Hybrid is slated for widespread release this November at a price of 799 DKK (about US$119 as of this writing) in the company’s two Copenhagen cafes, then the company’s online store for shipping worldwide.
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Howard Bryman
Howard Bryman is the associate editor of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine. He is based in Portland, Oregon.
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