Products You May Like
We’ve got some new products to showcase today, all of which will be reviewed in our Blog’s Mini Review category. They are from a company called Soulhand, which sells an expanding range of coffee brewing and preparation products. We’ve got three of them to show today and to set up for review.
Soulhand 350ml Ice Drip Coffee Brewer
First up is the Soulhand 350ml Ice Drip Coffee Brewer, which retails for $45.99, though it can be found or purchased for less.
In the box you find a lower glass vessel, made out of borosilicate glass. There’s a plastic collar for the coffee chamber to rest in. The coffee chamber itself is glass with several holes in the bottom of it. What looks like a repurposed espresso machine dispersion screen is included, and that serves as the main coffee filter, going into the bottom of the glass ground-coffee holder. The top plastic vessel has the adjustable dripper mechanism built in. The other items this ships with include a lid for the ice chamber and a package of circular filter paper, which is meant to sit on top of the bed of coffee to help distribute the water drips evenly over all the ground coffee. Everything is protected with a difficult-to-dispose-of foam cocoon.
This model works like most ice drip brewers, in that you add a specific volume of ice to the top portion, place slightly coarse-ground coffee in a middle portion of the device, and control a dripper so you get one drip every two seconds from the melting ice landing on the bed of coffee. As the coffee slowly saturates, the extracted elixir falls below into the lower vessel.
This is a good size if all you want is one or two servings of ice drip coffee. This brewing method is interesting, because it tends to avoid extracting some of the acids and brighter notes in a coffee, leaving the cup a bit more mellow and easily digestible for people who find the acidity in coffee to be too much.
The construction seems good at first glance. Almost everything fits together well (the repurposed espresso machine dispersion screen does slide around a bit in the glass middle chamber), and my initial tests of the drip mechanism show you can easily control it down to 1 drip every 2 or 3 seconds.
The setup looks good, is compact and presents a nice small package for those who want ice drip coffee but don’t want to brew up a half litre or more of it. We’ll give it a more thorough test and report back here in the blog.
Soulhand Cold Brew Coffee Maker
The Soulhand Cold Brew Coffee Maker is the company’s full size ice dripper, and it retails for $49.99 but can be found for less if you search around.
In the box is the large coffee carafe, the wood collars and lid, a laser etched filter assembly that sits between the top and lower vessel, and the top glass vessel which has the dripper mechanism integrated. Surprisingly, there were no paper disk filters to help disperse the water drips over the bed of coffee (these are a must-have for ice drippers). The entire brewer was well packed and protected, but with a decidedly environmentally-unfriendly cocoon.
At very first glance, this is an attractive, modern looking ice drip brewer. It can do up to 800ml of ice drip coffee over a four hour period, and can also be left in the refrigerator for even longer ice drip brews (24 hours). The middle collar and lid are bamboo, and accent the glass very well. I really like the look and shape of the lower glass beaker, though ours didn’t quite sit 100% level on the counter; it had a tiny bit of wobble, not much to worry about though.
It works the same as the 350ml brewer above, but delivers up to 2.5x the volume, for larger brews. I had an old-school tower style ice drip brewer that is 3 times taller than this, but only does 600ml volume, so this is a nice modern take on full size ice drip, that doesn’t stand 3 feet tall.
Again, we’ll be testing this Soulhand Ice Drip Brewer thoroughly and will report back to our readers.
Soulhand 5 in 1 USB Charged Travel Coffee Setup
The third product from Soulhand is this intriguing 5 in 1 (I’ll get to that), USB charged, cordless electric coffee milk and personal pour over brewer setup (product link). It retails for $59.99, but can be found for less, even on Soulhand’s site.
It ships in a box that is a lot more environmentally friendly than the cold drip brewers. Inside, there’s a faux-leather hardshell carry case for everything. Inside of that is the product, which includes a “drip kettle”, a pouring / storing lid, a vacuum insulated mug, a pour over brewer with a laser etched steel filter, and a coffee grinder with a usb-charged cordless motor. It also comes with a coffee scoop. The only thing missing is a real kettle to heat your water. The entire package, not including the carry bag, weighs 920g.
The “5” things, as best I can tell are 1) the electric coffee grinder, 2) the pour over filter setup, 3) the vacuum walled insulated tumbler cup, 4) the drip kettle, and 5) the carry case. I think calling the plastic upper container a “drip kettle” is a bit of a stretch. Just pour directly from whatever water’s been boiled with.
The grinder is based around a single spindle connection ceramic conical burr set, and while the motor spins the burr set even slower than you would by hand cranking it, it does do it automatically and also has a sensor for when it’s no longer grinding coffee, and stops automatically. It’s relatively quiet too, and obviously can handle the torque of slow spinning and grinding coffee beans. The company says the 1200 mah battery inside is good for grinding up to 8 brews before needing a recharge. It takes almost 3 hours to recharge it via a standard mini USB port.
The grinder has five clickable fineness settings; it can go quite fine, but because it’s a single connection spindle, the burrset will wobble a bit, giving a wide range of particle sizes. It’s not an issue so much with finer grinds, but at the coarser level, it will probably produce a lot of fines.
The tumbler is really nice and very lightweight, as most true vacuum insulated containers are. It has a rubber circular foot to help it from sliding around.
The brewing filter is interesting. It’s not very big, and I think it might max out at doing 24g, 350ml brews, but we’ll find out in testing. It does have two fold out “wings” to sit nicely on the tumbler cup when brewing. You also attach it directly to the grinder when grinding, so all the ground coffee falls right into the filter.
Even though this is a very slow grinder, the fact it automatically stops once no more coffee is being ground is a nice touch; you can start it up, go off and do something else, and come back to all the coffee ground, no need for a full size electric grinder, or cranking away on a manual grinder.
How does it all work in practice? Well I’ve given some hints, but I’ll save it all for a full Mini Review, coming soon.
Mark has certified as a Canadian, USA, and World Barista Championship Judge in both sensory and technical fields, as well as working as an instructor in coffee and espresso training. He started CoffeeGeek in 2001.