The Tricolate is one of the more unusual brewers in specialty coffee. Designed by American inventor Barry O. Jarrett and launched in 2017, it is a cylindrical stainless steel chamber with a microfilter at the bottom and a perforated distributor disc that sits on top of the coffee bed. Unlike every other pour-over, the current Tricolate uses a proprietary flat paper filter disc (dense creped cellulose) seated at the base, and the tall narrow cylinder blocks bypass almost entirely — water cannot escape around the bed. (The original 2017 design used a metal microfilter.)
The zero-bypass design is the whole point. Because every drop of water must pass through the coffee, extraction is unusually efficient and the cup comes out dense, sweet, and high in total dissolved solids. Tricolate recipes typically use lower doses than a V60 (10 to 14 g) with standard water volumes, producing a short, concentrated brew that drinks somewhere between a filter coffee and an Americano.
A canonical recipe: 14 g of coffee to 225 g of water (1:16), a grind a bit finer than V60 fine, water at 92–94 °C, poured in a single slow stream over 60 to 90 seconds, total drawdown in 4:00 to 5:30. The Tricolate rewards very light roasts and meticulous grind consistency — it has a reputation among competition brewers as the dripper that produces the highest extraction yields of any device in its category.
