This Oakland Design Studio Will Upgrade Your Pour Over Coffee
Photo: GDS Cloth Goods/Ebb
From an efficiency perspective, pour over coffee doesn't make sense. Why should you stand over your morning cup of caffeine, gently bathing each grind in hot water, when a machine could do the work for you, unattended, in half the time? But the motivation behind a pour over isn't utilitarian; it's about enjoying the flavors of well-crafted coffee, That's why you see droves of people queueing for a custom-poured coffee at spots like Blue Bottle and Philz. And it's why Oakland Design Studio GDS Cloth Goods wants you to try an organic cotton coffee filter.
Photo: GDS Cloth Goods/Ebb
Newcomer GDS makes aprons and utilitarian fashion for people who work with their hands. They start by developing their own fabrics, sourcing cotton from farms they know. GDS's newest product is the Ebb Filter, an organic cotton coffee filter for pour over that lasts 3-4 months.
"I'm from Brazil, and there my grandmothers made coffee using cloth filters. It's part of my own family's history, which I love," GDS founder Geana Sieburger says. "When I started making pour over for myself, it just made sense that I would make my own from fabric and never have to run out of a paper filter again. Our filters are sustainable, beautiful and make delicious pour over coffee—all goals we set for ourselves early on in the design and development of Ebb."
It's not just Sieburger who's bullish on the Ebb filter. Blue Bottle founder James Freeman says, "There is something wonderfully ineffable about coffee filtered with a flannel cloth. The result...has a luminosity which shines brighter and deeper than a well made paper-filtered coffee. Ebb cloth filters are the best I've tried in the United States, and I love that they are made from organically certified material."
Photo: GDS Cloth Goods/Ebb
Right now, you can purchase the Ebb through a limited number of IRL stockists like Eureka Coffee and Timeless Coffee in Oakland, but GDS just launched a $16,000 Kickstarter to back its filter dreams on a bigger scale.
"Our current filters are made from a certified organic cotton that is exactly what we want for filtering coffee in terms of performance. However, where it lacks is in transparency," Sieburger explains. "We spent a year developing a fabric using Texas-grown organic cotton that will be woven in South Carolina. The Kickstarter will fund the purchase of the fabric and allow us to make a small studio expansion so we can continue to keep production in-house. It's exciting to think that we'll know exactly where the fiber came from, the people who made it, and we'll be able to share that process with our customers."
If you want your own Ebb—and want to support GDS transparent production goals in the process—you can contribute to the Kickstarter until March 30.