Rip & Drip is live: try it here. This is a pet project, not a case study with a thesis. I got into pour over coffee, ran into an annoying problem, and built the thing I wanted to use.
The annoying problem
Buying a new brewer is the fun part. What comes next is less fun.
There are hundreds of recipes for whatever you just bought, and they are scattered across YouTube videos, roaster blogs and forum threads, every one of them in a different format. Some give you a ratio and no pour schedule. Some give you a grind size that means nothing on your grinder. Most assume a dose twice the size of the cup you are making.
So you either do arithmetic before your first coffee of the day, or you eyeball it and wonder later why it tasted thin. As someone new to this, that was the wall I kept hitting, and the recipes I ended up brewing were the ones I happened to find first rather than the ones I liked best.
What I built
A card deck. Pick the brewer you own, tear open its sealed pack, and pull one recipe a day.
Eight brewers with eight cards each: V60, Kalita Wave, Chemex, Origami, Hario Switch, Clever, Orea V4 and the April. Brew the card, rate it, and it goes in your binder. A card you have collected does not come back, so you work through a deck instead of scrolling a list and picking the one you already know.
The idea was to take the two things that are actually fun here, getting a new brewer and experimenting with it, and pair them with the bit of daily silliness that makes you open an app in the morning. It is meant as an on ramp. Work through a deck over a few weeks and you come out knowing which recipes you like on that brewer, which is a much better place to start than where I started.
The part that took the thinking
Everything on a card arrives already converted to your setup.
The grind is a number on your grinder rather than a word. Clicks on a Comandante, a dial position to one decimal on a Fellow Ode, a setting on a Baratza Encore. A published recipe saying “medium fine” is not portable, because grind is only meaningful in the units of the machine in front of you.
The dose matches your cup. Tell it you are making a mug and every pour step in the schedule rescales around your ratio. And it reports what actually ends up in the cup rather than the water you poured, because the coffee bed keeps roughly two grams for every gram of dry coffee. That gap surprised me the first time I measured it.
The recipes are other people’s
None of these are mine, and that mattered enough to build for.
Every card carries the author, where the method was published, and a link. The data model has a field for transcription notes, so where a recipe reached me second hand from a video rather than the author’s own write up, the card says so. Card one of the V60 deck is James Hoffmann’s Ultimate V60, credited to Hario, because that is where anybody sensible starts.
How it was built
Three days on Lovable, start to shipped.
The code was the fast part, which is worth saying plainly. What took the time was reading and transcribing the recipes properly, working out how a 1 to 10 grind scale maps onto the real ranges of eight different grinders, and drawing sixty four pieces of card art.
If you are into coffee, have a go and tell me what is wrong with it. Especially if your grinder is not on the list.