Why Filter Coffee Is Making a Comeback

Walk into a specialty coffee shop in Jakarta today and you probably will not see a barista rushing between an espresso machine and a steam wand. More likely, someone is standing still, pouring hot water in slow circles over a cone-shaped dripper, watching the coffee drip through a paper filter one drop at a time. This is filter coffee, often called manual brew, and it used to be seen as the slow, old-fashioned option. Now it is one of the main reasons people choose one cafe over another.

Not as Old-Fashioned as It Looks

Paper-filtered coffee is not actually a new idea. The German company Melitta began selling the first commercial paper coffee filter in 1908, and the basic concept barely changed for decades.^[2] The Chemex, with its hourglass-shaped glass and thick paper filter, launched in 1941, and devices like the Kalita Wave arrived in 2010 to give brewers more control over how evenly water passes through the grounds.^[2] Filter coffee never actually disappeared. It just got pushed to the side when espresso machines and sweet milk drinks took over the mainstream market, and most casual drinkers stopped seeing it outside of a home drip machine. What looks like a comeback is really specialty coffee's own slow-brewing habit finally reaching a wider audience.

What a Paper Filter Actually Takes Out

There is a real chemical reason filter coffee behaves differently from methods like French press, Turkish coffee, or Indonesia's own kopi tubruk, where hot water is poured straight over grounds with nothing in between. Coffee naturally contains diterpenes called cafestol and kahweol, compounds found in the oily film that sits on top of unfiltered coffee.^[1] A paper filter traps most of that oil, while methods that skip the filter let it straight into the cup. A serving of unfiltered coffee can carry around 30 times the cafestol and kahweol of a filtered one.^[1]

A large Norwegian study followed more than 500,000 people for about 20 years and looked at exactly this difference.^[1] Compared with people who drank no coffee at all, those who drank filtered coffee had a 15 percent lower risk of death from any cause, a 12 percent lower risk of cardiovascular death among men, and a 20 percent lower risk among women. Unfiltered coffee did not show the same pattern. This is one large population study, not a guarantee for any individual drinker, and it still involves caffeine either way, but it gives filter coffee's return a real health angle beyond just taste or looks.

Why Indonesia's Independent Cafes Leaned Into It

Manual brew took off in Indonesia for a very practical reason: it is cheap to start and run.^[3] A dripper, a kettle, and some filter papers cost a fraction of an espresso machine, and a shop does not need a steam wand, a dairy fridge, or the extra electricity an espresso setup demands. For small independent cafes trying to compete with established chains, that lower cost of entry was often the difference between opening at all and not opening. One Yogyakarta shop owner has described his own simple drip setup as practical, and said it was part of what kept his business running through pandemic closures that forced out shops with bigger overhead.^[3]

The format is flexible too. Shop owners can adapt their own dripper designs to use different filter papers and brew different coffee styles, which is harder to do with a fixed espresso machine.^[3] At the same time, a growing and increasingly well-traveled middle class has gotten curious about Indonesia's own coffee, which makes sense given that Indonesia is the world's fourth-largest coffee producer by volume. Cafes built around single-origin beans, where a large share of customers come specifically for Indonesian-grown coffee, have grown alongside this interest.^[3] Manual brew did not replace older styles like kopi tubruk here. It sits next to them, as one more way people choose to drink their coffee.

The Ritual Is Part of the Draw

Part of filter coffee's appeal is simply that it is slower and more visible. Baristas and coffee people often describe manual brewing as a way to show skill and attention that automation cannot fully copy, since every pour, every pause, and every angle of water changes the result.^[2] Brewer makers keep refining the physical design around this idea. Hario's V60 gets its name from its 60 degree cone angle, engineered specifically to help control how fast water moves through the grounds, and competitions like the World Brewers Cup have pushed brewer design further by rewarding whoever can get the most out of a single method.^[2]

None of this is really in competition with the sweeter, faster milk coffee that has also become hugely popular with younger drinkers. They are just different drinks for different moments: one made to be shared and finished quickly, the other made to be watched as it happens.

A Healthier Case, Not Just a Trendier One

Researchers at IPB University in Bogor tested Indonesia's most popular coffee styles directly, comparing manual brews like tubruk, V60, and cold brew against espresso-based drinks like cappuccino, palm sugar milk coffee, and cafe latte.^[4] All three manual brews contained measurable chlorogenic acid and caffeine along with real antioxidant activity, and V60 came out highest in bioactive content among the three.^[4] Chlorogenic acid may act as an antioxidant and could help slow how quickly sugar is absorbed, while the milk and added sugar common in espresso-based drinks can work against some of coffee's own natural benefits.^[4]