For countless coffee drinkers besides myself, the V60 has been both an entry point and a constant, a tool that grows alongside its user. Loved by home brewers and relied upon by professionals, it has helped define what specialty coffee looks like today. With the V60 recently marking its 20th anniversary in 2025, revisiting this icon reveals not just how far coffee has come, but how deeply one object has shaped contemporary brewing culture.

Possibilities seen through a funnel

HARIO Corporation’s path to coffee began far from cafes. Founded in 1921 under the name Shibata Hiromu Seisakujo, the company built its reputation producing laboratory glass and chemical apparatus. In 1949, HARIO established the industry’s first fully integrated heat-resistant glass production system, overseeing everything from melting to finishing under one roof. In 1971, it opened the world’s first fully electric factory dedicated to heatproof glass, a facility that remains in operation today.

The name HARIO, meaning ‘King of Glass,’ was adopted in the early 1950s alongside the development of a new, cutting-edge heat-resistant glass. That ambition to lead rather than follow has defined the company’s output ever since, from Japan’s first glass teapot to microwave-safe kitchenware that reshaped domestic cooking. Even outside the kitchen, HARIO’s material curiosity has produced such extraordinary creations as glass musical instruments, including a violin that received a Guinness World Record. Coffee first entered the picture in 1948 with the launch of a home siphon. By closely observing cafe practices and domestic habits, HARIO sought to bring professional-quality flavour into everyday life. That balance between scientific precision and lived experience would later prove crucial to the company’s ethos.

‘Because we had long worked with laboratory funnels, we immediately recognized the filtration potential of the cone shape,’ explains Junichi Kuranaga, Managing Director and a member of the original V60 development team. At the time, cloth filters dominated in cafes, prized for flavour but often impractical and not the easiest to clean. HARIO’s challenge was to replicate that clarity using paper without sacrificing ease of use. The solution would not be quick. Research into filtration, flow, and extraction stretched over three decades. The V60 is the culmination of that work.

An unstoppable revolution

Even twenty years after its release, the V60’s appeal lies in three deceptively simple structural choices. The first is the cone itself. Compared to the flat-bottom drippers common at the time, the V60 creates a deeper bed of coffee grounds. As water flows toward the centre, contact time increases, allowing for greater extraction control and nuance.

The second innovation lies in the spiral ribs lining the dripper’s interior. During development, HARIO discovered that when paper filters adhered too closely to the dripper wall, airflow stalled and extraction became unpredictable. The raised, spiral ribs, extended toward the top, reduce surface contact while allowing gases to escape during bloom. The wave-like form, now iconic across HARIO products, echoes patterns familiar to glassmakers, where layered drops of molten glass spread and harden into a honeycomb-like structure. The third feature is the single, large hole at the base. By removing flow restriction from the dripper itself, the V60 places control firmly in the brewer’s hands. Grind size, pour speed, and technique determine the result, not the device.

This design philosophy is precisely why the V60 has endured. It does not guarantee consistency; it invites engagement. It exposes mistakes as readily as it rewards attention. For many brewers, including this writer, it remains one of the few tools that can feel endlessly familiar yet never exhausted. A minor change in grind or pour can reveal a coffee entirely anew. That openness has made the V60 a staple at the highest level. To date, it has been used to win six World Brewers Cup championships, more than any other dripper.

Reverse importation of enthusiasm

When the V60 launched on 1 October 2005, its reception in Japan was cautious. Cafes favoured immersion-style brewing and consistency over control. As HARIO’s Managing Director Ryohei Uno recalls, the launch felt like a series of trials with the ‘greatest struggle being with the commercial route, coffee shops and cafes. Back then, concepts like TDS were unheard of, and it was an era when even using scales or timers during extraction was uncommon.’ The V60 ran counter to prevailing methods.

Momentum instead arrived from across the Pacific. As coffee’s third wave gathered pace in the United States, improvements in traceability and access to high-quality beans created demand for single-cup, origin-specific brewing. Filter coffee, often produced in large batches, struggled to meet that need.

The V60 offered an answer. Affordable, adaptable, and expressive, it allowed baristas to adjust extraction for each coffee without investing in costly equipment. Early adopters championed it loudly, and pioneering cafes such as Intelligentsia famously lined their bars with rows of red V60s, providing a visual shorthand for a new approach to coffee. Around the same time, James Hoffmann’s London pop-up cafe Penny University showcased HARIO equipment almost exclusively. For HARIO, it was confirmation that the V60 had found its global audience.

The future beyond 60 degrees

Two decades after its debut, the V60 enters a new phase. Released in 2025 to mark the 20th anniversary, the V60 NEO is a reinterpretation. First unveiled at SCAJ, it re-examines the V60’s original premise of industry-leading flow through the lens of modern brewing. By increasing the number of ribs from 24 to 72, the NEO pushes drainage speed to an extreme, prioritizing clarity and responsiveness.

Designed with competition brewing in mind, it can also be paired with the immersion-style Switch dripper, reflecting how contemporary brewers move fluidly between methods rather than adhering to a single philosophy. In this sense, the V60 NEO is about refinement, an acknowledgement that even the most established tools must evolve alongside the people who use them and the contexts in which they are used.

HARIO’s continued relevance rests on its relationship with those people. World-class baristas, competitors, cafe owners, and home brewers have shaped the V60 as much as engineers and designers. That open, critical, and collaborative dialogue has kept the cone grounded in practice rather than theory. As Ryohei Uno says, ‘for us, baristas aren’t merely business partners, they’re like friends that we’re striving with together to achieve better coffee; our products are recognized globally solely because baristas have genuinely championed them.’ The daily act of brewing with a V60 still reflects HARIO’s long-held philosophy: bringing dreams into everyday life. After twenty years, the cone has not become a relic. Instead, it has become a place of return, a familiar starting point from which coffee’s future continues to unfold.