June 2025

I bought a Hario Switch and fell in love with it. Then I kept grabbing the lever and feeling the gap.

The brewer is serious hardware. Glass cone, stainless steel ball valve, silicone base. The lever that operates the whole thing is plastic. It sits directly in the path of near-boiling water, actuated every brew.

I started thinking about what it would take to fix it. The geometry has to be exact: the lever actuates a ball valve with tight tolerances. A few millimeters off and you lose the snap, or the seal. I worked through several iterations before I had something that felt right.

I posted the concept on r/pourover as a "plastic delete mod." Nobody had built one yet. The response was more positive than I expected. The first batch of preorders went out in 2024 and sold out quickly. I doubled the quantity for the second run and added a DLC finish: black diamond-like carbon coating, scratch-resistant, clean. That sold out too.

At the time of writing, GoodSwitch is in its third generation. None of it was planned. It started with one brewer, one component, and a feeling that it could be better.