(MC) I think the sophisticated and beautiful design is one of its biggest attractions. Can you tell us about it?

(EPEIOS CEO Kim: hereafter Kim) Yes. The designers are Benoît-Pierre Emery and Damien Auchribin, who have worked on designs for global luxury brands. FoElem is the first industrial design series by these world-renowned designers, who are responsible for scarf designs for Hermès. Mocca is the third in the series.

(MC) It's a very sophisticated and well-designed appliance that will blend in well with your interior decor.

(Fri) Thank you. The FoElem series is inspired by the "Four Elements," and its design allows you to feel the changes that occur in nature and fills the hearts of those who use it. Mocca is based on the natural cycle of coffee cherries, which fall to the ground, eventually sprout and grow into trees, and the cherries that grow on those trees return to the soil. It embodies the desire of the designer and us at EPEIOS to provide busy modern people with moments of relaxation in their daily lives.

(Izaki) The thing we paid the most attention to was that we weren't recreating hand-dripping.

(Kim) That's right. I think many of the coffee makers these days seem to be particular about "reproducing the feel of hand-dripping."
In fact, our company was initially looking to recreate hand-dripping, so we were really surprised when Izaki-san suggested not recreating hand-dripping.

(Izaki) I think the biggest feature of a coffee maker is that it can make 4 to 5 cups of coffee at once. However, because it consumes a lot of ground coffee at the same time, the volume of the ground coffee in the dripper increases, and the hot water does not reach the ground coffee evenly, resulting in a phenomenon known as "under-extraction."

(Fri) We spent a lot of time redesigning the shower head to eliminate any "unextracted" results. It was really difficult, with numerous prototypes and experiments being made to get closer to the image that Mr. Izaki had in mind.

(Izaki) Water (hot water) has the tendency to pass through areas that have become wet due to laziness (laughs). So it's important to find a way to make the water and coffee grounds come into contact with each other evenly.

(Kin) Working with Izaki-san, we calculated the flow rate and speed of the hot water coming out of the shower head, as well as the size and position of the holes in the shower head, and after repeated improvements using logical and scientific methods, we were finally able to increase the efficiency of coffee extraction and succeeded in creating a highly refined coffee maker. I still remember how relieved all the staff were when we did this (laughs).

(MC) In a survey we conducted in advance of the event, we found that many people were concerned about decaf coffee. Mr. Izaki, you also produce decaf coffee yourself, right?

(Izaki) Before COVID-19, I was traveling overseas more than 200 days a year, so my only way to communicate with my wife was over a coffee break at the end of the day.

(Kin) You are very thoughtful of your wife.

(Izaki) It's an important time for my wife and I to talk about what happened that day, but when my wife became pregnant, she couldn't drink coffee anymore. That's what prompted us to make a decaf coffee that suited our tastes.

(Kim) I had never tried decaf coffee until I met Mr. Izaki, but it really does taste just as good as coffee.

(Izaki) I was particular about that. But I think that by facing decaf, I was able to reconsider how I interact with caffeine.

(Fri) What do you mean?

(Izaki) I'm sure you know that coffee contains caffeine, but if you consume caffeine all day just because you like coffee, it can have a significant impact on the quality of your sleep. That's why I decided to "not consume caffeine after a certain time" and substituted it with decaffeinated coffee. This helped me realize that learning how to properly interact with caffeine without accumulating mental stress (from not being able to drink coffee) was the right way to interact with coffee (caffeine).

Q: Please tell us your impressions of using Mocca (coffee maker) and its design.