Tetsu Kasuya

Tetsu Kasuya is a Japanese barista, roaster and consultant who won the 2016 World Brewers Cup in Dublin and then gave away the recipe. That recipe — the 4:6 method — is now the default hand-brew taught in cafés and on YouTube worldwide, which makes him unusual among champions: most are remembered for a coffee, he is remembered for a technique.¹²

He was the first Asian champion of the Brewers Cup³ — consistent with this wiki’s own champions table, where every winner from 2011 to 2015 came from Ireland, Australia, the USA, Greece or Norway.

He also founds and runs Philocoffea, a roastery and café group in Chiba, east of Tokyo.⁴

Story

From IT to a coffee counter

Kasuya worked in IT before coffee — described in a 2016 interview as an IT consultant. What moved him was a diabetes diagnosis roughly four years before that interview: he could no longer drink sugary drinks, so, in his words, “I had to change what I drink”.⁵

He moved into the coffee industry properly in 2013, working as manager and barista at The Coffee Factory in Ibaraki, a thirty-year-old shop north-east of Tokyo. Ibaraki is the same prefecture that produces Saza Coffee and Taro Suzuki — no source connects the two, but it says something about where Japanese coffee obsession actually lives.

Competition record

	Year	Competition	Result
1	2015	Japan AeroPress Championship	Champion
2	2016	Japan Brewers Cup (national qualifier)	Champion — brewed on an AeroPress
3	2016	World Brewers Cup, Dublin	World champion

Both Barista Magazine and Daiohs give the same three results, independently. Winning a national Brewers Cup on an AeroPress — a plunger-style immersion brewer, not a pour-over cone — was itself a statement; he switched to a Hario V60 ceramic dripper for the world stage, choosing ceramic because it holds heat during the brew, which he called especially important for the 4:6 method.

The world final was held in Dublin in June 2016. No source consulted publishes his score.

The coffee he won with

A natural-processed Geisha from Panama, a lot called “Sylvia”, grown by Ninety Plus — the producer-and-brand whose Panamanian operation is named Gesha Estates. He says he picked it partly for the producer’s passion rather than cup score alone.

Geisha from Panama is the coffee that broke every price record at Best of Panama; a natural one is dried whole in the fruit, which pushes it further towards ripe berry and floral sweetness. Note that Ninety Plus sells through its own channels rather than the Best of Panama auction, so this lot has no auction price attached to it — see the callout below.

The 4:6 method

The idea is a single split. Take your total brew water and divide it 40% / 60%:

• The first 40% — poured in two goes — sets the balance between acidity and sweetness. More water in the first pour, more sweetness; less, more acidity.
• The remaining 60% — poured in two, three or more goes — does nothing but set the strength. As Kasuya put it, “the only role of the last 60% of the total water is to control the strength of coffee”.

He arrived at it by brute force: brewing the same coffee over and over, catching each portion of water in a separate cup, and tasting which portion was actually carrying the flavour. His conclusion was that “after 40%, the rest doesn’t have a clear taste”.

The second unconventional part is the waiting. He lets the bed drain completely — all liquid down into the decanter — before starting the next pour. At the time, the received wisdom was to keep the bed wet and the flow continuous.

Why it caught on: it gives a home brewer two independent dials — sweet-versus-sour, and strong-versus-weak — instead of a single fixed recipe to follow. Philocoffea’s own site describes it as “a coffee brewing technique based on a scientific approach to coffee extraction”.⁶

The winning recipe, as published

Kurasu’s write-up of the 2016 routine gives the numbers:⁷

Parameter	Value
Coffee	20 g, coarse grind
Water	300 ml at 92 °C, 0.33 ppm, pH 6.6
Dripper	Hario V60
Pour 1 (bloom)	50 ml
Pour 2 (0:45)	70 ml
Pour 3 (1:30)	60 ml
Pour 4 (2:15)	60 ml
Pour 5 (3:00)	60 ml
Finish	lift the dripper at 3:30

The arithmetic is the method: 50 + 70 = 120 ml, exactly 40% of the water, then 60 + 60 + 60 = 180 ml, exactly 60%. The near-zero mineral content — 0.33 parts per million of dissolved solids — is competition-grade water, effectively blank, so nothing in it competes with the coffee.

Philocoffea

Philocoffea was founded in 2017 by Kasuya and a group of friends as a small roastery, with Kasuya handling roasting and quality control himself. The company’s own site names him as founder and builds the brand explicitly around his selection criteria and brewing knowledge.

It now runs three shops in Chiba Prefecture and opened a flagship in Tokyo’s Omotesando district in March 2025. Chiba is commuter-belt Tokyo; Omotesando is the city’s luxury retail spine, and putting a roastery café there is a premiumisation move as much as a retail one.

On 1 October 2020, Daiohs — a Japanese office-services company — signed a comprehensive advisory contract with Philocoffea and Kasuya (Daiohs is a party to the contract, so this is a first-hand source for its existence, not an independent one for its terms).

Consulting and teaching

Beyond his own company, Kasuya consults for convenience-store chains and large companies in Japan and abroad, and travels internationally to run workshops and coach competitors.⁸ The line he is most often quoted on: “Anyone can easily make coffee more delicious”.

That is the whole point of the 4:6 method, and it is why he sits differently in the Japan coffee market story than a buyer like Saza Coffee does. Saza’s influence runs through the auction room — paying record prices for a bag of Elida Estate Geisha. Kasuya’s runs through technique, distributed for free.

To verify

The Hario “Kasuya Model” V60. A retailer’s blog reports that Hario released a Kasuya Model V60 in 2018, with “customized ribs that hold coffee longer compared to the standard V60 model, which makes the extraction more stable and easier to control”. Hario’s own sites could not be checked — both hario.com and global.hario.com returned HTTP 403 to this machine⁹ — so the release year and the rib description rest on a single retailer source. No price or production figures are documented anywhere consulted.

To verify

The bloom timing in the published recipe, and the water figure. Kurasu’s own list writes both the 50 ml bloom and the 70 ml second pour at 0:45, which cannot both be right; the sensible reading is bloom at 0:00, second pour at 0:45. The research report behind this note also gives the water as 0.3 ppm where the Kurasu page reads 0.33 ppm. Neither discrepancy changes the 40/60 structure, but do not quote the timings or the ppm figure as exact.

To verify

The Best of Panama link that isn’t there. The winning coffee is documented as a natural Geisha from Ninety Plus in Panama, but no source ties it to a specific Best of Panama lot, auction year, price or buyer. Ninety Plus sells privately rather than through the auction. Any lot number, cupping score or hammer price attached to “Sylvia” would be invented.

To verify

The Stronghold S7X roaster. The research report states he roasts on a Stronghold S7X in Chiba, sourced to a single YouTube video, not fetched or corroborated here.¹⁰ Philocoffea’s site does not name its roasting equipment on the pages read.

To verify

What is simply not documented. No source consulted gives his birth date, age or home town; his name in Japanese characters; his exact World Brewers Cup score or any sub-scores; Philocoffea’s ownership breakdown, production volume or wholesale clients; or the names of the three Chiba shops. The official Specialty Coffee Association of Japan competition archives and the Specialty Coffee Association’s year-by-year rankings PDFs would be the places to settle the competition figures.

Related

• 4:6 method — the brewing technique he is best known for, in full
• World Brewers Cup — the championship he won in 2016
• Emi Fukahori — the other Japanese-born Brewers Cup champion on this wiki, 2018
• Philocoffea — the roastery and café group he founded
• Geisha · Natural process — the variety and processing of his winning coffee
• Ninety Plus — the Panamanian producer behind the “Sylvia” lot
• Hario · AeroPress — the brewing gear behind the 4:6 method and his national title
• Japan coffee market · Saza Coffee · Taro Suzuki — the market and the buyers he sits alongside
• Specialty Coffee Association of Japan — runs the Japanese qualifiers he won
• Coffee scoring · Cupping — how competition brews are judged
• Premiumisation — the shift his Omotesando flagship is riding

Official links

• Official site — PHILOCOFFEA (Tetsu Kasuya’s roastery)

Footnotes

1. Barista Magazine — 10 Minutes with World Brewers Cup Champion Tetsu Kasuya of Japan ↩

2. Daiohs — Daiohs x Philocoffea (advisory-contract announcement, a party to the agreement) ↩

3. ZEROMILE — Discovering Japan’s Finest Drip Coffee, Chapter 11: PHILOCOFFEA / Tetsu Kasuya ↩

4. MATCHA — Coffee by a World Brewers Cup Champion ↩

5. Perfect Daily Grind — Interview with World Brewers Cup Champion, Tetsu Kasuya ↩

6. PHILOCOFFEA — official site ↩

7. Kurasu — Winning recipe of 2016 World Brewers Cup Champion Tetsu Kasuya ↩

8. A Brief Encounter With Tetsu Kasuya — projecktdrip ↩

9. Hario — global site ↩

10. Make it your Story — Philocoffea, Tetsu Kasuya (video) ↩