Kono
Kono — written KONO on the products — is the brand of the Japanese company 珈琲サイフオン株式会社, which renders in English as Coffee Siphon Co., Ltd.1 The company name is unusually literal: it is the coffee-siphon company, and the vacuum siphon is the object it is built around.
Outside Japan the brand is better known for something else — the Meimon cone dripper, a pour-over brewer that turns up constantly in discussions of where the Hario V60 came from. Both sit in the same catalogue.
This note is deliberately thin, and the reason is at the bottom of the page: almost nothing about this company is readable from the open web in a form worth writing down as fact. What follows is what the company’s own site actually confirms, and nothing more.
What the company sells
The official site’s own page index lists the product range, which is the most reliable thing available here — it comes from the company rather than from a retailer or a blog:2
| Product line | What it is |
|---|---|
| Syphon | The vacuum brewer the company is named after — see Siphon brewing |
| Meimon (名門) | The cone dripper, catalogued in 2-cup and 4-cup sizes |
| KONO special | A separate dripper line sold alongside the Meimon |
| Server | The glass carafes the drippers sit on |
| Beans | Roasted coffee, sold by the company directly |
That last row matters for how you read the brand. Kono is not purely a hardware manufacturer: it sells coffee as well as the equipment to brew it, which puts it closer to a Japanese roaster-retailer than to a pure glassware firm like Hario — a company that, as its own note records, sells no coffee at all.
The two-size dripper catalogue — one small, one large, rather than a single cone in several materials — is the other visible difference from the V60 range.
Why the name keeps coming up
Two threads in coffee run through this company, and the wiki already touches both.
The first is the siphon. Japan kept vacuum brewing alive after the West abandoned it, mostly through the kissaten — the table-service coffee houses where one master brews a cup at a time in front of the customer. Kono and Hario are the two names any siphon user in Japan encounters. The method itself, and why it survived there, is on Siphon brewing.
The second is the cone dripper. The Meimon is routinely cited in brewing writing as an ancestor of the modern conical pour-over, and this wiki’s Pour-over brewing note already carries an unresolved conflict about when the V60 design actually appeared. Those two questions are related and neither is settled here — see the warnings below before repeating any version of that story.
To verify — the entire corporate history is undocumented here
No founding year, founder, address, capital, president or company timeline is established. The official site was fetched directly and its pages — including the “about” page and the product pages — return only the company name to a plain reader; the content is delivered in a way this machine could not read.12 No company registry entry, filed record, trade-body listing or annual report was consulted. The commonly repeated account of a 1920s founding and a founding family named Kōno was not verified against anything for this note and is deliberately not stated above, even as a claim with a source, because no source for it was actually read.
To verify — the Meimon dripper's design story and its relationship to the V60
Coffee writing widely credits the Meimon as a forerunner of the modern cone dripper, and describes design specifics — rib placement running only part-way up the cone, a resulting change in how the paper seals against the wall. None of that was verified for this note. No launch date, patent, catalogue or first-party design statement was read. This bears directly on the open question in Pour-over brewing about whether the conical dripper dates to the 1950s or to Hario’s own stated October 2005 V60 release, so getting it wrong here would compound an existing conflict. Treat the Meimon’s history, its dimensions and any claim of influence as entirely unresearched, not as disputed.
To verify — a name collision that has already caused one bad research pass
The research pass behind this note returned almost nothing about this company, because “Kono” collides with two unrelated subjects that dominate search results: Kona coffee, the Hawaiian growing region on the slopes of Hualālai and Mauna Loa, and Kono NZ, a Māori-owned food and beverage producer in New Zealand with no coffee-equipment connection. Neither has anything to do with 珈琲サイフオン株式会社. Anyone extending this note should search the Japanese company name or coffee-syphon.co.jp rather than the four Latin letters. Nothing about Kona or the New Zealand company should ever be merged into this page — if Kona coffee is wanted, it belongs in its own origin note.
Related
- Siphon brewing — the vacuum method the company is named after
- Hario — the other Japanese maker of siphons and cone drippers, and this note’s closest sibling
- Pour-over brewing — where the cone-dripper mechanics and the V60 dating conflict live
- Chemex Corporation — the American single-object brewer company, the same story on the other side of the Pacific
- Kissaten · Nel drip · Japan coffee market — the Japanese coffee culture both brewers grew out of
- Third wave coffee — the movement that pulled Japanese brewing gear onto café counters worldwide
Official links
Footnotes
-
珈琲サイフオン株式会社 — official site — fetched directly; confirms the company name and that the site is live, but returned no readable corporate detail ↩ ↩2
-
珈琲サイフオン株式会社 — official site page index (sitemap) — fetched directly; first-party source for the product lines: syphon, Meimon 2-cup and 4-cup, KONO special, server, beans ↩ ↩2