Kalita

Kalita Co., Ltd. is a Japanese manufacturer of coffee and tea equipment: drippers, filters, grinders, kettles, and automatic and commercial machines. The company's official timeline places the start of its business in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, in October 1958, without naming a founder; formal incorporation as a joint-stock company under its current name, Kalita Co., Ltd., dates from 25 July 1959, according to both the timeline and the company profile.

Over the following decades Kalita rode Japan's kissaten (coffee house) boom by opening locations in Nagoya, Osaka and Sapporo, and from the 1980s added the import of high-end European and North American equipment alongside its own manufacturing. The company is now headquartered in Kanagawa-ku, Yokohama, following a 2011 relocation, with production based at plants in Kanaya and Shimada, Shizuoka prefecture.

The brand is best known internationally today for its flat-bottom, three-hole drippers, a direct alternative to the cone-shaped V60, and for its wide range of paper, cloth and metal filters designed for that same brewing method.