The Ultimate Filter Brew Guide
Amazing pour over coffee can take some time and effort. Every coffee and every palate is a little different and as such, there is no ‘One true recipe”. This guide arms with a great starting recipe, but more importantly the tools to understand how to tweak it to get the best out of every drink. Be sure to check the ‘fine tuning’ section at the end.
Quick Guide
Makes 2 Cups
Brewer: Hario v60 size 02
Grind: medium coarse
Ratio: 30 Grams of Coffee - 500 Grams of water
Water Temp: 96C
Bloom 90g and wait for 50 sec
Pour remaining 410g in slow gentle circles finishing by 2:40
Wait for drawdown (another 30 seconds or so)
Enjoy!
You will need:
Good Coffee
Kettle
Brewer
Coffee Grinder
Filter Paper
Scale
Nice tasting water
Dose:
This is how much coffee we will be using for our brew. How we dose coffee is essential, this allows us to be as consistent as possible from brew to brew. There are lots of variables in coffee brewing, dose is a variable that is very easy to keep consistent. As a guide, we usually use 15g per person. For our 2 cup brew above, that’s 30g of coffee!
Preparation
Get some water on the boil, a temperature controlled kettle is what we are using. Our brew temperature is between 93-96 degrees celsius, however boiling water will do just fine! Give your brewer a rinse with some hot tap water, pop your filter in and give it a rinse too, get all that papery taste washed away. Pop that all on the top of the vessel you will brew your coffee into (Mug, Cup, Thermos, Carafe, Soup Bowl) and move on for now.
Grind
This is one of the trickiest things to grasp when you first start brewing. Luckily, grind size in filter brewing is quite a bit more forgiving than in something like espresso preparation. As a starting point, aim for your grinds to resemble beach sand granules. In future if you wish you can adjust finer to taste/draw down speed (more on that later).
Set up
Your coffee is ground, your brewer is rinsed, warm and ready - gently tip your ground coffee into your brewer and give it a couple gentle taps, swirls or shakes to ensure that the coffee is distributed evenly in the bottom of the brewer and pop the whole array onto your scales. You should already have your water prepared, make a note of how much water you will need to pour in to meet the coffee:water ratio. Nothing worse than realising you don't have enough water in the kettle mid-pour. As a general rule, we use a ratio of 16.7:1. Or rather 60 grams of coffee to 1 litre of water (30:500, 15:250…you get the gist.)
Bloom
Gently pour a small amount of water over the top of your coffee. We like to use a ration of 3:1 for our bloom, we have dosed 30 grams of coffee for our 2 cup brew, which means we will be adding 90 grams after water during our bloom phase. Let the coffee swell and bloom for about 50 seconds (Yes we know, this number is one of hot contention in the community, but this is a good place to start). This process allows for the release of the gases that we may not want in our cup, and allows us with our next pour, to get better access to the good stuff we want in the cup!
Pour
After your bloom, we start the main pour. Starting in the centre, making small circular motions, we are going to gently pour the water over the bed of coffee. We pour at a rate of roughly 4-5ml/sec. This means, with 410 grams of water left to add to our 30/500 brew, we will aim to pour our remaining water in somewhere close to 80-90 seconds.
If your brewer fills to the top it’s ok to take a moment to pause, if your brewer fills up too quickly though, you may need to reconsider, how fine you have ground your coffee and adjust for next time, considering how much coffee you are trying to brew!
Fine Tune Your Brew
Bitter and astringent?
This means we have extracted a little more of the coffee than we would like. Solutions to this include: pouring more gently/slowly (or holding the kettle higher) and/or making your grind size a little coarser, dropping your water temperature if you have that available is also an option), we adjust in 3 degree increments, 96, 93, 90…as anything less is pretty hard to taste in the cup. Chose one of these variable and test. Remember, only change 1 thing at a time!
Too thin and watery?
If you are happy with the flavour of your coffee but find the consistency or ‘body’ (our perception of texture, thin, silky, thick, full, etc) is not to your liking, you can control this with the amount of pours. Instead of one long pour of 410 grams, in your next brew you could break that down to two pours of 205. Meaning, after your bloom phase, pour in 205 grams, wait a moment for the water to begin to drain, then, pour the remaining 205 grams into the coffee. If you really aren't getting the body you are looking for you could grind a touch finer or consider adding more pouring phases… four pours of 102.5 if need be.
Too sour?
This means we have extracted a little less of the coffee’s flavour than desired, this could be for a couple reasons and may require a little trial and error to discover the problem. On one hand, the grind might be a little too coarse and is letting the coffee slip by before we get out all of the flavours we want, if this is the case, try grinding a little finer, and/or pouring a little more aggressively to stir up and agitate the grounds during the brewing process. You could also swirl the brewer after the bloom and main pour, to get some of those finer particles down lower to act as a high resistance filter, giving the brew more contact/drawdown time.
On the other hand, if we have ground way too fine, the water may be finding n easier path down, pushing itself around the sides of your coffee bed, through the filter paper and to freedom below, without taking any of the coffee flavour with it, or even cutting a channel in the bed of coffee and escaping all though one place, leaving one section over extracted and the others under. This usually results in sour and bitter flavours being present at the same time (we call it over-under). If this is the case, grind coarser and see if that tames the next brew!
Too thick and syrupy?
Similarly, you may need to reduce the amount of pours, if you are at one pour, maybe consider adding some extra water during your main pour, (30 grams should do it), or even adding it in after your brew to water it down a touch!