Coffee brewing for the third wave of hipster coffee drinker.
"This method of making coffee had somehow slipped by me my entire adult life, and I was shocked at how simple the process is, and how delicious a cup of coffee it makes!"
—4nines, on the Coffeegeek forums: https://www.coffeeforums.com/threads/pour-over-coffee-where-have-you-been-all-my-life.24068/
Whereas the first wave of coffee was represented by the rise of the home automated brewers (set in motion by Mr. Coffee, and the second by the Starbucks twenty-ounce takeaway cup, the third wave is marked by the advent of the Hario V60 filter brewer and the rise of personalised pourover specialty coffee. In case you're not familiar with it, it looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB5sIABKmZ4. As more cafes offered speciality coffee, and wanted to showcase the coffees they had for sale, the concept of making an individual brew of a particular coffee began to be important. For coffee roasters, it was a way of the prospective customer to sample the coffee personally, nd the filter cone was an easy mechanism for the barista to showcase the best sides of each roast or blend. the customer, for their part, could see a simple brwing method they could replicate at home, and a new industry was born. Soon the Hario V60 filter come and papers were being bought in their thousands by coffee geeks keen to not only try new coffees but also to get the very best out of the beans.
It's probably unfair of me to have called specialty coffee drinkers "hipsters". It may have been true at one point, but increasingly, ordinary people are getting turned on to the flavours of specialty, and more and more people brewing at home are taking advantage of this brew method.
An quick how-to.
A pourover setup consists of a paper filter cone and a conical support (ranging through plastic, glass, ceramic or metal), which usually rests on a small carafe or the serving cup. The filter paper is placed in the conical filter, coffee is added and almost-boiling water added. Water percolates through the coffee grounds, picking up flavour and finally dripping through into the collecting vessel.
Grind size should be Medium to Medium-Fine, a tad finer than table salt or beach sand. Ratio of coffee/water and the temperature of the water are variable depending on personal taste, but I offer guidelines (1 gram of coffee to 16 grams/ml of water) which equates to ~15 grams/mug. I'd do conversions for US measurements, but you can catch up with the rest of the world on this one. Just buy a bloody scale and get over yourselves.¹ There will be no scoops/cup ratios here, you can figure those out for yourself if you must. Water temperature is also variable, close to boiling for lighter roasts (say 95°C, just off the boil). Medium is best between 90°C and 95° and dark 88-90°. If you don't have a thermometer or temperature-controlled kettle, temps for light roasts are best about 30 seconds after boiling, medium about 45 seconds and darks about a minute.
For the most part, water can simply be added in a steady stream, making sure to check that the coffee grounds are saturated and allowed to drain freely. Advanced options are available if you have a goosenecked kettle (the long curved spout you may have seen). Aficionados will advise you to ''bloom' the coffee by covering the grounds with water and allowing the CO2 to bubble out before adding a number of steady pours over a few minutes. Every coffee Youtuber has their own take on how to maximise flavour extraction, but I get decent results by:
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adding enough water to cover the grounds in the filter and allowing the bubbling to subside. This "blooming" allows the release of the CO2 still in the beans and allows further water to extract the solubles.
- pouring ~50 grams of water at a time and allowing it to almost drain
- ensuring that the laminar flow of water disturbs the coffee bed a little with each pour. This is easier with a good gooseneck kettle.
- being patient and allowing the brew to finish without messing with it
You may see some quite complicated timing tricks and whatnot from some commentators. My advice is to try each of their methods and then take what works for you and develop your own workflow. I've suggested in the past that when experimenting, you take notes and keep tabs on what works. Developing your own method and workflow will take time, and a notebook will help.
Don't be put off by anyone who tells you that their method is the best, or the only one that really works. AT the end of the day, you and you alone are the arbiter of how you enjoy your coffee. As log as you buy good beans and grind them fresh you'll develop your own method that works for your taste and the beans you use.
Brewers other than Hario
You'll se many people siging the praises of Hario, simply because they were to first to really get popular in the West. In time, other anufacturers followed, with a wide variety of designs and philosophies around brewing. There are schools of thought suggesting that flat-bottomed brewers are "best", and a modern school that focuses on "no-bypass brewing" using specially-designed systems to make certain that all the water and all the coffee come into contact with one another.
Whether that's worth considering depends on how much time you're willing to spend in experimenting, and how many brewing systes you're prepared to collect. I'm happy with the original Hario, which is portable, easy to use and makes a good cup.
You may still have questions. One of them may be "What's the advantage over my automated drip brewer?", the answer to which is "if you're happy with that system, don't change", *but* there is a reason that manual pourovers are preferable. Mostly, this is to do with control over the brew process dependent on teh coffee you have. In the course of brwing manually you may learn more about how coffee is extracted from the bean. Automated brewers aren't generally great at distributing water consistently over the coffee bed, whereas you will be conscientious and careful. Cheap electric brewers are okay at dealing with the average grocery store coffee and will make an average if forgettable cup. See my everyday coffee hacks for all the reasons why. A <$10 investment in a plastic brewer may well take your coffee up a notch or two, so I consider it worthwhile trying manual pourover at least once. There's a good reason why millions of Hario brewers have been sold around the world, after all.
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¹ Sorry, but I'm done with conversions to US measures. Freedom units just don't work here in the new coffee world. I'm not being rude, this is just the way it is.
$ xclip -o | wc -w
1145