If you’re a complete beginner to pour over coffee, you’ve found the right blog post! We’re going to go through how to start your pour-over brewing journey and break it down for you step by step. I’m sharing everything you need to know about pour-over coffee for beginners, including my top tips and tricks as well as my favourite pour-over brewing recipe.
So What is Pour Over Coffee?
Pour over coffee is essentially pouring hot water on top of grounded coffee, allowing it to seep through a paper filter which extracts the flavours from the ground coffee beans into a drinkable form we call ‘filter coffee.’ In my opinion, it’s the most delicious form of everyday human necessity: coffee!
In pour-over brewing, detail matters. This means dialling in on the grind size, the temperature of our filtered water (filtered water is better than household tap water, we will go through this in another post), how much water we put in our brew, how much coffee, and how long or little we brew for. This is what we will go in-depth about today.
Our Main Focuses
When brewing our biggest focuses are:
- Ratio
- Grind size
- Water Quality
- Time
- Turbulence
- Temperature
We will explain all of these fundamentals as we go through our recipes. I won’t go too in-depth as we’re learning a new skill and I don’t want to overwhelm you. If you’ve already dived into pour-over coffee brewing, I’d recommend staying up to date with us as I will be writing a more in-depth article for a more advanced take on brewing, more technical recipes, tips and tricks very soon.
What We’ll Need
- Fresh, well-rested speciality coffee beans
- A Coffee Dripper (today we will use a Hario V60)
- Filtered Water (we will be using water filtered through a Brita filter)
- A Pouring Kettle (a gooseneck kettle is best for flow control)
- Paper Filters
- A Hand Grinder or any regular coffee grinder
- A Coffee Scale
SO LET’S GET STARTED
The Fundamentals of Pour Over Coffee For Beginners
Ratio
First, we will talk about ratios.
The ratio is a very important part of pour-over brewing; it helps us stick to a specific amount of coffee to water, to ensure even extraction for a more balanced brew.
The easiest way to understand the coffee ratio is by doing the following:
1 is your ground coffee X our denominator (i.e 1:15)
So …. For example, if we’ve got 20g of ground coffee we’d timed it by 15 which equals 300
20×15=300
20 grams of coffee, x 15 = 300 which will be the amount of water we will use.
Then we split up the 300g of water into different pours to begin our brew.
We will go through a quick recipe shortly, but for now, we’ll quickly talk about our main focuses a bit more.
For our first pour, we begin with a bloom. This degases our coffee of CO2 and allows our coffee to extract its beginning flavour, also allowing it to breathe.
Each time we pour, we pour in a circular-like motion ensuring the hot water is soaking our coffee bed. Make sure you do this nice and easy, don’t pour too vigorously or you’ll disrupt your coffee bed and it will cause over-extraction.
Pour nice and gently. I like to zone out of everything around me and indulge in the therapeutic motion of brewing whilst making sure I keep an eye on the weight and timing of the brew by looking at the scale.
But that’s only the beginning; there are more variables we need to learn before we continue.
Grind Size
When it comes to filter coffee brewing, grind size is a very important factor when you brew individual cups of coffee. For example, if you grind your coffee beans too coarse, your brew will be under-extracted (it will come out too quickly) and you’ll allow your water to push through your coffee bed too quickly. This is because your coffee grounds are larger and you allow water to get through air pockets which isn’t what we want.
On the other hand, if you grind much too fine, your brew will be over-extracted (it will come out too slowly). Essentially if you grind too fine there isn’t enough room for water to push through your coffee bed. So we need to find the perfect balance of grind size for our coffee, and we do this by using our ratios
Water Quality
A glass of water – Credit eddows from Tharakorn arunothai
So you may be wondering, as a pour-over beginner, why water quality matters in coffee. Well, you’ve probably heard about hard and soft water before. Depending on different areas, the quality of drinking water can differ. For example, London has very hard water and here in Cornwall, we have relatively soft water. All this means is soft water has fewer mineral parts per million (minerals being: magnesium, sodium, calcium etc) and hard water has more mineral parts per million.
If you think about it, filter coffee is about 98% water, so we need to make sure the quality of our water is good to get a great brew. Too hard water (high mineral content water) can under-extract our coffee and will result in our coffee lacking in body and sweetness, and too soft water can over-extract our coffee, which will make our coffee taste bitter. Therefore we need to get the balance of hard to soft water through filtration and the correct amount of minerals to get a nice tasting cup of coffee. I would recommend bottled water or buying a Brita Filter to get the best quality water without having to make your own.
But that’s enough rambling, we’re learning a new skill. Now you’ve got the basic understanding of why water quality matters we will move on to our next focus. I don’t want to overwhelm you when you’re only starting out.
Time
When brewing pour-over coffee, time affects a vast amount of things when attempting to create a solid and tasty cup of coffee. We should always time our brews from when we start pouring our water.
Some coffees extract faster than others depending on how they are roasted, the variety of coffee beans and how it is grounded, as well as the sugars and other things inside coffee. They may take a bit more time to extract and come to light.
Bitter properties in coffee take longer to extract and this is why having a balanced extraction and balance of timing and pouring our water will help result in a more even brew with a fuller body, sweeter and richer taste (basically a much more yummy brew) and who doesn’t want that?
Turbulence
Turbulence, also known as agitation, increases the pressure put on a bed of coffee. It happens when water passes through our coffee bed, and if done well creates a more even extraction and a speed up in extraction too.
You can agitate your coffee bed in several ways to create a more evenly distributed extraction. Some include: swirling your dripper between each pour, pulsing the amount of water onto the coffee bed, stirring your brew with a spoon and tapping the dripper. But as I said, we will start off with the basics and come back to turbulence in pour-over coffee at a later date.
Temperature
Water for coffee should be anywhere between 90-96 degrees Celsius. If you brew too hot your coffee will become too bitter and if too cool you won’t extract the best of what the coffee you’re brewing has to offer. Having said that, I sometimes find that 86 degrees brings out a more fruity body in my brews. But all I say is experiment; that’s the beauty of coffee, experimenting to create the best brews and learning new things along the way. So enjoy yourself and take your time.
Now let’s get a recipe started for you. Grab the following equipment and we can begin:
- Coffee Beans
- A dripper
- Grinder
- Scale (with timer)
- Server
- Gooseneck kettle
- Paper filter
If you’re struggling with which equipment to go for, check out: POUR OVER EQUIPMENT ON A BUDGET
When you’ve got your equipment, have a go at this recipe:
My Go To Pour Over Recipe
This is my go-to recipe for How to make pour over coffee
This is my favourite recipe; it’s simple, only 3 pours and easy enough to get to grips with once you get the hang of grind size and ratio. You can replicate this with most coffees, but I’d say have some fun with it and play about changing the grind size and the amount of coffee you’re using.
When doing this, just make sure you do the quick equation we mentioned earlier when talking about ratios. If you want to use a 1:16 ratio for example and you want to use 15 grams of coffee, it would be 15 X 16 which equals 240 (that’s your water). Then divide it into 3-4 pours i.e. a bloom of 50g, then your second pour of 90g, and a third pour of 100g.
You’re probably thinking that’s a lot of information to absorb, so that’s it for now! We will go through some more recipes and how changing a pour-over coffee recipe can affect the extraction times, flavour and taste of our brew very soon. But for now, enjoy the process, have fun, play about with some of the variables we discussed today and most importantly enjoy the process. Trust me, it’s worth it.
Keep learning, keep enjoying and I’ll see you on the next one.
