There’s never been a better time to dive into the world of coffee. Coffee yields have brought prices down, the lowest ever since 2006. You can refine your coffee-drinking experience by learning how to make pour-over coffee.
It all starts with a bag of fresh coffee beans, roasted, and ground for each cup. Once you’ve found your favorite blend, it’s all about how you’ll brew the perfect cup. Getting comfortable with the idea of hand-pouring water over coffee for your cup is step one.
To accomplish this fine art (and science!) of brewing by the cup, there’s some careful planning involved. Let this guide bring you to the dark(brown) side! You’ll yield more power over others than ever before.
What is the Difference?
Without sounding like a coffee snob, if you think drip coffee makers are “good enough”, you’re missing out. That old Mr. Coffee method of extracting flavor from pre-ground beans is for budget offices. If you truly enjoy the complexities of coffee, you need a better way to extract them.
Learning how to make pour-over coffee may seem like you’re doing the same as a drip machine, it’s not. Yes, you’re manually dripping coffee onto grounds set on top of a filter. That’s where the similarities end, though.
By doing the pouring yourself, you get to make sure all of the grounds are evenly soaked. You control the water-to-coffee ratio, water temperature, and the chemistry going on in those grounds.
How to Make Pour-Over Coffee
There’s more than meets the eye when executing the pour-over method. Yeah, you are basically just pouring hot water over coffee grounds. That isn’t all you’re doing.
How you pour hot water over the coffee matters for extracting the most flavor. Dumping all the hot water onto the grounds all at once: wrong. Slowly pouring hot water in a steady stream over the grounds: also wrong.
There was a lot of hard work getting those precious beans produced for you to waste their potential. Read more info here, but, in the meantime, you’ll need to pay attention to the technique. It involves three phases: wetting, dissolving, and diffusing.
First, the wetting, it’s pretty self-explanatory. You set up your carafe, filter and put in roughly 10g of coffee per 120mm water. This ratio will vary based on the bean, preferences, and how much creamer/sugar you’ll add.
Pour a little of your hot water on the grounds, enough to wet them. Wait thirty seconds, you should notice the grounds have swelled or “bloomed” larger. Next, you’re going to start pouring the rest of your water over the grounds.
We recommend pouring in a circle, making sure all the grounds get submerged evenly. The water should naturally swirl around in the filter, creating a nice frothy layer.
Using a Machine Instead
In the event that you don’t have the testing and experimenting, you can purchase pour over machines to carry out the job. Take care while picking them, quality matters even more than drip machines. You should remember that the fundamental motivation behind it’s preferred to do the pour over strategy over machines is to have full authority over the quality.
Thus, when purchasing a pour over brewer, check that it has settings that will guarantee appropriate espresso to water proportion, temperature control, and percolating like the manual pour over technique.
Albeit new espresso innovations might sell you on features, one must choose whether or not it is hiding quality with quantity. Grinding your own beans will also play a role in how effective a pour over machine will be. If you’re not buying based on technical specs, you could wind up wasting money on another expensive appliance.
Grind and Flavor
Whichever method you decide to go with, if the coffee flavor is off, it’s probably the grind. The pour-over coffee method is all about enhancing the flavor and complexities of the beat. If your coffee is coming out too sour or bitter, you need to change the grind.
Weak or sour flavors means either your temperature is too low or your grind is too coarse. Bitter flavors are associated with burnt grounds, so adjust your grind to bigger grounds. In fact, did you know that the biggest problem with fast-food coffee is not so much the quality of bean?
Because they make coffee in such large quantities, they opt for hotter water and finer coffee grounds. It’s also fairly watered-down, so to compromise, they rely on syrups and creamers to hide the weakness. This is what gives that weak, bitter, and burnt flavor.
Of course, some prefer these flavor profiles. Darker roasts do this, but you taste so much more of the roast when you use a pour-over method. The more mild, fruity roasts are practically nonexistent outside of enthusiast cafes.
More Value in Your Cup
Taking the time to learn about pour-over coffee and experimenting will mean better quality coffee. That results in more savings in the long run. Making coffee at home will cost you one-fifth to one-eighth of what you pay at Starbucks.
You’re able to afford higher-quality beans if you are roasting and grinding them at home. It’s actually not too much work to roast and grind your own beans. The key is buying in bulk, roasting in batches, and grinding as you go.
There’s nothing like a freshly roasted batch of beans filling your house up with an intoxicating aroma. Invest in a nice grinder and all you need are some popcorn poppers to roast on the stove top. There’s also automatic roasting appliances if you have the budget.
Get the Perfect Cup
Now that you know how to make pour-over coffee at home, it’s time to start experimenting. Everyone has their own best way to make pour-over coffee, but what matters is the end result. If you love the taste of a particular batch, make sure you know how you did it.
Coffee brewing is a science; subtle changes in temperature, volume, and technique will result in different flavors. Coffee flavors are much more complex than what is achieved by a machine.
Read this to learn how to save money online for coffee supplies at Outlier Model and the perfect cup can become a reality.
