History and Elements of Pour Over coffee

Welcome to CoffeeGeek’s Pour Over Event and Contest series! This article is just the first of a series of articles, how tos, interviews to come over the next month, all wrapping up with CoffeeGeek’s MasterClass on Pour Over Coffee. We’re very proud to partner up with both Bonavita World and Baratza to bring you this new educational and informational content and also a huge contest we’ll be rolling out towards the end of April, 2020.

In CoffeeGeek’s forums, we’ve had literally thousands of conversations in the past sixteen years about manual pourover coffee. I’m quite proud of the fact that some of our members were pioneers in developing techniques for making the coffee brewing method better and more precise. We’ve even had manual coffee brewing world champions get their start in discussions here over the years. We’ll be using this deep resource and the things all these folks taught us to develop a series of how tos as our Pour Over Event continues.

For now, this is our introduction article, talking about pour over’s evolution and role in specialty coffee, how it began, what the brewing method means, and where it is going.

History and Development of Pour Over Coffee

Manual pour over coffee… Just sixteen years ago, very few people in specialty coffee were talking about this brewing method, other than dedicated Melitta fans. Then something happened: because everything Japanese in coffee was (and is) considered “cool” in the coffee world, when word started to filter through the Internet about the Japanese doing a manual, slow and methodical approach to brewing coffee called “manual pour over”, it became a curiosity… then a trend… then a fascination… then an obsession… and today, it’s arguably the number one method that serious coffee nerds use to brew non espresso based coffee.

The Five Elements of Good Pour Over Coffee

The good news about pour over coffee is that it’s actually not rocket science, though there are certainly advanced brewing techniques that can make it seem so. So I ask you to keep this in mind: this brewing method can be as simple and as care free as you want it to be, but we’re also going to give you some advice, tools and considerations if you want to make your pour over game even better.

There are five equally important things go into making good pour over coffee:

• Water and the delivery system you use (aka the kettle)
• Coffee, and the device you use to grind it just before brewing
• The brewing device itself
• The filter you choose to use
• A scale. Yes, you need a scale. It can be a super cheap, 1g readout scale but you need one.

Let’s tackle each.

Water and Pouring Device

97%+ of what is in your coffee cup is water. It makes sense you should be using the best water possible. Invest in a water filtering system like a Brita or a no name knock off – charcoal based water filters do an excellent job. If you have really good tap water, then by all means use it, but water filtration will, in many cases, dramatically improve your cup of coffee.

As for the kettle: can you use your regular old electric kettle you’ve been using for 10 years? Absolutely. You will limit your ability to do advanced techniques down the road, but as long as it heats water and has a spout, you can use it for pour over coffee and get decent results.

You will, however, get better results if you invest in a proper pour over kettle, one that features a long pouring / control spout known as a “gooseneck spout”. There’s literally dozens and dozens on the market today, but for this article and our Pour Over Event, we’re going to be working with one of the pioneers in pour over kettles: Bonavita. They were the first company to introduce a temperature control electric gooseneck kettle for pour over coffee that is still available today and usually under $75. They also have a fast heating gooseneck kettle without temperature control for under $50 and a fantastically priced manual stovetop gooseneck for a true budget option.

As for brewing water temperature, keep in mind, ground coffee beans like water at 195F to 205F for an optimal extraction. While you don’t need a temperature control kettle like the Bonavita InterUrban, it does help and makes sure your water temperature is spot on, but here’s a trick: even with a $20 stovetop gooseneck kettle, just recognize that once the water in it has boiled, you can remove it from heat, let it sit for 30 seconds or so, then pour with the kettle about 10 to 15 cm above the pour over device: as the water travels through air, it will cool down to around 200F (or even lower). You can even do a ghetto-control over your water temperature for your brewing depending on how high, or how low you hold the kettle when pouring: really close to the bed of coffee and the water’s going to be hotter. Higher up, more air flow? Colder.

Coffee and the Grinder

Other than water quality, nothing improves your coffee quality more than a quality grinder does, and grinding fresh just before brewing. Nothing. In fact, you can get a better cup from a run of the mill roasted coffee and a superb grinder, compared to a top shelf, award winning coffee that was pre-ground yesterday (or ground with a blade grinder). A good quality coffee grinder will create even particle sizes and present you with a grinded coffee that is absolutely optimal for the kind of extraction method you’re throwing at it. On top of that, when using coffee fresh ground – a lot of the volatile oils, lipids, fats and other elements are still within the grinds, and not floating off into the air, carried away by the coffee’s release of Co2 gas.

So many people ignore the coffee grinder. If your goal is awesome manual pourover coffee, you will not ignore the grinder – you will buy the best grinder you possibly can afford. I’m not suggesting you go nuts and drop $1K on a coffee grinder; but at the very least you should consider a grinder like Baratza‘s fantastic entry point grinder, the $140 Baratza Encore. If you want versatility and excellent espresso grinding as well, step up to the $250 Baratza Virtuoso+ or the state of the art, class leading Baratza Sette 270Wi grinder at $550. And if $140 (the Encore) is too much for your budget, check out Baratza’s Refurb Program, where Encores sometimes show up for as little as $99.

Grinder out of the way, let’s talk coffee a bit more. Coffee is one of life’s true affordable luxuries (we even wrote something on that), so make sure you get a quality coffee to brew with your pour over setup. Costco coffee isn’t going to deliver you great manual pourover coffee; get your coffee from a local specialty coffee roaster, or buy online. During this current pandemic, specialty coffee roasters need your help more than ever, and we’ve created a global resource list that has over 175 roasters (as of this article’s publication date) ready to roast and deliver some fantastic coffee to you.

No matter where you source your beans, just make sure the coffee’s been roasted within the last 6 to 10 days by the time you buy it. Coffee is volatile and has a short shelf life: it’s peak time for pour over coffee use is between 5 and 15 days after it was roasted. Stay in that window and your pour over coffee will be awesome.

The Manual Pour Over Brewing Device

I know some people who have spent literally $1,000 or more on their pour over setup (not including the grinder): they’ve bought copper clad filter holders and kettles, bought gold plated filters, bought exotic metal ultralight setups that run into the hundreds of dollars.

You don’t have to do that. You can get an awesome manual pour over coffee experience from a $5 Melitta plastic filter and paper set or their $12 filter and glass carafe set. If you want a Japanese brand name, Hario’s got basic V60 starter kits under $30. And our Pour Over Event’s sponsor, Bonavita, have beautiful and functional ceramic pour over filter holders for under $30.  Save the exotic, expensive stuff for your man-cave down the road.

The Filter

For some, the hardest decision they make in pour over coffee is what kind of filter to use: paper, cloth, or metal / permanent filter. Personally, I love cloth since it is the best of both the permanent filter world (like metal filters, cloth allows all the coffee oils to fully flow into the cup, for a better tasting cup) and the paper filter world (like paper, cloth doesn’t allow sediment to pass through to the cup). But cloth filters have their own pitfalls and issues, and it’s more an advanced element in manual pour over coffee.

For a basic setup, go with paper. These filter papers from Hario, Melitta and others do just fine and result in a really great cup of coffee. I really like Melitta’s papers, which have their patented ‘flavorpore” design which do allow some aromatic oils to pass through into the cup (paper is such an efficient filtering method that much of the aromatic oils and lipids in coffee brewing can’t pass through it, but Melitta’s design does allow some of these oils to pass through that would be otherwise blocked).

The Scale. A Necessity

Water is the #1 way to improve your coffee. A good grinder and good, fresh roasted coffee is the #2 way. Well in a pourover, the #3 top way to improve your cup is the use of a scale.

Now, you don’t need a $250+ Acaia Lunar scale to get good pour over coffee. You don’t even need a 0.1g accurate scale (those are slightly more expensive than the most basic digital scales). But you do need a scale that can hold up to 2000g minimum (5kg is better) and has at least a 1g resolution. For example, here’s a rechargeable nutrition scale with tons of features, for only $12.

A scale does several things: it helps you measure very accurate water applications (remember, 1ml of water = 1g) it helps you accurately weigh your ground coffee, and it gives you a guide on how fast or how slow you’re pouring your water; if you see the scale’s numbers climbing really quickly, you’re most likely pouring too fast! That visual reminder helps you slow down and control the application of hot water to your bed of coffee.

Conclusion

Our goal with this article, the first in our Pour Over Event Series, is to provide you with some background on pour over coffee and the basic fundamentals and tools that go into having good pour over coffee at home. You don’t need to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on gear to get great pour over coffee in the home. You need to spend the vast bulk of your money on a quality grinder, which can run up to $250 or more (though the $140 Encore is a fantastic investment).  The next most expensive thing is the kettle: you can perform very well with a $25 gooseneck kettle. Then there’s a $10 scale, and a $12 Melitta Pour Over and Carafe system. In total, this is a $180 investment that will deliver a decade or two of high performance and high return pour over coffee in the home.

In fact, think about your home pour over setup as a long term investment, and amortize that cost over 10 years. In that case, you’re only spending $20 each year to deliver better brewed coffee than anything your office coffee maker can dish out.

Don’t forget the coffee either. It truly is an affordable luxury and you shouldn’t balk at paying $15 or more for a 12 ounce bag from a top flight specialty coffee roaster. That 340 grams of coffee can deliver a whopping 4.8 litres of brewed coffee (at a ratio of 7g per 100ml brewed); that works out to 19 250ml cups of coffee, or a cost of a measly $0.83 per brewed cup, for that $15 bag of coffee. That right there is affordable luxury.