HOW TO BREW: Pour Over

 

Pour over coffee. It looks like a vintage science experiment, so it’s little wonder that it’s become the darling of the hipster elite. It’s also one of the best ways to make and serve several cups of coffee at once. We recommend either Harris Smooth or Strong, but it will work with any of our blends.

 


Method

1. Fill your kettle and boil the water.

2. Open a paper filter and place it into your brewing device, and rinse it with hot water to get rid of the papery taste.

3. Portion out the coffee you are going to use to brew. Our reco is 6g (1 tbsp) of coffee for every 100mL water.

4. If using beans, grind them right before brewing to maximise the flavour.

5. Place your brewing vessel, with filter and coffee, onto a scale and press tare.

6. Saturate the grounds and wait for it to bloom. This is a fancy term for gases in the coffee grounds bubbling to the surface.

7. After a minute, add the remaining water in stages - our reco is 100ml, or 100g at a time - until you reach the final brew weight.

8. Let all the coffee drain from the filter.

9. Remove the filter and put it into your compost bin.

 

Pro Tips

1. Using scales might seem a bit wanky but it’s not. It's the simplest and easiest way to get a consistent coffee when making a pour over coffee. No more comments from the cheap seats about the coffee being too weak or strong!

2. Hot tip (bad pun!) - boiling the water before brewing ensures that the water is hot enough to make delicious coffee without burning the coffee.

3. Rinsing the paper filter takes 5 seconds and helps remove the papery taste and ensures that the coffee extracts evenly through. It’ll still taste okay if you don’t, but since you’re going to the effort to make a pour over you might as well do this step.

4. If you are using a Chemex, put the side of the filter with three folds against the spout.

5. Grinds for pour over brewing should be medium-coarse, like granulated sugar. Finer grinds will extract more slowly resulting in a richer, more robust brew; coarser grinds will be brighter and lighter. Neither is right or wrong, just different.

6. While pouring, pour the water slowly in a spiral pattern that goes from the centre of the coffee out to the edge of the coffee and back in again.  Try not to pour onto the paper above the filter.