One of my big hobbies since 2022 is coffee. It all started with a birthday gift and developed into a big part of my life. Two months ago I took a course on how to brew coffee on my favorite method: the v60 drip. This is an organized dump of the notes I took there and, though it was focused for the v60, some principles here apply to general coffee making and to most of the drip methods.

Also, huge thanks to Moka Clube, the coffee roaster that hosted the class! They also have an amazing monthly coffee subscription.

Principles

First things first, there exists not an universal recipe. Every coffee is different, particularly when talking about specialty coffee. And we can extract a lot of different things from the same coffee, but with a different pour over strategy. Let’s list some factors that influence the final product:

• Water quality
• Roast
• Grind size
• Water temperature
• Pour-over strategy

There are all deeply intertwined, however we’ll attempt to understand them in isolation and then move to completing the final picture. The first three are all energy-related, so we’ll put them under that category.

Energy

Roast

After we grind the coffee, we have many little grains that almost look like powder depending on the grind size. Each one of these can be thought of as a little ball filled with some stuff, which we want to extract.

Roasting the coffee is nothing less than providing the grain with energy, which will make it softer and weaker. We are, essentially, breaking the defenses of the grain up by filling it with energy. Think of how a potato changes as you cook it: very hard in the beginning and soft by the end.

When we buy coffee, we do not control the roast level it comes at (well, we can buy a different coffee, but that’s about it). In a nutshell: the lighter the coffee, the more energy you need to provide it during brewing. This means hotter water, finer grind. The darker the coffee is, the less energy you need to put in order to break the defenses and extract the flavor.

• Light roast -> + temperature, + grind
• Medium roast -> +- temperature, -+ grind
• Dark roast -> - temperature, - grind

Coffee is all about balancing energy.

Grind

I use a Timemore C3s Pro, so my grind clicks are based on this.

As said in the last session, the ideal grind size depends on a lot of factors and you should experiment with a few on any given coffee. I always start with medium and then decide if I want to go lower or higher (lower is finer).

Finer grind will turn your coffee grains into smaller pieces, which increases the surface area through which the water can touch and envelope the powder, increasing the extraction power. Isn’t extracting more a good thing? Well, it depends. Up to a certain point yes, depending on how you want the final coffee, but as we’ll see the sourness is the last thing you extract and if you push the extraction too long, you’re going to get it.

Again, it’s a matter of balancing the overall energy flow.

Here’s a table of the amount of clicks to grind size commonly named:

Temperature

We’ve been talking about energy and temperature concludes the triad. It’s the least complicated piece: the hotter the water, the more energy you are putting in the coffee. Sometimes you want to use more energy and sometimes not, learning when to do which is tricky, but rewarding. The good thing is that water temperature is most noticeable in the extremes, not really showing up in the middle (for regular humans, that is).

Takeaway

The main takeaway is: avoid the three energy extremes. You do not want a coffee that has received too much or too little energy. The following image is a good summary.

Never brew a coffee that sits on the extremes:

• light roast, coarse grind, low temperature
• dark roast, fine grind, high temperature

Pour-over Strategy

After you have chosen a grind size, water temperature and know your roast, it’s time to brew. Let’s start with some general knowledge. Most people do not know this, but there are phases withing the extraction. Each phase is going to extract something different from the coffee. Take a look at the following image

One way to see this is to pour water in equal parts and every 30s switch the recipient and then try them separately. It’s very pedagogical.

This image shows that we cannot allow the extraction proccess to last too long, otherwise we’ll make our coffee sour. Thinking through these phases as you brew is going to increase the quality of your coffees a lot!

The first phase, though, is a bit special and we call it the pre-infusion. It is in this phase that the coffee will liberate the gases that are inside the grain - mostly CO2. It’s important to drop 15-25% of the total water (or ~3x the amount of coffee) in this first phase and then wait 30s. This will allow the gases to to away, else they will go to your coffee and increase the acidity even more.

Also, two general tips:

• Do not make the last pour long
• Do not pour over 120g of water at once

It’s also worth noting that coffee is going to absorb 7-8% of the water your pour.

Conclusion

Be intentional on what you want to brew! Think through the flavors you want to extract and go for it.