Pour over
Pour over means pouring hot water by hand over ground coffee sitting in a paper filter, and letting it drip into a cup or carafe below 🫖. It's simple gear, but you control everything: the grind, how fast you pour, how hot the water is. People love it for a clean, bright cup where you can really taste the fruit or chocolate notes in the beans. Grab a scale and a timer and you'll be making lovely coffee by your second try.
Grind: Medium-fine, like table salt
Pick your kind
- Your first cone pour over15 g coffee, 240 g water, a bloom and two gentle pours. Done in about 3 minutes.8 min · a little practice
- Easy pour over with a flat-bottom dripperA forgiving brewer: bloom, then a few small pulse pours to 240 g.8 min · easy
- Chemex for two (or one very happy person)30 g coffee and 480 g water through a thick filter for a super clean cup.10 min · a little practice
Words you'll hear
- Bloom
- The first small pour that just wets the grounds. Fresh coffee puffs up and releases gas, which helps the rest of the water extract evenly.
- Ratio
- Water weight divided by coffee weight. 1:16 means 15 g of coffee to 240 g of water.
- Extraction
- How much flavor the water pulls from the grounds. Under-extracted tastes sour and thin; over-extracted tastes bitter and dry.
- Drawdown
- The last stage, when you've stopped pouring and the water drains through the coffee bed. It tells you how fine your grind is.
- Bed
- The layer of grounds in the filter. A flat bed after drawdown means the water flowed evenly.
- Pulse pour
- Pouring in several small portions with short pauses, instead of one long continuous pour.
- Gooseneck kettle
- A kettle with a thin curved spout that gives you a slow, precise stream. Helpful, but a normal kettle poured carefully works too.
- Fines
- Tiny dust-like particles from grinding. Lots of them can clog the filter and slow the drawdown.