Pour over rewards precision with the clearest cup in coffee — and precision is just a recipe followed twice. Here's ours, refined over thousands of morning brews, with the troubleshooting to match.
The setup
25g fresh coffee, medium-fine (fine sand), 400g water at 200–205°F (~30 seconds off boil, or set your Stagg EKG exactly), a V60 or Kalita on a mug atop a scale, paper filter rinsed with hot water (kills paper taste, preheats everything — don't skip).
The pour schedule
0:00 — Bloom. Pour 50g (2× coffee weight) in slow spirals, wetting everything. Watch it bubble — that's CO₂ escaping so water can extract evenly. Swirl gently. Wait 30–45 seconds.
0:45 — First pour. Spiral steadily to 250g total, center-outward, avoiding the filter walls. Slow is smooth: target ~5g/second.
1:30 — Final pour. Top to 400g. Give one gentle swirl to flatten the bed.
2:30–3:30 — Drawdown. Water clears the bed; finished bed should look flat, not domed or cratered. Total time in this window = your grind is right.
Reading your cup like a pro
Sour, thin, finished fast → under-extracted: grind finer (or pour slower). Bitter, drying, stalled past 4:00 → over-extracted: grind coarser. Both at once → uneven pouring: slower spirals, gentler swirls. Change one thing per brew — the ratio stays fixed while grind does the steering, exactly like dialing espresso.
The 80/20 of pour over
If the full ritual is too much at 6am: bloom properly, then one continuous slow pour to 400g. That single simplification keeps 90% of the quality and halves the choreography — it's how most of us actually brew on weekdays. The Kalita Wave makes even that more forgiving; the full gear ladder is here.
