All Rounder
Pour Over Recipe
The Beauty of simplicity…
I wanted to create one recipe that simply worked for everything. Coffee can be frustrating when you’re adjusting every coffee to fit in such a tight variable range. Many grinders and roasting machines often require very different brew parameters to achieve a consistently tasty cup, some even require completely different styles of brewing.
This All Rounder recipe is meant for your brews to taste good 100% of the time…no ifs, ands, or buts about it! To make things even more enjoyable, this recipe allows you to tweak every single variable, without much limit, if you want to really explore your coffee.
I’m incredibly excited to share this simple and incredibly hard-to-mess-up recipe with you all! Use this as a starting point, & shoot for the stars!
WHY IT WORKS
The Origami is a unique brewer as it’s meant to have much less bypass with flat bottom fitlers due to how the male ridges fold inward lining up with the female ridges on the flat bottom filter paper. While this can make beutiful brews with increased texture and notes that wrap around each other, I’m using this brewer in the opposite way: to take advantage of the airflow pockets with a connical shaped filter.
The connical filter combined with this brewer has very minimal contact with each other. Unlike the spiral patterns of a v60, the air pockets between folds may not form the same continuous, low-resistance liquid pathway like those v60 spiral patters allow. Some pockets can be isolated or poorly connected depending on how the paper seats.
Origami with conical filters can be more forgiving than a V60 because its slower, less efficient downstream drainage acts as a hydraulic buffer. The brewer holds more water in and above the bed at any given moment during and after each 100ml pulse pour, which dampens changes in kettle pour rate and pour pattern. That reduces peak flow velocity, softens channeling, and can make the cup taste rounder and sweeter. It may not technically eliminate bypass, but it can reduce aggressive bypass behavior by keeping more water engaged with the coffee bed/particles before it exits.
EQUATION FOR THE SMARTIES
A pour-over’s drawdown is roughly governed by Darcy-style flow:
Q = (kAΔP) / (μL)
Q = flow rate
k = permeability of the coffee bed/filter system
A = effective open filtration area
ΔP = pressure difference pushing water through
μ = viscosity
L = thickness/resistance path length
The V60 ridges do not just create airflow. They create a lower-resistance drainage boundary outside the paper. Because liquid can leave the filter quickly through the spiral grooves, which act as continuous hydraulic pathways to the bottom, the outside-paper pressure stays lower relative to the slurry side. That preserves a stronger pressure differential, or ΔP, across the filter. In an Origami brewer with a conical filter, drainage can be less uniform. If water accumulates outside parts of the paper, or if the paper partially seals against the brewer, outside-paper pressure rises locally. That reduces ΔP across those regions of the filter, so flow slows even though the brewer appears to have more open air space.
This also explains why the Origami can feel more forgiving. Flow depends on the relationship between how fast water enters the brewer and how fast it can leave. In a V60, the spiral ribs drain efficiently, so more of each 100 ml pulse exits quickly and less water is temporarily held in the slurry and coffee bed. In an Origami with a conical filter, the outlet side may drain less efficiently, so more water remains temporarily in the brew system during each pulse. That extra retained water acts like a hydraulic buffer, smoothing out changes in pour rate and pour pattern. Because the brew responds less aggressively to each pour, the Origami can produce a rounder, sweeter cup that is often harder to mess up than a faster, more responsive V60.
BREWER
Origami Porcelain Medium/02 size (bigger size + material gives you more options).
FILTER
Filter Shape: Conical.
Filter Type: Cafec Abaca 4 Cups. But you can use any filter type, even 01/smaller sized filters. If using smaller filters, you may have to do more pours than our recipe as slurry may overflow above the filter paper, which you don’t want.
We prefer Cafec’s Abaca filters most often because they keep water moving through the coffee bed without clogging as easily. Cafec dries the paper with hot air instead of pressing it flat against a heated drum, which helps preserve the crinkled texture on both sides of the filter. That texture creates tiny air pockets between the paper, the brewer, and the coffee grounds, helping reduce paper sealing, fines clogging, and uneven drawdown. In the Origami, especially with conical filters, that matters. The filter preserves the brewer’s useful flow-buffering effect while reducing the bad kind of slowness caused by side sealing and fines buildup, especially where the cone narrows toward the bottom. It’s a small feature, but it can mean less local backpressure, less stalling, and a sweeter, cleaner drawdown without turning the brew into uncontrolled side bypass.
In a way, the filter paper acts like a miniature version of brewer ribs. V60 ridges create larger drainage channels outside the paper, while Cafec’s textured surface creates micro-spacing on a much smaller scale. That micro-spacing improves how the Origami drains without making it behave exactly like a V60. You still get the Origami’s slower, more buffered flow, but with less clogging, less sealing, and a cleaner finish in the cup.
WATER
Water Temperature: 208 Bloom, then declining (down to at least 203).
*In Celsius that’s 98 and 95.
We want to kickstart the extraction by using hotter water for the bloom, which will also cool down rapidly due to the ceramic brewer. For more info about this visit the “Ceramic vs Plastic” section below.
Water Mineral Content: Any.
We prefer Third Wave Water, Lotus Coffee’s Bright & Juicy recipe, Aquacode, and Nashville Water with a slow-flowing filter exchanged at least every 6 months (~75mg/L Total Hardness + 68mg/L Alkalinity + 11mg/L Sodium).
If you’re using filtered municipal water and your coffee still doesn’t taste right, the issue may not be the coffee. It may be the water. Municipal water changes depending on your source, treatment plant, season, and filtration setup, and those shifts can make or break a coffee’s flavor profile. For consistency, it’s always worth having a water source you can trust, whether that’s a well-designed café filtration system or distilled water rebuilt with coffee mineral packets. Read our article, “Nashville Water Was Holding Coffee Back”, on municipal water filtration to learn how local water treatment can affect sweetness, clarity, acidity, and overall cup quality.
RATIO
Coffee Dose: 22 grams.
Water Amount: 366 grams.
Brew Time
~2:00-5:00+
This recipe is VERY forgiving on time. Though time will depend on the grind setting used, grinders burr geometry, filter papers, water filtration process, and kettle pour techniques + agitation.
GRIND
Dont worry too much about grind size. Your coffee should taste great regardless of grind and grinder/burr profile being used. If not, you’re dosing too small or are using a v60 (lol!). This recipe was designed to be effortless for a reason. Don’t go rouge on dose.
Just tweak according to your flavor preferences! I have been using just two grind sizes for all of my coffees and they have been tasting fantastic! I suspect the burr spacing is somewhere around 750 and 815 microns.
Grinder Micron Size Range: 700’s-800’s.
My Go-To grinders:
*EK43 w/ 98mm Titus SSP Brew (burrs touching just before 0) grind size: 12.1-13.1.
*Bentwood grind size: I have been grinding every coffee at 800 microns (burr touch at 40, so around 760 microns) and it has worked extremely well for me regardless of brew time.
Other Grinders I dont have much expeience with:
*Comandante MK3 grind size: ~24-26 clicks
*Comandante MK4 or later grind size: ~21-26 clicks. I’m unsure of the slightly new geometry.
*Fellow Ode Gen 2 grind size (hard to say based on alignment): Try 4’s-5’s.
*Fellow Ode Gen 1 grind size (hard to say based on alignment): Try 3’s-4’s.
*Baratza Encore grind size: ~14-21.
TDS
TDS Range: Varies depending on grind size, brew time, and sample collection methods used. It’s fairly useless to talk about unless you’re using a calibrated VST refractometer specifically, but in case you’re curious, here’s my readings.
*VST TDS Range: 1.20’s to 1.50’s.
Let taste be your guide.
Now…Let’s Get Started!!
0:00 | Bloom 66g water.
Rao spin brewer aggressively 5-10 times to wet bed.
Turn kettle down to 203 degrees (95 celsius). Let it steadily decline as you brew, yet not go under temp.
0:35 | Pour to 160g.
Rao spin brewer gently a few times.
1:10 | Pour to 260g.
Rao spin brewer aggressively about 5 times to agitate and level bed.
1:50 | Pour to 366g.
Rao spin gently about 3 times to level bed.
Additional Tips & Tricks
Ceramic vs Plastic
I’m often not a fan of higher heat retention in filter brewing. I like ceramic because it absorbs more heat from the water at the beginning, and will start to release heat towards the end which keeps its thermal stability. Think of this like a frozen whiskey ball or the flash-chilling technology Nucleus Coffee Tools released to preserve aroma volatile compounds. Ceramic is doing a similar thing (but at higher temperatures) because it takes a long time to heat up due to its heavier weight. So you are blasting the grounds (directly) with hot water, yet that slurry temperature cools down rapidly once it comes into contact with the ceramic walls. Simultaneously, ceramics thermal conductivity is similar to plastic and also loses temperature at much slower speeds when it’s fully heated. You will never get a slurry as hot as one in a plastic brewer by the end of your brew cycle with typical methods, but i don’t think coffee excels at the hottest possible temperatures, in fact i’ve found using kettle temperatures around 203-206 degrees (95-96.67 Celsius), post bloom, to often be the sweet spot for what I like to taste out of a coffee when using ceramic and metal brewers. Of course, this varies with a given brewer, its material, and the amount of water being used.
For example, on my modded metal brewer, I love a 208 bloom for about two and a half minutes followed by a 203 degree kettle brewing temperature. But because we’re working with a ceramic brewer, and I don’t want to bloom that long for this brewer (long blooms don’t work well for most brewers, in my experience), we need hotter water to heat up the ceramic more to get the slurry to be around, or close to, the same temperature as my metal brewer with a long bloom. We could use 210-211 degree water, but then we’d be starting our first post-bloom pour at a much higher temperature, which I personally am not a fan of. So, the simplest things to do would be to shorten the bloom time to just 0:35 seconds (compared to the 2:35 I use on the metal brewer) and the hotter post-bloom pour will actually be reduced in temperature from the thick ceramic, which gets us in the ballpark of what we like. It also is convenient because going from 208 degrees to 203 degrees would be impossible in a typical kettle in only 35 seconds! And if it is possible, you definitely need a more heat-stable kettle…lol!
Brewing coffee with specific goals in mind always requires sacrifices and trade-offs. There are pros and cons to any method, and it takes a skilled brewer to analyze before developing a recipe what they’re after and to asses afterwards what they favored and what they didn’t. It can be a constant game of development, if you so choose. That’s what makes it fun and also what creates great Brew Masters!
Conical vs Flats
I’d imagine many people reading this have already asked themselves “why conical filters?”. Though UC Davis Coffee Center, among others at the time of this writing are actively investigating why exactly different brewer geometries, like conical vs flat bottom brewers, offer different flavor attributes, I think most good coffee tasters and decent brewers have an idea of what it tastes like.
When we think of different coffee brewers, we must think of the “mass transfer” process happening where molecules move out of their solid coffee grounds housing, drain down through the brew bed and end up in the end cup. It’s a simple speculation that can get so incredibly complex. We still have yet to have "crystal clear” answers written in stone….But we’re getting there….Most of us have to understand through taste and speculation, which is equally (if not more) important than the science-backed data behind it. Taste is often subjective, unless you’re a bot.
My reasoning for choosing a conical brewer geometry correlates to the info above, but also because of its thicker bed depth and its shape to actively filter out insoluble particles and bitterness via the coffee bed. When you have a thicker bed depth, water spends more time in contact with a greater amount of the coffee bed. You are increasing the water to coffee contact and increases the rate of overall extraction across the brew bed (assuming the coffee dose and water amount is the same). Not only does a thicker bed do this, it also works well to be a natural filter, so the slurry has a higher chance at reaching equilibrium due to the thicker bed, but now it also gets filtered more and more.
Why does coffee bed filtration matter?: It’s speculated that coffees bitterness is related to an insoluble particle, meaning the only way to lessen its concentration in your end cup is to filter it out above. A conical shape will taste cleaner and have less body because of this filtration process (assuming all other variables are held equal).
When we have greater filtration of the brew bed, along with more even water to coffee contact in the brew bed, combined with a slower flowrate, we are then given a wider sweet spot range across a much wider array of grind sizes.
Even though It’s fairly common for people to say conical brewers are much harder to work with, people are mislead by the brewer geometry itself (certain ribbed brewers can taste terrible with specific brew methods) and probably most importantly, their comparison - It was common to dose higher in flat bottom brewers and grind coarser than the conical brewers on the market at the time when this way being said often. So obviously people would have a much easier time brewing with flat bottoms using higher doses, more water, more agitation, more time, and coarser grinds than brewing with lower doses, less water, less agitation, less time, and finer grinds that give them a MUCH smaller sweet spot range. I think this is where that saying truly came from.
*this is also a reason why people say brewing ultra-light roasters with lower fines burrs has a tighter sweet spot…They are trapping themselves into using these variables similar to how people brewed with conical brewers in the past. Your sweet spot range is relative to your process, not your grinder.
Also, the popularity of the V60 lead people to experience its brewer geometry, creating a lot of variables that require much greater modifications to each coffee (as well as variable consistency) and a much tighter grind size range for coffees that taste good. It’s brewing on hard mode for the perks of having a fast brew with a higher extractions due to finer grinds at higher flowrate.
More About Thermal Stability & Stabilizing Proteins
I find it funny that our industry resorts to using expensive, external tools often based on hype/popularity, yet does the complete opposite of what those tools are meant to do. Like brewing with a plastic brewer and ignoring ceramic or similar materials/heavier-weighted brewers but using a flash chilling device below their brew to trap more “aroma volatile compounds” (we’ll talk more about this in a second).
If you’ve ever tried aggressively flash-chilling espresso (while keeping it undiluted) vs gently cooling that espresso over a period of a few minutes, you will notice a massive flavor quality difference. With aggressive flash chilling (i.e. the slurry as a whole, not the stream over time like with these whiskey balls) the coffee tends to taste more bitter and rancid.
I’ve heard that flash chilling is actually retaining flavor components instead of aromatics, which they are actually being lost. I’ve experienced this in Sey’s Brooklyn cafe where they used their own technology to “flash chill” batch brew (keep in mind I believe they are cooling it in stages to preserve flavor, and not all at once). The washed Ethiopian flash chilled cup had no smell whatsoever, yet it was an explosive flavor bomb of florals upon first sip…which VERY quickly declined as it warmed.
When we try to preserve coffee by flash chilling, we need to preserve BOTH aromatics and flavor components. Most people talk about trapping VOCs like that explains the whole cup, but coffee is not just a handful of aroma compounds floating around in water. It is an emulsion, a suspension, a volatile system, and a dense matrix of acids, oils, sugars, melanoidins, gases, bitter compounds, and protein-like material. If you shock that system too aggressively, you might preserve one piece of the puzzle while destroying the way the whole thing expresses itself.
“Stabilization of protein and protein-like molecules translates into preservation of both structure and functionality during storage and/or targeting, and such stabilization is mostly attained through establishment of a thermodynamic equilibrium with the (micro)environment.” (Victor M Balcão, Marta M D C Vila, “Structural and functional stabilization of protein entities: state-of-the-art”, 2014).
If you put those two espresso shots in milk, the slower chilled one would taste significantly better. What’s incredibly interesting is if you dumped a freshly-pulled hot espresso into milk, it would taste just as good, if not better than the slowly chilled one in my experience. Is this stabilizing the “coffee system matrix” in the best way? Reaching a greater equilibrium by stabilizing in milks temperature vs flash chilling with MUCH colder surfaces for the coffee to only become much hotter again? I’m not too sure.
Nucelous Coffee Tools tests, in my opinion, look incredibly inconclusive for a wide range of coffees. It’s also easy to modulate test data, as I've heard through the grapevine is all too common. Maybe what we should be doing is paying attention to the brewer MATERIAL we use at the source to trap BOTH aroma compounds (which hasn’t been done well) and other flavor compounds (my experience with slow, incremental flash chilling) by stabilizing coffees complex matrix better through thermodynamic equilibrium. This is an interesting topic I hope some people will experiment with, as it’s much over my head!
Dosing High For A Wide Sweet Spot
I always keep my dose around this amount as it works very well to be a natural filter of the coffee bed, as the coffee bed filters out insoluble compounds and bitterness. This higher dose leads to an often coarser grind, and cleaner cup with more depth and dimension as opposed to using lower doses and finer grinds. Also, keep in mind higher doses require more water, which will help heat up and stabilize the brewer throughout the brew process while also helping to keep the slurry much hotter compared to lower-dosed/less water brews.
Dosing lower exposes less channeling. Combine that with cooler water and it creates a buffer for a terribly implemented brew. Many people will get upset at this while many experts and experienced coffee brewer designers will get a kick out of it. You’re welcome! So, this brew recipe is also creating a buffer system in its own unique ways described throughout this article, but it relies on water that doesn’t channel throughout the slurry in order to use MORE of it for both increased thermodynamics, more contact time, coarser grinds to reduce bitterness, and a deeper filtration system via the higher-dosed coffee bed to naturally filter out insoluble particles and maybe even the insoluble bitterness particle.
Incredible Brews From Ultra Light To Medium To Dark Roasted Coffee
If you’re using coffee from modern, light roasters that operate on Loring-style roasting machines or similar machines, this method also works well for extracting them with 22 gram doses. You may want to grind just a bit finer (not too much, 750 microns of burr spacing is a great start) and aim for longer brew times (they should automatically give this to you if you’re using a washed or light honey processed coffee from these style of roasters) to extract these coffees more efficiently.
Please don’t down-dose this recipe and expect everything to work the same with smaller amounts of coffee and water. It will not…
Pouring Pattern
This is for the 3x ~100g pours after the bloom. Use a similar spiral pattern for the 66g bloom, but obviously with less rotations (the bloom doesn’t matter as much since we’ll be aggressively agitating/Rao spinning afterwards). Our goal here is to wet all of the grounds to prime them for Carbon Dioxide release in order to properly extract them during the next pour and the following 100ml pulse pours.
Flow Rate: 6-10 mg/Second (I like to aim for around 8ml/second).
Although I recommend you to explore, I like to keep my pouring pattern and flow rate the same for every coffee. Here is my pour recipe:
Start in center, spiral pour outward with 5 full rotations until you reach near the outer sides of the brewer.
Now, start spiral pouring toward the center for another 5 full rotations (rotations 5-10).
When you’re at the center around the 10th rotation, stay there and pour for ~2 seconds to increase center agitation and flow rate while kicking up fines.
Now, start your last 3-5 rotations until you reach your end pour weight. You should have made about 13-15 full spiral rotations for each of these ~100g pours.
*all of this should be done in one pour, while aiming to keep your kettle flow rate the same throughout. This takes some practice to do consistently. Also, be sure to check in on yourself over time to make sure you’re not pouring too slowly…This also happens to me from time to time and I need to pour faster or slower.
It should be said your kettle height should be consistent throughout. I see some people like to raise and lower their kettle throughout a pour, which can be extremely inefficient towards even extractions.
Brew Time
Please do not associate brew time within a specific time range to prevent under or over extraction. This method was created to make brew time not much of an issue, and your coffee should taste great no matter the time as long as your grind is fairly dialed in to the wide sweet spot grind range.
You may notice one brew is at a different time than another, even though the parameters and coffee were all the same. That is entirely ok! It is part of the joy of brewing with recipes designed for even extractions no matter the brew time.
Specifically with this brew method longer brew times give off more sweet cooked-note flavors while shorter brew times give off sharper, more clean-note flavors. If your brew time is fast, you’ll get a different flavor presentation compared to it being slow, but all of the brews should be tasty, that’s the benefit of this method! Just enjoy the experience!
If the brew is too slow and you want to make it faster by coarsening the grind, your TDS or Total Dissolved Solid amount will change. You cup might be 98.9% (1.10% TDS) water instead of 98.7% (1.3% TDS) and that taste will be dramatic and might taste terribly weak. Always tweak by flavor preference and not a grind size number range. Though this recipe should get you pretty locked in to great flavor.
The Milk Conundrum
If you read the previous paragraph about TDS, you’ll see that you’re dissolving only 1-1.5% coffee in your cup. With 366ml of water, and coffee that absorbed 49ml of that water giving you a yield of 317ml in your end brew weight, with a TDS of 1 and 1.5% (in two different brews with different grind size adjustments), that’s an extraction of 15.85% and 21.61%. Meaning you extracted 3.49g and 4.76g of soluble material out of you 22g coffee dose.
Imagine just 4g of soluble coffee floating around just 313ml (or 10.7oz for crazy imperial-measurement people) of hot water. That’s coffee. NOW…Imagine adding 40ml (or 1.35oz) of milk to that brew. It’s completely ruined due to the fragile concentration of coffee to a small yet enormous amount of dilution/milk with its own fats, proteins, lactose, minerals, and roughly five grams of milk solids crashing into a drink that only had around four grams of dissolved coffee solids to begin with.
This is why milk is bad for coffee when it’s completely unaccounted for, scientifically speaking. Just brew dark roast.
A darker roast tends to have more roast-derived structure. As coffee roasts longer, it develops more Maillard reaction products, melanoidins, caramelization products, chlorogenic acid breakdown products, and heavier aromatics. Those compounds create deeper flavors like cocoa, toasted nuts, caramel, bitterness, roast sweetness, and body. Milk easily buries delicate florals, citrus, and high-tone aromatics, but these deeper roast-derived compounds have more sensory weight and can still come through after dilution.
Though I really enjoy a light roast in a milk-based drink like a ~140ml, or 4.7oz, flat white. That’s pure heaven to me, but only when brewed correctly. You have to extract in a way that complements milk, not fights it. For a very light roast, I think there are two ways to do that.
You can extract very high and slow, creating more total dissolved coffee solids, more sweetness, more body, and more complete structure. That gives the milk more actual coffee material to carry. Or you can extract low and fast with a turbo-style shot, where the goal is not maximum extraction but cleaner expression. That kind of shot may extract less total coffee, but it can pull a more useful slice of the coffee: acidity, fruit, sweetness, aromatics, and clarity without as much bitter, dry, muddy late-extraction material. In a small flat white, that can work beautifully because the coffee does not need to overpower the milk like a dark roast. It needs to cut through it.
Milk is fat, protein, lactose, minerals, water, texture, and dilution all at once. If you don’t build the espresso around that, it will bury the coffee. Same with adding milk to your filter-style brew, if unnacounted for, it will ruin your cups flavor profile in an instant if usign a lighter roast.
The trick here is to either use less water in your pour over, or use more coffee. This will raise the concentration. So, if you want to dilute your cup with 40ml of milk, change your dose to around 24.5-25.5g or use around 325ml of brew water. Pick just one and do not do both right off the bat.
This is how you should account for milk in your coffee!
Adapting to Different Roasters Development Styles
Sometimes when brewing certain roasters that develop their coffee slightly more developed than I’m used to, or I know they’re in a higher altitude area where their water boils much lower, I like to lower my kettle temperature to around 205-200 degrees (~91-96 Celsius) to best suit their coffees. This can remove a muddled or muted flavor profile that comes from higher temperature water on more developed coffee that’s incapable of accounting for higher water temps due to limitations on altitude at the roasting or quality control facility. Even when using a coarser grinds if this flavor is still noticeable, it will often remain unless the brewing water the temperature is reduced.
Keep in mind I will be brewing at ~205 for the bloom and letting my kettle decline throughout. The tail end pour/s will just be below our previously recommended setting of 203 degrees, where the kettle will start heating the water again unless told not to.
For even more developed roasts, I’d consider dropping the bloom temp to 203-201 and reach closer to 197-200 degree range faster.
Slow Feeding Your Grinder
Depending on the grinder I'm using and its mechanics, single feeding a couple beans at a time into your grinder (or one bean at a time with the Niche grinder with connical burr blades) is an interesting way to taste new flavor profiles. If you want a cleaner cup with less fines this can significantly help or not really help much at all depending on many factors of your grinders build and how it feeds and grinds beans.
With most entry-level home grinders, this can significantly help improve the flavor quality of your cup. On the other hand, it can be useful to avoid this technique if you favor more texture/body and sweetness.
Hand Grinding Tip: If you’d like to slow feed a hand grinder, you can tilt the grinder while grinding to slow feed the beans into the burrs.
The Joy of Filtration
What separates coffee from nearly every other extraction method for common beverages like wine and tea is that coffee HAS to be ground within a very precise range to extract well and in return, it must be filtered for percolation-style brewing.
The type of filter porosity and thickness determines how the brew will not only extract, but how evenly it will extract depending on the grind size being used. Finer grinds often like thicker filter paper that is less prone to clogging and simultaneously flows slower to avoid channeling/clogging that can come from a faster flow rate. While coarsely ground grinds can favor a filter paper that flows faster to bump extraction in a shorter amount of time and retain more flavor compounds that have not yet evaporated, creating brews full of depth and dimension. BUT coarser grounds can also favor the same filter type as finer grounds if you’re after a much slower brew with more rounded, sweet, cooked simpler flavors.
The choice of these flavor profiles is up to you to explore! Let this brew method guide ypou to using a wide variety of filter papers rather than new coffee grinders…It’s MUCH more of an affordable way to enjoy the differences in cup profiles by having more or less fines filtered out of your brew. Just like what grinders are doing, but with filtration.
If you’re curious about sieving out fines, I’d advise against it unless you’re brewing a fully immersion brew, without percolation. In my limited experience with sieving I’ve found that sieving often chokes my percolation brews and significantly alters the flow rate more than any grinder on the market could do. Though, the effects of uneven particle distribution in a brew bed can be reduced through shaking the grounds in a container and using a spoon to grab the grounds in random areas and dump the scooped grounds into the brewer many times to have a more evenly dispersed particle distribution across thr brew bed (and not one side having fines and the other side having coarse particles).
The Joy of Bypass + Minimizing Head Pressure
If you try this method on other conical brewers, especially smaller ribbed cones or smooth-walled brewers that don’t allow for much bypass, you can get unwanted flavors and astringency fast. It’s honestly surprising how much this specific recipe doesn’t pair well with brewers that offer less bypass.
That sounds backwards, because bypass is usually treated like a flaw. But in this recipe, it’s part of the design.
When a brewer gives water some controlled escape along the filter wall, it reduces how much of the brew is forced straight down through the deepest and most compacted part of the coffee bed. Instead of every drop being driven through one increasingly resistant path, some of that pressure gets relieved through the sides. That can help reduce harsh localized extraction, lower astringency, and preserve cup clarity.
By dosing higher and grinding coarser, this is already controlled much more than it would be with a lower dose and finer grind. You’re building a bigger, more open coffee bed that does not choke as easily. But when you combine that with a bypass-prone brewer, this recipe suddenly has a MASSIVE sweet spot. Brew times can shift and grind size can change via a wide sweet spot, but the cup always seems to hold together.
As for bypass, remember…
There is beauty in the faults.
Do What You Want
This is a method where you can develop your own techniques. Please don’t feel the need to pay attention to these variables if it prevents you from developing your own! This is what I’ve found that works best for me to be consistent for when I want to introduce a new variable while keeping everything else the same and to help get consistently even and fool-proof extractions, without resorting to dramatic methods.
Remember…
KEEP IT SIMPLE, enjoy the experience, &
HAVE FUN!
Do what you want and who cares if you dont follow every variable if it means youre making tasty cups! Use this guide as a starting point for you to explore coffee in your own way, that pairs well with your own brewing ecosystem!
If you have any questions, email me at connor@pitstopcoffeeco.com or DM @pitstopcoffeeco on instagram!
