Every major coffee company has specific instructions on how to make coffee using different methods. So, here’s mine. I do *exactly* the same thing for Aeropress and Hario v60 Pourover. I use a 1:19 ratio coffee to water ratio…or for you mathematically challenged, that’s 13.5gr coffee and 260gr water. And yes, I weigh out my coffee and water for these methods. To make things a bit faster, I have a metal frothing container that I marked so I can just fill it to exactly 260gr (btw…1ml of water weighs 1gr…fun chemistry fact.)
For the pourover, I like to use the glass v60 #2 cone. My general method for BOTH starts out the same (taking for granted all the steps like warming the vessels, etc):
- Boil your water. However you want to do this, electric kettle, stove top, whatever, get the water going.
- Prepare your vessel…assemble the Aeropress, get your filters ready, etc
- Weigh out your beans
Now, here’s an important bit to help with consistency. When your water boils, shut off the heat. Use the water right away to WARM your vessels…not brew. Now, CALMLY (no need to rush) grind your beans, dump the warming water and fill your device with the ground coffee. Doing this will all become second nature quickly, and it will basically guarantee that you have let the water cool to the target brewing temp.
- Bloom the coffee for 30 sec. Start a timer and pour about 50gr of water. But, don’t just pour it in. Stir the crap out of it for 10 sec to make sure all the grounds are wet. In the Aeropress, you can just swirl the tube vigorously. Also, for the Aeropress, I use the inverted method.
Now, here’s where the 2 methods differ
- Aeropress
- Slowly pour in the rest of the water
- At the 2:30 mark, stir the slurry gently a few times and put the cap on
- At the 3:00 mark, turn over and press. This should take about 20-30 sec to press completely. If you press to hard, you will “blow out” the filter and push grounds into your cup, and too slow, you will over extract the coffee.
- v60 Pourover
- Start to slowly pour the rest of the water using the concentric circle method. Make sure you finish at the outside of the grounds bed to ensure that ALL the grounds are getting extracted. This should be done slowly taking at least 60sec.
- Once all the water is poured, lift the filter cone a few inches and drop it. This will shake the slurry down to the bottom and make sure that ALL the water passes through ALL the grounds.
- At the end, you should see the grounds bed dry out almost completely evenly and all at once (look up Matt Perger’s demo for a v60 pourover).
If you don’t have a gram scale, get one. You can get a very usable one fairly cheap at Amazon like this one. Using volumetric brewing methods is the single easiest way to have superior consistency. And, once you weave it into your routine, it is quite fast.
Now, how to adjust. DO NOT change the coffee to water ratio. Change your grind! If the resulting brew is thin and sour, grind finer. If the brew is strong and bitter, grind coarser. That’s it. You can play with water temp if you want. But, if you stick with the simple routine above of boiling, then grinding, you will be using water that is in the perfect target range every time. This entire process will take no more than 5 min (10 if you really take your time).