That does seem like too much getting left behind. I was under the impression that 15g of whole beans should yield ~15g after being ground
But congrats on your first brew turning out a lot better than my first two lol. How much water did you use for 15g?
Weighing out water before pouring seems needlessly difficult. Hopefully you have a scale that can be tared, if so put your cup/rinsed filter on that, zero it out, add grinds to desired weight, zero again, then add water on the scale up to whatever amount for your bloom and additional pours.
Yeah grind coarser. These days itās very difficult for me to exceed 3 minutes including a 30 second bloom. For a 15g dose, I wouldnāt be surprised if youāre under 2 minutes with a great brew. It really depends on the coffee a lot though. Are these Ethiopian beans? Which grind setting are you on?
Itās should be expected that your first grind will have some retention since there are a lot of places for coffee to get stuck. This happens to me whenever I do a full cleaning, but after a grind or two your retention should be close to zero.
You have a few options with the standard hopper:
(1) Use a method called RDT (Ross Droplet Technique) that involves very lightly coating the beans with water first. What I do is run a spoon under water and then stir the beans with it in a cup. Iām taking about a very small amount of water here, like a drop or two you can see on the spoon. You can also mist with a spray bottle if you have one. This reduces the static electricity and prevents both grind retention and messy, clingy chaff.
However, this wonāt prevent the popcorning problem with the standard hopper, and youāll have to knock them back down into the grind chamber with a spoon handle or something. If youāre going to single dose ~15g, the far better solution is to buy the single dose hopper ($24). The thing about popcorning, aside from being annoying, is that it reduces the consistency of the grind quality slightly.
(2) Since you have the Forte, you can fill the hopper to about half full and then grind by weight to prevent popcorning. So if youāre dosing 15g, maybe add 30g to the hopper and grind your 15g. That leaves 15g in the machine and you can top it off the next morning. The beans in the machine will be somewhat exposed to air for a day, but I wouldnāt worry about that too much.
Thanks. Iām probably taring more than necessary. First I tare the kettle before filling water to heat. Then Iām taring the cup that holds the beans before adding them. Then Iām taring before rinsing the filter with 15g of water. Finally, I tare the entire set up before the first pour over. Thatās a lot of taring lol
Thanks, good to know thatās normal and Iāll try option 1. Not sure if option 2 will be good for me cause occasionally I might go a week+ without making anything.
I was on 4M per the chart you posted but from what I understand itās tough to compare numbers between different grinders because thereās a range they could be calibrated to. Dark roast Ethiopian from Harrar Roastery but you mentioned it may be more of a medium.
Just sounds like your brew parameters are off. Can you post pics of your grind?
Here is my V60 default. I measure and grind 20g of coffee to a coarseness of roughly kosher salt. The optimal size depends on the coffee and can vary considerably, so the first attempt is always a guess.
When the water reaches the desired temp, I rinse the filter and heat the cone with considerably more than 30g of water. I dunno the exact amount but more than 100g and less than 200g Iād say. I dump the rinse water and add the coffee, then make a small divot in the center of the grinds with my finger. The purpose of the divot is to allow the bloom water to penetrate deeper into the grinds for even coverage, but this step is optional.
Then I carefully and slowly pour about 3x the weight of the coffee (so ~60g of water) starting directly in center or divot. Your goal here should be to get complete saturation / coverage of the grinds. Sometimes it takes less than 3x, sometimes more. Just wait for the CO2 off-gassing to stop. Thirty seconds is what most people say, but imo you should just wait for the bubbling to stop which can take longer sometimes.
If youāve bloomed well, most coffees will rise, expand, and sometimes dome slightly, creating a false top. When I start the main pour, I begin pouring gently and slowly again in the center, then expanding out to the sides, attempting to break up this false top and knock it back down into the slurry. This only takes a few seconds and not much water. I want everything to be flat / even before most of the water goes in. When Iām satisfied with this, I increase the flow rate and pour in a spiral motion starting in the center and expanding outward, then repeat. Goal is to get slurry height up to between 1/2 and 3/4 full in the cone.
From there, I honestly donāt feel like it matters that much how you put the rest of the water in. You can reduce your flow rate and do one continuous pour, you can pour in periodic pulses, you can wait for all of it to drain before pouring again, etc. There are tons of different techniques people use and none of them are necessarily correct. I default to 15:1 or 16:1 ratio, so for 20g coffee dose thatās 300g to 320g of water. If Iām trying to dial something in, I may go down to 14:1 or as high as 17:1, but anything outside of that Iād consider experimentation. The thing to remember is that a lower ratio will be higher strength but lower extraction, while a higher ratio will be lower strength with higher extraction.
One thing to know about Ethiopians is that they are notoriously harder and denser than most beans. That means youāll be grinding coarser for those to get similar times and extractions. Since I drink a lot of light Ethiopian naturals, that might explain why my default grind setting for V60 is so coarse. If itās only slightly bitter, try backing it off to maybe 5A or 5M, but Iād also recommend trying a ~9A just to see what happens. My theory is that there can be multiple āoptimalā target particle sizes for one coffee, each having a different profile.
Also, for both of you, realize that your burrs are not seasoned yet and will change for the better over time. Iād recommend running several pounds of cheap beans (light roast) through the Forte at the espresso end of the grind range to speed this up. Iām not sure how much it matters for the 1Zpresso, but I wouldnāt suggest doing it for a hand grinder.
Tap for now. I have a filter but it claims to take out all solids so Iām not sure if thatās better. I could do bottles but right now Iām just using what Iāve got.
Iām using Arrowhead bottled water. I heard bottled is better because it doesnāt contain the chlorine taste, but also worse because it doesnāt have minerals either and you want some of that. I know that ideally soft water is best, but my two choices are shitty tap or bottled
I only saw one video where they used a divot in the center so I didnāt use it. Iāll try it next time
Not to sound cheap but I was trying not to waste bottled water. But I suppose I could rinse the filter with +100g
Yeah, I thought 15:1-16:1 would be the sweet spot too. I get why yesterdayās (10:1) was way too strong. But this morning I went almost 16:1 and it was worse than yesterday! ???
So Iām going to assume itās my technique and pour rate as well as my grind setting that needs improvement. Just to be clear. A lower ratio will produce a stronger coffee and a higher ratio will produce a weaker coffee with more acidity? Is that correct?
Thanks for the suggestions. Iām coffeeād out for today. Will try it again tomorrow
Some tap water may work well, but even āgoodā tap tends to vary too much to be reliable. The thing to know about water is that there are two main parameters for coffee brewing, alkalinity and hardness, assuming we have ācleanā water and approximately neutral pH.
Here are the āsimpleā things I recommend:
(1) Crystal Geyser Alpine Spring Water
Itās widely available (Walmart and others) for about $1 / gallon and closest to the coffee water chemistry targets of all the cheap and mass-produced bottled water products that are out there. You have to get something like Volvic or Mont Blanc to beat it, and those are expensive if you can even find them. I did a lot of research on waters (like seriously downloaded dozens of water quality reports on bottled water brands) and this was the easiest and most affordable solution thatās available to the largest number of people. This isnāt a perfect solution, but itās relatively cheap and practical.
(2) A mixture of Evian:distilled at 1:6 ratio
About the same price but slightly more complicated. However, Iām more confident about the water chemistry of Evian being a known quantity than Crystal Geyser because they print those numbers right on the bottle. The 1:6 mix nails the alkalinity target (important for acidity) of 40 ppm but comes in a bit low for hardness at just over 50 ppm. Thereās some room to play with the ratios a bit using this method too.
(3) Third Wave Water packets
These are premix packets that you dissolve into gallon jugs of distilled water. Primaās price is $16 / 12 units, so thatās $1.33/gal plus your cost for distilled which will push total cost to over $2/gal. Roughly, thatās about double the cost of the cheapest option, but itās still pretty simple with the added advantage of exactitude in the water parameters. Specifically:
Our formula is 150 TDS high in magnesium helping provide natural sweetness in the flavor profiles. Brew times will need to be adjusted when you change waters when brewing tea (or coffee).
150 TDS is on the high end of the range for acceptable hardness and considerably higher than options (1) and (2) which are both arguably too low. Thereās a unique aspect of relatively more magnesium in their compound which may extract different compounds from the coffee. I think the jury is very much out on that though.
I have all of these on hand. If the Crystal Geyser isnāt working, Iāll switch to something else. The biggest thing here though is that water is another variable and potentially a major source of frustration, so itās good to have an idea of your water profile (alkalinity, hardness). Some coffees seem very picky about the brew water while others arenāt. Some seem to do better with lower minerals while others are best with high minerals. Hereās a water megapost I wrote a while back:
Right. The name Arrowhead sounds familiar to me. Maybe it was one of the better bottled waters? Canāt remember and Iād have to pull a water quality report for it.
This is a valid point. Another option is to rinse the filter with hot tap water from the faucet, then maybe a final pass with your 30g from the kettle to add some heat right before brewing. Iāve written about this before, but sometimes I use this method to fill the cone up completely with water to get an idea of the filterās flow rate. No two paper filters are exactly the same, and some are actually so slow that Iāve tossed them. Like, if you pull a Hario filter from the box and it struggles to pass water from a full cone, the actual brew is gonna go way too long.
A higher ratio will produce a weaker coffee with higher extraction. Itās sort of counterintuitive.
Right but what does extraction mean to richness and taste exactly? These are the obvious things I donāt know
My tap water gets ridiculously hot. I could certainly use that to rinse. I was just concerned about getting the tap water taste on the filter. Should this be a concern? Iām psyched to try another one tomorrow!
Iāll pick up some Crystal Geyser next time Iām shopping. I remember drinking Volvic all the time around the late 90s/early 00s. It was super cheap back then and great just as a bottled water. But yeah itās expensive now.
Made another coffee this afternoon with a coarser grind, same slight bitterness but less flavor but I did a horrible job keeping the grind bed level so thatās probably why. Basically finished with a perfect cone going up the filter. I need to work on that spin technique.
Itās sort of complicated but here is the basic idea. When you brew, the coffee compounds youāre pulling out of the beans do not extract linearly over time. The compounds which are easiest to extract dissolve in the water toward the beginning of the brew rather quickly, and by the end, you arenāt extracting much coffee at all. The things you are picking up at that point are mostly bitter and undesirable āearthyā flavors. Read this part:
So what weāre trying to do here is get a brew method that extracts to the middle of this order and not much longer. You can see from this that if we stop too soon, our coffee will be too acidic and I mean that in a bad way. It will taste harshly sour, like raw lime juice, and will lack all of the complexity and sweetness itās supposed to have. If we extract too much, itās going to contain a lot of these grassy / plant flavors that are bold, bitter, and generally awful.
Based on this Iād guess you have hard water. Can you dig up a municipal water report for your area? If you can find one, look for TDS or total hardness entries.
Hereās a relevant water anecdote:
I fucked up today mixing waters for my brew and later realized that what I ended up with was essentially 1:1 Evian:distilled mixture. That puts the alkalinity at 145 ppm (waaaay too high) and total hardness at 180 ppm (slightly too high by SCA standards but way higher than I normal use). I ground coarser today at 9M, and the coffee was really bad. Not interesting, not sweet, definitely overextracted with a horrific bitter aftertaste. Was baffled by it at first, then I realized that some water I used to ādiluteā the Evian was actually a concentration I made a few days ago. Whoops.
Trials 3&4
Result:Getting there!
#3 still way too strong! The brewing time also exceeded 3.5 minutes (closer to 4), which I know isnāt correct. I dumped it and started again (Iām starting to take this personally)ā¦
Okay. Clean slate. Wtf why is this so hard for me? I figured back off to 18g of beans and keep 305ml water (fwiw I donāt actually get 305ml. I seem to lose 10ml or so between the heating and brewing process). I also took apart the 1Zespresso and set it to dead middle for trial 3. The texture was more like a fine powder rather than salt as lawnmower suggested. So for trial 4 I moved it another 3 notches (9 clicks?) towards coarser.
So put the water on (Arrowhead), rinsed the filter with hot tap, and did another grind of 18g of coffee. Btw, this grinder is truly awesome. Even with never having worked any grinder in my life let alone a hand grinder, I can tell how well constructed it is. Takes less than 40 seconds to grind 18g of beans. The consistency was definitely less fine and closer to table salt. I poured it in the V60, set it, and made a divot. Once water was up to temp I started the timer and poured about 40g and let it bloom for 30 seconds. Then I continued in slow concentric swirls but faster this time. When it was almost full, I gently shook the V60, let it go down some, and repeated the process until the water was used up (about 295g total. What happens to the other 10g?)
The total brewing time was just over 3.5 minutes. The coffee was still too strong but after using cream and sugar it was more than 100% improved. For the very first time I tasted the smoothness of the coffee! And the overall taste was deep and rich albeit still too strong for me. Iām hoping my next brew will be much closer to nirvana. Further adjustments I think are needed are:
Still need a coarser grind. Iām gonna go another two settings (6 clicks) towards coarser although that may be a bit too much, but at this point Iād rather err on the side of slightly too weak and adjust from there. I also think a coarser grind will cut down the brew time to within an ideal 3-3.5 minutes. Iām also going to use a bit more water and up it to 310g to start and hopefully wind up with 300g overall for the finished brew
In summary:
I was going too slow on the pour. Once you get all the numbers right, itās just a nice steady swirling pour. I was babying it too much which resulted in a too long brew time and probably oversaturated grounds
The grind setting was too fine towards an espresso consistency. I think the V60 brew needs a more medium coarseness and my particular taste probably more coarse still. Once I fine tune this enough to where Iām actually enjoying the coffee Iāll try to catch up to all @Lawnmower_Man 's amazing tips and info about water and the rest that is for now, way beyond my ken
Thanks all for the incredibly helpful suggestions. @ripdog that 1Zespresso recommend was spot on!
Edit: I realize Iām now almost at a 17:1 ratio (16.3 if I use the final 295ml after the finished brew), which should be lower strength/higher extraction. I canāt account for this unless I just donāt know the difference between strong and earthy bitter tones that Iām tasting
just dilute it after you brew it. this is actually the best way to make weaker coffee, most people think āoh just use more water when brewing and keep the amount of grinds the sameā but thatās generally a great way to get over extracted brew.
