I just keep a gentle stream going until I reach brew weight, low nozzle height above the cone. Don’t think I’ve ever come close to the water overflowing the top. The thing I’m trying to achieve with low agitation is consistent drawdown times, but I also think it tastes more separated. I dunno why or how this is what I landed on but it’s the technique that most often gives me the cup I’m looking for. I also prefer drip machine profiles to high agitation pours. I watched a barista cup final once where Elika used a melodrip on a gesha claiming that it was the only way he could achieve max separation in the flavors (albeit on a very fine grind). That’s the kind of cup profile I’m always aiming for I guess.
I’ll give this a try this weekend and see how it goes. what’s your typical drawdown time here? With a slow flow of water it seems like it will be slower than if there’s a big column of water pushing down on the bed. Are you keeping a consistent amount of water above the bed or just enough to keep it barely wet?
Generally under 3:00 if we’re including a 30s bloom for a 22g dose. I’ve tried keeping the water level both low and high and can’t say there’s definitely a difference. It’s mostly about turbulence and agitation, so I keep the spout close to the top of the slurry and try not to “stir” it with the water too much except for maybe the first ~15 seconds where I carefully use the water to level the bed out. I’d say just do one where you focus on low agitation instead of number of pours or flow rate and see if you can tell a difference. Maybe even keep your same # of pours and everything, just don’t spin the brewer or pour aggressively.
Random observation: I’m approaching 4 weeks off roast (5/7) on this latest batch and the coffee is behaving differently in the bloom phase. It’s expanding / mushrooming the same way I’d expect a darker roast to expand. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, check this out:
In general, I can’t make light roasts swell up like that. Sometimes it happens, but I wanna say it’s an exception. Also, when the bloom mushrooms bigly, I find that those are the ones that require more than 3x water to saturate. So my working theory here is that the mushrooming effect may be a visual indicator of solubility.
Some coffee math I was screwing around with under the SCAA’s assumption that extraction = surface area * contact time:
The point here is to figure out total surface area for a given grind size at a certain starting volume of coffee. I set contact time to a constant (180 seconds), removing it as a variable, because it’s super complicated for percolation. Anyway, the point was to just make a quick reference table of grind size for various doses of V60. First column is target particle size in microns, last column is dose in grams.
Of course, it’s not anywhere near this simplistic in practice because it’s not just one particle size, but it seems to at least map onto reality to some degree. For example, I usually dose 22g for V60 02 and my target particle size is around ~875 microns (9A on my Vario). So I can see how @pvn was getting drinkable cups in the 6/7 range dosing 18g or whatever. It makes me think that the people using the 4M-5M range are microdosers doing those 12g to 15g brews. That was my primary reason for doing this, because I don’t drop down that far in dose often enough to recalibrate it properly, so judging by this, it does seem that 5M is plausible for a 15g V60 dose in terms of surface area.
Honest question:
Given the hundreds of dollars and seemingly countless hours spent on improving coffee, I assume the increase in quality and taste has been enough to justify the continued financial and time investment, right?
I’m just casually browsing the thread rather than doing that stuff but would bet the is no just based on quality and taste alone. It seems to be more like a hobby that you do because you enjoy the process.
wat
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To me, the best cups are so good that I actually crave them and can ghost taste them throughout the day. It’s weird and unlike anything else I’ve experienced, and I’m not sure exactly what’s happening. The best way I can describe it is a pleasant and balanced sweet acidity, and it seems to hit hardest right where the hard palate transitions to soft palate in the upper back part of my mouth. It’s a different sensation I get from the tongue which seems to be better at discerning flavors. It can be challenging to produce such a cup, but I should also point out that what I’m drinking tastes nothing like coffee as most people know it. Better description is probably botanical fruit juice.
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I should make an updated FAQ / buying guide for the people who don’t want to read all of the in-the-weeds posts where we try to figure everything out. The basics for getting good coffee at home are still fairly simple and repeatable*:
(1) Buy a good grinder
(2) Buy a good drip machine
(3) Buy good coffee
(4) Use proper water
*Unless you ignore my advice to buy a good drip machine and be done with it, and instead succumb to the siren call and venture into the voodoo land of the mythical V60. Then all bets are off and the rabbit hole has no bottom.
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I think theres clearly some variable reward brain circuitry going on too.
Put in effort. Roll the coffee dice. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. It’s a recipe for addiction.
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yeah the thing is, like, maybe… 10% of the cups I brew are like this. The other 90% are… ok. They’re fine, really, very drinkable, better than what I would get in basically any “fancy” coffee house outside of a few extremely hardcore places (that, in my experience, tend to be decidedly unfancy). But they’re not what I’m doing all of this for. Once you’ve A) tasted those god-tier brews and B) managed to do it yourself a couple of times, you’re basically fucked.
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so, to tie it back to superuberbob’s question, most days I feel like I’m putting in all this effort and buying these weird beans from tiny micro roasters and I FEEL like the coffee is actually worse, though that’s just because as rugby touched on, my brain is fucked up by those rare moments of sublime reward.
yeah this is a huge element of it, there are moments that feel extremely familar as a former craps junkie.
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Catching the dragon 10% of the time is better than the 0% of the time opioid addicts get. So, it’s not quite as bad as that.
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just to expand on this point a bit, when I visit a “fancy” coffee place I’ve basically given up on pourovers and just get espresso. Most baristas are just not paying attention to drip coffee at all, much less dialing in an exact grind setting for each different roast they have. That sort of detail just doesn’t scale commercially.
This dude is one of the only guys I’ll get a pour over from:
He operates out of a literally hole in the wall in LA chinatown, it’s really easy to miss and it’s just completely bare. He’s just 100% focused on making a good cup with zero frills. It’s really hard to get a true sense of how minimal his shop is, the camera work is always so close-in. This pic gives the best sense of it that I could find in a quick search:
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Some people, pros even, won’t brew V60s. They can’t handle the swings.
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So. Do you thinks it’s possible to get a cafe version of one of these “God-cups”.
I’m keen to try and get an idea of what in aiming for.
It’s unlikely. Like @pvn is saying, most places don’t devote that kind of time or effort to brew. The best you’ll probably get is a very good batch brew, and that’s fine to form your basis of comparison from.
There was a place in Milan that was selling cups of espresso for like 10 Euros.
I thought it was a misprint but I realized why nobody was in their chairless cafe immediately after confirming that the price was real.
At least I hope they were that good. Otherwise it was one insane scam. Don’t recall the name of the place and finding it will be like a needle in a haystack.
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