Pour-over basics: V60, Kalita, Chemex
A no-nonsense guide to brewing pour-over coffee at home — equipment, ratios, pour technique, and the small mistakes that kill flavour.
Pour-over is the cheapest way to brew genuinely good coffee at home. A V60, a kettle, a scale, and fresh beans will outperform a thousand-dollar drip machine. The technique looks fussy from the outside, but once you do it twice it becomes routine.
What you actually need
A dripper (V60, Kalita Wave, or Chemex), the matching paper filters, a kitchen scale that reads to one gram, a kettle (gooseneck preferred but not required), and a grinder. The grinder matters more than the dripper. A good grinder with a cheap dripper beats a great dripper with pre-ground supermarket beans every time. The grind size guide covers what to look for.
The basic recipe
Start with a 1:16 ratio — fifteen grams of coffee to two hundred and forty grams of water. Grind medium-fine, somewhere between table salt and sand. Rinse the paper filter with hot water before brewing to wash out the papery taste and warm the dripper.
Add the grounds, give the dripper a gentle shake to level them, and start a timer. Pour twice the weight of the coffee in water (so thirty grams) over the grounds in a slow circle, then wait thirty seconds. This is the bloom — gases trapped in the beans escape and the puck swells.
After the bloom, pour in slow circles up to the target weight. Aim to finish pouring around two minutes thirty seconds, with the brew fully drained by three thirty. If it drains much faster, your grind is too coarse. Much slower, too fine.
Pour technique
Keep the kettle close to the grounds — a high pour over-agitates and adds bitterness. Pour in concentric circles starting from the centre and moving outwards, then back inwards. Do not pour directly on the paper — water will channel down the side without extracting the coffee. Water temperature matters too — boiled and rested briefly works for most beans.
What goes wrong
Sour and weak usually means under-extracted: grind finer or pour slower. Bitter and harsh means over-extracted: grind coarser or use cooler water. Muddy or astringent means the brew stalled — uneven grinds or too fine a grind for your dripper. Buy a slightly better grinder before you buy anything else. For a full troubleshooting walkthrough, see fixing bitter or sour coffee.
See also
- Grind size by brew method — pick the right grind for your dripper.
- Water quality, temperature and brew ratios — the often-ignored variables.
- Bean storage and what "fresh" actually means — keep beans pulling well.