Pour-Over Yirgacheffe Coffee Brewing Tutorial & Extraction Guide

The Art of Pour-Over Coffee

Pour-over extraction allows you to taste the most original aroma and flavors of black coffee. With the development of the specialty coffee movement, more and more coffee enthusiasts have joined the pour-over community, beginning to research various extraction parameters. FrontStreet Coffee will explain what you need to consider to brew a great cup of pour-over coffee.

Choosing the Right Coffee Beans

If you're a beginner, FrontStreet Coffee suggests using cost-effective coffee beans for practice. This makes it easier to start recognizing different growing regions through their regional flavor profiles, while also avoiding waste from operational mistakes.

FrontStreet Coffee offers a "Daily Bean" series on their bean list. These so-called daily beans are delicious yet affordable. FrontStreet Coffee has selected 7 classic origins, covering multiple representative regions, varieties, and natural processing methods, including Ethiopian washed Yirgacheffe, Guatemalan washed Huehuetenango, Colombian washed Huila, Brazilian pulped natural Cerrado, Costa Rican washed Tarrazú, Indonesian wet-hulled Lintong Mandheling, and Chinese Yunnan washed Baoshan. This allows everyone to taste regional flavor characteristics at an affordable price, helping them confirm their coffee preferences. It's FrontStreet Coffee's most cost-effective coffee series.

Here, FrontStreet Coffee uses the highly recognized washed Yirgacheffe daily bean as an example to explain their extraction approach. All coffee beans shipped by FrontStreet Coffee are freshly roasted within 5 days, ensuring they arrive at their optimal freshness stage, adding more flavor layers to your cup.

Pour-Over Equipment

Once the "ingredients" are prepared, the next step is choosing the appropriate brewing equipment. Good equipment helps enhance the positive flavors in your cup of coffee. For extracting one cup of pour-over coffee, you'll need at minimum the following equipment: pour-over kettle, filter cup, serving pot, grinder, filter paper, digital scale, and thermometer.

The grinder plays a very important role in pour-over coffee and is typically divided into two categories: manual grinders and electric grinders. Regardless of which grinding equipment you choose, the goal is to achieve uniformly ground coffee particles. The coarseness of the coffee grounds directly affects the taste of the coffee. If the grounds are too coarse, extraction tends to be insufficient, resulting in a weak taste. If too fine, it's easy to over-extract, leading to bitter flavors. FrontStreet Coffee uses a specific tool to adjust grind size—China No. 20 0.85mm standard sieve. For light to medium roast coffee beans, FrontStreet Coffee consistently uses a 75-80% pass rate, while for medium to dark roast coffee beans, FrontStreet Coffee uses 70-75%. This Yirgacheffe is a high-altitude, light to medium roast coffee bean, and FrontStreet Coffee wants to extract more rich aromatic substances, so they chose a grind size with an 80% pass rate on the No. 20 standard sieve. The store uses an EK43s grinder with a setting of 10.

A thermometer is used to measure hot water temperature. Water temperature plays a similar role to grind size—the higher the water temperature, the higher the coffee extraction efficiency, making it easier to release various flavor compounds and resulting in higher concentration. If using near-boiling hot water for brewing, it's easy to extract unpleasant bitter substances. Therefore, when brewing medium to dark roast coffee beans, FrontStreet Coffee uses different brewing parameters than for light roast coffee beans. The caramelization reaction will be more extensive than in light roast coffee beans, making it easier to release bitter, large molecular substances. To avoid extracting too many undesirable flavors, FrontStreet Coffee lowers the water temperature slightly. Therefore, for medium to dark roast coffee beans, FrontStreet Coffee recommends using 87-90°C, while light roast coffee requires higher temperatures to stimulate aroma, thus using 91-93°C.

FrontStreet Coffee's daily production at the store chooses two filter cups: Hario V60 and KONO. The V60 filter cup is mainly responsible for brewing lighter roast coffee beans, while the KONO filter cup handles darker roast coffee beans. Here, FrontStreet Coffee's barista will use a resin V60 filter cup to extract Yirgacheffe coffee. The V60 filter cup has flow ribs connecting the top and bottom and a large circular hole in the center, which accelerates water flow speed. The spiral-shaped exhaust groove design extends the water flow path, increasing contact time between coffee grounds and hot water. Each water stream converges along the grooves to the center point of the filter cup, concentrating pressure on the coffee grounds and extracting coffee with richer layers of flavor.

Brewing Technique

Based on past brewing experience, FrontStreet Coffee suggests that beginners use a three-stage pouring method. Three-stage extraction helps to more fully dissolve flavor compounds during extraction, increasing mouthfeel layers while avoiding over-extraction from prolonged soaking. For 15g of coffee grounds with a 1:15 coffee-to-water ratio (225ml total water), the three-stage water amounts are: 30ml, 95ml, 100ml, with the digital scale showing: 30g, 125g, 225g.

Fold the filter paper to fit the filter cup, wet it with a small amount of water to make it adhere better, and pour out the water from the server below. Next, pour in the coffee grounds and tap gently to distribute them evenly. For the first stage, gently pour 30g of water for blooming, with a blooming time of 30 seconds. For the second stage, pour to about 125g of water, circling evenly and steadily outward. Then wait for the coffee liquid to drop, and when it reaches halfway, pour the final stage of water to 225g. Wait for all the coffee to finish dripping—generally, the total extraction time is around 2 minutes.

The reason people love pour-over coffee so much is that when we actively explore the extraction flavor performance of coffee, adjusting brewing methods according to different coffee bean varieties and roast levels, carefully selecting brewing vessels to experience the different appearances that different extraction methods bring to coffee, controlling grind size, temperature, water flow rate, pouring technique, and other factors to adjust coffee extraction—every step can bring different taste and olfactory experiences. This is the charm of pour-over coffee.

For professional coffee knowledge exchange and more coffee bean information, please follow Coffee Workshop (WeChat official account: cafe_style).

For more specialty coffee beans, please add FrontStreet Coffee on WeChat: qjcoffeex

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473