How to Rescue Under-extracted Coffee and the Popular Three-Pour Pour-Over Technique

FrontStreet Coffee - Pour-Over Coffee Extraction

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When you're starting to learn pour-over coffee, avoid watching too many technical videos. Excessive guidance will disrupt your brewing approach. Instead, start simple, maintain consistency in your pouring, and learn how to bloom, pour in stages, and stir to achieve even extraction. Many baristas pour in circular patterns, which helps maintain a steady water flow. When starting with pour-over coffee, many people experience under-extraction due to unfamiliarity, resulting in weak taste and flavor. Once you're familiar with the basic operations of pour-over, you can advance to refining details, or even break all the rules to establish your own order.

Blooming

During the first pour, the coffee grounds will absorb water and expand, forming a small mound. This is caused by the release of carbon dioxide gas accumulated during the roasting process. Light roast and fresh coffee beans may produce more foam because they typically contain more gas.

Carbon dioxide doesn't help with extraction and may even prevent it, as it repels water and disturbs the coffee grounds at different heights. Therefore, the blooming process allows the gas to escape, improving extraction. Gently pour twice the amount of water as your coffee grounds. If you're using 15g of coffee grounds, pour 30g of water. Then wait for 30 to 45 seconds until the blooming process is complete and the coffee grounds begin to settle.

Segmented Brewing & Continuous Brewing

Segmented extraction means using specific amounts of water for multiple pours. You can experiment with the amount of water per pour and the number of pours. This technique helps prevent channeling or the coffee liquid level rising high and overflowing the filter cup edges. It also causes the coffee grounds to dance gently, creating more uniform contact with water.

Another approach is continuous pouring, where the barista continuously pours water with as constant a flow rate as possible. Continuous pouring aims to maintain uniformity in water volume and saturation as much as possible, while segmented pouring intentionally creates variations. When adjusting your brewing strategy, you can consider pouring techniques as another variable. Different types of pouring methods have different effects on extraction, directly affecting the flavor of the extracted coffee.

Benefits of Segmented Pour-Over:

In filter brewing, compared to a single pour, segmented pouring can improve extraction rate. The main reason is that each pause creates a new mixture of coffee grounds and water with a lower concentration. Water is a better solvent compared to the turbid mixture. However, it's not necessarily better to have more pauses. Depending on the brewing method, the ideal number of pauses ranges from 2 to 8. Ironically, in batch brewing, the segmented technique is used to adjust brewing time, but it happens to also improve extraction.

Knowledge Point:

The rate of soluble substances in coffee particles is related to the amount of surface area where coffee grounds and water come into contact.

About FrontStreet Coffee

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