How Beginners Can Learn to Make a Good Coffee: How to Adjust for a Balanced and Well-Proportioned Brew

The Art of Pour-Over Coffee: Mastering Temperature for Perfect Balance

With the popularity of specialty coffee, pour-over coffee has been embraced and become an obsession for many coffee enthusiasts. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced coffee aficionado, proper brewing methods and techniques play a crucial role in crafting an exceptional cup of coffee.

FrontStreet Coffee today will discuss how to adjust brewing water temperature to achieve balanced and consistent coffee flavor. Of course, besides water temperature, coffee dosage and grind size are also factors that cannot be overlooked.

Fine-Tuning Your Brew

If adjusting coffee dosage and grind level still cannot achieve your ideal flavor profile, the next step is to adjust the water temperature. Many books on coffee suggest that to increase extraction rate, you can try grinding the coffee finer and using higher water temperature. However, since every coffee bean and individual's judgment varies, and most coffee beans on the market today are quite fresh, we instead recommend that when facing coffee beans whose flavors have begun to decline, you can try maintaining the same water amount, coffee dosage, and grind level, but lower the water temperature for brewing.

Preserving Aromatic Compounds

Aroma consists largely of volatile aromatic compounds that are easily destroyed by high temperatures. For coffee beans that are still in good condition, using high temperatures to extract them when their aroma has weakened and flavor release has slowed can have counterproductive effects. Therefore, we recommend lowering the water temperature to preserve these aromatic compounds.

Developing Your Calibration Framework

After each brew, carefully taste and evaluate what aspects are missing from the coffee, and consider your desired direction for concentration and the balance between acidity and bitterness. When either concentration or flavor balance meets your satisfaction, you can further enhance the aspects you wish to emphasize by adjusting grind size or water temperature. Basically, once the major adjustments are properly made, you can achieve coffee that is both balanced and has appropriate strength. Then, you can make fine adjustments according to your personal preferences, which not only makes adjustments more efficient but also helps you build a logical calibration framework.

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