Beginner's Coffee Guide: Key Points for Pour-Over Coffee Novices & Recommended Filter Drippers for Beginners

The emergence of pour-over coffee was originally intended to make coffee preparation simpler. As times have changed and quality of life has improved, people increasingly enjoy the process of making pour-over coffee and have developed more research and pursuit of it. Research continues to innovate, and people continue to pursue excellence, leading to many misconceptions that have trapped many enthusiasts...

Misconception 1: Coffee Brewing Techniques

Regarding brewing techniques, many coffee beginners become "obsessed" with imitating the brewing methods of baristas from coffee competitions without understanding the principles of extraction. While the front street doesn't deny that techniques affect coffee flavor, their importance is not primary, because all brewing methods are based on one principle: using appropriately hot water in suitable quantities to pass through properly sized coffee particles for the right amount of time to extract coffee with perfectly balanced flavors.

The front street believes that as long as you use fresh coffee beans with the right grind size, water temperature, and coffee-to-water ratio, combined with a conventional brewing method (circular segmented pouring), ensuring that 100% of the injected water passes through the coffee particles, you can get a good cup of pour-over coffee.

When some coffee "experts" explain their brewing approaches, we can easily discover that behind every different technique lies the goal of better expressing the flavor characteristics of the specific coffee beans they're brewing, and these methods are often "tailor-made" for that particular coffee bean, not necessarily applicable to other coffee beans. We need to understand their intentions and then think about brewing methods suitable for the coffee beans in our hands, which will help you grow quickly on your brewing journey rather than blindly following trends.

Misconception 2: Filter Cup Selection

As pour-over coffee has been embraced by more and more people, various types of coffee filter cups have appeared on the market, some focusing on even extraction as their core principle, others on rapid water filtration to prevent clogging, etc. The emergence of these filter cups has brought more variations and possibilities to pour-over coffee. Many beginners will enthusiastically purchase various types of filter cups, only to find that they can't brew good coffee with any of them and point fingers at the filter cups... (Filter cups: I'm innocent!)

Whether it's classic filter cups or innovative ones, their designs always have trade-offs. As long as you fully understand their design and extraction principles, any device can achieve equally excellent brewing. For example, the V60 filter cup's 60-degree angle design guides water flow to the center, extending the contact time between water and coffee. The large-aperture filter hole at the bottom allows everyone to control the coffee's flavor extraction time by changing the pour rate.

Another example is the cake filter cup, whose flat-bottom design creates an evenly distributed flat coffee bed structure. With the same amount of coffee grounds, the flat-bed structure is thinner, allowing water to pass through the coffee grounds more quickly, while the flat structure also enables more even extraction.

Misconception 3: Being Casual About Brewing Parameters

"I don't use a thermometer, water temperature feels about right," "Using an electronic scale is too troublesome, as long as it's brewed approximately right." Regarding these "approximately right" approaches, there are valid reasons why the brewed coffee doesn't taste good. When brewing pour-over coffee, you typically need to use auxiliary tools like electronic scales and thermometers. These seemingly "unimportant" tools provide you with actual accuracy.

For example: when you've prepared 15g of coffee beans and plan to brew with 91°C water temperature and a 1:13 coffee-to-water ratio. Suddenly, your grinder decides to "hold back" some particles, and you end up with only 14.7g of ground coffee. However, if you proceed with the original parameters without knowing this, the final extracted coffee will have flavor deviations from what would have been brewed with the original parameters.

The front street believes that these seemingly insignificant small changes always manifest in the final coffee tasting stage. Therefore, once you've established brewing parameters, you need to execute them rigorously using auxiliary tools. If each parameter deviates slightly, the final extracted coffee flavor will have significant differences.

Important Notice :

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