Is Pour-Over Coffee Difficult to Learn? A Guide to Pour-Over Coffee Brewing Parameters: Grind Size, Water Temperature, and Ratios

Coffee mysticism has long become commonplace in coffee circles, with the most discussed topics being flavor mysticism and brewing mysticism. FrontStreet Coffee is here to help everyone uncover the surface mysticism and reveal the science behind it.

Flavor Mysticism

Flavor mysticism generally refers to when you taste a cup of coffee and find it merely bitter and sour, while your friend can describe dozens of flavors, making you question your life—"Are we drinking the same coffee, or while I'm drinking coffee, you're secretly having a fruit feast behind my back?"

"Shouldn't coffee just taste like coffee? Can a dark cup of coffee really have so many flavors, or are businesses deliberately creating long lists of flavors to deceive me into paying higher prices?"

Actually, that's not the case. As early as a decade ago, scientists had already discovered that the fruity flavors in coffee come from ester compounds, while caramel sweetness comes from furan compounds. In the April-published volume 388 of "Food Chemistry," the article "Recent advances in analytical strategies for coffee volatile studies: Opportunities and challenges" explicitly lists over 200 flavor compounds and their corresponding specific flavors. For example, when we taste pineapple in coffee, it's expressed through methyl isovalerate and ethyl isovalerate; rose fragrance comes from phenethyl alcohol; while very sweet flavors like caramel, brown sugar, maple, and marshmallow are expressed by furaneol.

Therefore, all the flavors we taste in coffee are scientifically based and not mystical at all.

Brewing Mysticism

Another coffee mysticism is brewing mysticism. This is most evident in techniques, such as the theory that the tail section must be bitter, which means when brewing coffee to the end, don't let the last 20ml or so of coffee liquid in the filter cup finish dripping—remove it because those tail liquids are the root cause of bitterness.

Another is that different pouring methods can express different flavors. For example, using the same coffee beans, I can brew out the citrus flavors this way, and that way can bring out the strawberry flavors... Or everyone uses the same brewing method, so why is mine worse than yours?

Friends who find it mysterious but impressive will think, "That's amazing, so mystical, so profound and unfathomable!"

In fact, if you're willing to spend more time understanding the logical relationships behind coffee extraction, you'll discover that all techniques and everything that seems mysterious have patterns and can be controlled.

FrontStreet Coffee believes the factors affecting pour-over coffee include coffee beans, grind size, coffee-to-water ratio, water temperature, time, and human hands (technique). These parameters are interconnected and mutually influential, ultimately creating the flavor of the brewed coffee. Among these factors, coffee beans, coffee-to-water ratio, and water temperature are the easiest to grasp, followed by grind size and time, with technique being the last.

Good coffee beans are the foundation. "Good" here doesn't necessarily mean expensive coffee beans, but rather beans without major defects that are within their optimal tasting period. This isn't difficult to achieve. (Never underestimate the date—some friends ask FrontStreet Coffee why this bean doesn't brew well, and after inquiry, it turns out the coffee beans weren't properly rested or were stored too long, causing the flavors to dissipate. Generally, coffee beans reach their optimal flavor state around 4-30 days.)

The coffee-to-water ratio and water temperature are the easiest factors to control because they are concrete numbers that can be accurately determined using electronic scales and thermometers, making it difficult to have large deviations in actual operation. As long as you correctly understand these two parameters, you basically won't go wrong. "FrontStreet Coffee won't repeat this here; for details, click on coffee-to-water ratio and water temperature."

What makes grind size difficult to grasp isn't our understanding of it. In terms of grind fineness requirements, FrontStreet Coffee recommends using a #20 sieve for calibration. Light to medium roasted coffee beans will use a fineness with a 75-80% sieving rate, while medium to dark roasted coffee beans will use a fineness with a 70-75% sieving rate.

But the difficulty of grinding lies in the quality of the grinder hardware. Some friends use grinders with poor grinding quality—lots of fine powder, lots of coarse powder, and a large particle size difference between fine and coarse powders. In this situation, if brewing with an 80% sieving rate fineness, it's very easy to experience over-extraction due to extraction times that are too long. Therefore, when brewing coffee, you need to learn to identify the causes of problems and solve them one by one. For this problem, there are two solutions: first, sieve out the fine powder to reduce the particle size difference; second, adjust to a coarser grind to avoid excessive soaking time.

In pour-over coffee, human hands are the most unstable factor. Other factors can be set to reasonable parameters through adjustment, but it's difficult for human hands to ensure exactly the same brewing and pouring every time. Therefore, using the simplest brewing method reduces human error, which is why FrontStreet Coffee always recommends using the three-stage pour-over method.

And why the brewed coffee tastes the way it does—everything can be traced back to these factors. For example: Why is this coffee sour? Because the coffee beans used for brewing are lightly roasted.

Why is the tail section of the coffee bitter and needs to be removed? Because you're using incorrect parameters, such as grinding too fine or having too much fine powder, high brewing water temperature, too much water poured, or too much force when pouring in circles during stirring. If you use the right parameters, this problem of bitterness in the tail section won't occur. Removing the tail section is just a remedial method.

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