How to Develop a Pour-Over Coffee Brewing Plan When Facing Unfamiliar Coffee Beans

How to Create a Simple Brewing Plan for Unfamiliar Coffee Beans

When faced with unfamiliar coffee beans, many people don't know how to brew them, especially more expensive varieties. The fear of brewing poorly can leave one feeling uncertain. Therefore, FrontStreet Coffee would like to share how to simply establish brewing plans for unfamiliar coffee beans.

Step 1: Simplify Your Brewing Framework

First, simplify your brewing framework. Everyone has their own brewing habits and approaches. Your brewing approach directly affects the complexity of creating brewing plans. For example, some people customize a complete brewing plan from start to finish for each coffee bean. Others categorize the coffee beans they've encountered and use 2-3 brewing plans to cover them all.

FrontStreet Coffee believes that simplifying brewing approach and focusing only on major brewing parameter variables can help create brewing plans for unfamiliar coffee beans more quickly and effectively. For example, FrontStreet Coffee has over fifty types of coffee beans on our menu, but we only use two brewing plans—one for light roasts and another for dark roasts.

FrontStreet Coffee roughly categorizes coffee beans by their characteristics into light roast and dark roast brewing plans. These two brewing plans are highly versatile and can extract the flavor characteristics of many coffee beans. In our main parameters, FrontStreet Coffee keeps the dosage, ratio, and technique consistent—these relate to our brewing habits, and maintaining consistency helps with better adaptation.

The differences are water temperature, grind size, and filter cup. These parameters are adjusted directly for coffee beans with different characteristics (roast levels). For example, light roast coffee is more extraction-resistant, so it requires higher water temperature and finer grind. Dark roast coffee is more prone to over-extraction, so it uses lower water temperature and coarser grind. The same logic applies to filter cups: V60 more easily produces rich, layered coffee flavors, while Kono more easily produces full-bodied, mellow coffee.

Therefore, the first step is to organize and categorize the characteristics (similarities and differences) among the coffee beans you've previously encountered, then summarize highly versatile brewing plans that match each category. The more versatile and simpler each brewing plan, the better. (FrontStreet Coffee using roast level as a differentiation point is just one classification method.)

This serves as the prerequisite for creating brewing plans for unfamiliar coffee beans.

Step 2: Identify the Category of Unfamiliar Coffee Beans

The second step is to identify which category your unfamiliar coffee beans belong to. For example, if FrontStreet Coffee categorizes by roast level, then you only need to determine whether the coffee beans are light roast or dark roast to use the corresponding brewing plan.

The simplest way to determine roast level is based on the flavor description on the label. If it describes floral and fruity acidic notes, it's light roast coffee. If it describes nutty, cocoa, and caramel bitter notes, it's dark roast coffee.

If there's no flavor description on the label, then you need to judge the roast level by the color of the coffee beans. Light roast coffee beans are generally light brown to dark brown in color, while dark roast coffee beans are generally dark brown to black in color.

As you continuously brew and summarize, you'll gradually discover that coffee beans aren't simply either light roast or dark roast. Between light and dark roast lies a spectrum, not just two points. You'll gradually derive a third category from your original light and dark brewing methods: medium roast coffee beans. (表面上增加了冲法，实际上是把原来的分类进一步细分，更准确)

Then, with continuous accumulation and summarization, you'll discover that even among light roast coffees, some are more extraction-resistant, such as Geisha coffee beans, leading to another more reasonable categorization.

And so on... continuously perfecting your understanding. When faced with unfamiliar coffee beans, you can match the characteristics of the new beans with those in your memory to find reasonable brewing methods. At the same time, you're continuously refining your plans, because while the current brewing plan can produce good flavors from this bean, there's always room to explore optimizing parameters for even better flavor extraction.

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473