Are You Mastering These 9 Coffee Brewing Details?

Under the patient guidance of a barista, you've carefully selected a bag of coffee beans to take home, and you've followed the brewing recommendations exactly, only to find that the coffee you brew tastes completely different from what you drink at the shop. You ponder and wonder, but can't figure out where the problem lies... This is most likely caused by overlooking some detail.

In reality, for newcomers just starting to learn pour-over coffee, mastering details is the key to successful entry, rather than fancy brewing techniques or tricky extraction parameters. If you've encountered the above problems and are troubled by coffee that doesn't taste good, you might want to check out these details that FrontStreet Coffee has listed that beginners most easily overlook.

Detail 1: Not "purging the grinder" before actual grinding causes flavor cross-contamination

Whether you're using a manual or electric grinder, after each grinding session, the burrs will more or less have some fine particles stuck to them. Many people don't have the habit of disassembling and cleaning, and if the usage frequency isn't high, the fine powder accumulated in the crevices will oxidize and deteriorate over time, producing woody or oily flavors.

To avoid bringing residual old powder into new powder, which would cause flavor cross-contamination in the coffee, FrontStreet Coffee always throws a few beans into the hopper to run through first before actual grinding. Additionally, to extend the service life of a grinder, it's important to develop the good habit of cleaning it after each use.

Detail 2: Wet filter paper doesn't fit the dripper properly

Wetting the filter paper is a default action that many people perform before brewing, first to ensure the filter paper fits the dripper "tightly," and second to preheat both the dripper and server. Some beginners only know to "pour" water to wet the filter paper but overlook the importance of proper fitting.

FrontStreet Coffee once conducted a comparative experiment and found that if the filter paper doesn't fit properly, the coffee grounds' degassing during blooming will be hindered, and some design features of the dripper walls will lose their auxiliary functions (such as the spiral ribs of V60 or the smooth curved surface of Kono), which in turn affects the uniformity of coffee extraction and flow rate. For techniques on fitting filter paper properly, you can refer to relevant resources.

Detail 3: Tapping the dripper too many times after adding coffee grounds

Everyone knows that an uneven coffee bed can easily lead to uneven contact between coffee and water, so after pouring coffee grounds, we gently tap or shake the dripper to make the surface of the coffee bed more level. However, excessive tapping or too many repetitions will cause a large amount of very fine particles with smaller volumes to fall to the bottom through the gaps. At this point, the upper layer of coffee becomes loose, while the lower layer becomes compact and dense, making it difficult for hot water to penetrate, ultimately causing blockage problems in the final brewing stage.

There's also a technique to adding grounds. We can aim at the center point first and slowly pour out the coffee grounds, which makes it less likely to be biased to one side. Just a gentle shake is enough to distribute the particles evenly at the bottom of the dripper.

Detail 4: Inadequate pre-pouring inspection work

FrontStreet Coffee has brewed at least thousands of pots of coffee and is familiar with all parameters, but occasionally still makes some basic mistakes. Therefore, to avoid irreparable situations, pre-pouring inspection is very important. First, please check if the water from rinsing the filter paper into the server has been poured out, and if there's enough water in the kettle. After grinding the coffee grounds, zero the electronic scale before pouring to double-check the weight, in case the grinder "consumes" some coffee.

Detail 5: Confirming water temperature too early but delaying the brewing

This is a problem many home brewers overlook and one that most commonly appears among beginners. They're used to confirming the water temperature first, then covering the kettle and attending to other tasks, but by the time they actually pour water, the temperature has already dropped. Therefore, FrontStreet Coffee suggests confirming water temperature in the final two steps. If using a kettle without temperature control, you could consider its heat absorption effect by pouring water that's a few degrees higher than the brewing temperature, then waiting for it to gradually cool to the target temperature before immediately starting to pour.

Detail 6: During blooming, some coffee grounds remain dry

The formula of twice the weight of coffee grounds in water for 30 seconds is a well-known blooming formula, but it actually has a prerequisite: ensuring all coffee grounds are wet and can release gas simultaneously. If you only focus on the amount and time of blooming and your pouring technique isn't skillful enough, it's easy to have one side of the coffee bed dry while the other side is wet. Based on FrontStreet Coffee's pour-over experience, if you can't wet all the grounds with twice the amount of water, you might as well "borrow" a little water from the later stage (5-10g) to pursue better blooming results.

Detail 7: Not strictly executing brewing parameters

Before brewing a coffee, we'll create a corresponding brewing plan, including parameters such as coffee amount, water amount, temperature, grind size, water temperature, and pour distribution. Only by strictly brewing according to the originally set values can we adjust within the original extraction framework during review if the final coffee taste isn't right.

Imagine this: if you're using a 1:15 coffee-to-water ratio with 15g of coffee grounds but pour a total of 238g of hot water, and then the coffee hasn't finished dripping, you think the end will be bitter, so you hurriedly remove the dripper, and finally "add water" to adjust concentration, then the actual coffee-to-water ratio isn't 1:15 anymore, and the coffee taste can only be "left to fate," making it impossible to serve as an effective extraction reference.

Detail 8: Only staring at the electronic scale, ignoring changes in the coffee bed

Many beginners have a bad habit of always staring at the data on the electronic scale when pouring water. For coffee extraction, the accuracy of values is certainly important, but focusing too much energy on data often causes you to miss changes in the coffee bed. For example, when brewing a light roast coffee, fine grinding slows down the flow rate. When you're overly focused on weight and time, and the liquid level continues to rise over the coffee bed, water will flow directly down the ribs, causing under-extraction. Therefore, during the pouring process, more attention should be paid to changes in the coffee bed.

Detail 9: Drinking coffee without shaking it first

Generally, the flavor compounds extracted at different stages of coffee brewing are different, and the taste goes from strong to weak. So if you don't want to experience coffee that's strong in one sip and weak in another, you need to shake it a few times manually to allow it to fully mix before tasting for better results.

Mastering these details might not immediately make your coffee ten times better, but doing them well can eliminate various unstable factors from the source, making it more intuitive to identify why your coffee doesn't taste good—whether it's the grind, water temperature, coffee-to-water ratio, pouring technique, etc.

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FrontStreet Coffee

No. 10, Bao'an Qianjie, Yandun Road, Dongshankou, Yuexiu District, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473