How to Prepare Volcano Pour-Over Coffee? What are the Characteristics of Japanese Volcano Pour-Over?

FrontStreet Coffee often comes across various articles about Japanese-style pour-over brewing while browsing online. These articles typically showcase an impressive visual appeal that practically leaps off the screen. That's why today, FrontStreet Coffee wants to share about the renowned "Volcano Pour-Over" from Japanese-style brewing.

What is Volcano Pour-Over?

As mentioned at the beginning, the Volcano Pour-Over originates from Japan! As the name suggests, during brewing, the coffee grounds in the filter continuously release gases when they contact hot water, creating a phenomenon that resembles a volcanic eruption – truly spectacular!

Best Suited for Dark Roast Beans

This brewing method is particularly suitable for dark roast beans. Why does FrontStreet Coffee say this? First, because it's a brewing method designed according to the characteristics of dark roast beans (this is largely related to the popularity of dark roasted coffee beans back in the day). We know that dark roasted coffee beans, due to their loose texture, contain a lot of carbon dioxide. And! When they come into contact with hot water, they release carbon dioxide more quickly due to their density, thus forming a large, bulging appearance!

If we were to use light roasted coffee beans, because of their harder texture, they cannot contain too much gas and cannot release it easily. This would result in low expansion during blooming, unable to form the large bulge seen with dark roast beans. The visual appeal would be much lower than with dark roasted coffee beans!

Brewing Equipment Considerations

Moreover, because the extraction time for this brewing method is relatively long, the coffee flavor will tend toward high sweetness, balance, and rich body. Compared to light roast beans that primarily extract the front and middle notes, this method is more suitable for dark roast beans. Another point to note is that this brewing method has specific requirements for filters! It works better with cone-shaped drippers like flannel, V60, and Kono. This is because during the brewing process, the water pouring method involves intermittent small streams of water poured into the center. When coffee grounds are in a cone-shaped dripper, the particles mainly accumulate in the middle of the dripper, with the thickness of the coffee grounds layer around the edges being much thinner than in the center.

Therefore, intermittent center pouring actually allows hot water to pass through more coffee grounds compared to conventional pouring methods (with the same amount of water, there's much less bypass water). Additionally, hot water can flow from the middle to the surroundings through transfer, allowing the surrounding coffee grounds to receive sufficient extraction. Therefore, we don't need to worry about the surrounding coffee grounds being under-extracted due to not being reached by water.

Volcano Pour-Over Recipe

So how should we brew this Volcano Pour-Over? Since it's a Japanese-style brewing, we naturally use dark roasted FrontStreet Golden Mandheling, as this makes the coffee more authentic! Because the extraction time is longer, to avoid over-extraction, we need to make reasonable adjustments to the parameters! FrontStreet Coffee's Volcano Pour-Over parameters are as follows:

• Beans used: FrontStreet Sumatra Golden Mandheling (Dark Roast)
• Coffee amount: 20g
• Grind setting: Ek43 setting 11 (60% pass-through rate on #20 sieve, coarse sugar texture)
• Coffee-to-water ratio: 1:12 (240ml hot water)
• Brewing temperature: 88°C
• Filter used: Kono dripper

The entire brewing process is mainly divided into two parts: one bloom, and several continuous pours! As usual, we first use double the amount of water to the grounds (40ml) to wet the coffee grounds, performing a 30-second bloom. At this time, if the coffee beans are fresh, they will expand into a giant "hamburger" shape (that is, the "volcano" itself) as shown in the picture below.

After the bloom ends, we divide the remaining hot water into 10 portions of 20ml each, pouring them into the center of the dripper with small streams in a dot-pouring manner. The interval between each pour is about 5 seconds (pour when you see the coffee bed about to collapse). Then you can witness the entire "volcano" made of coffee grounds continuously expanding, contracting, then expanding again, and contracting again, just like a volcanic eruption!

Serving Suggestions

When all the hot water has been poured and dripping is complete, we can remove the dripper and then perform a bypass according to our preferred concentration. Because a 1:12 coffee-to-water ratio is very concentrated coffee for most people, and because the hot water doesn't have ample space, the coffee flavors are all concentrated together and cannot be well expressed. Therefore, after brewing is complete, FrontStreet Coffee suggests adding hot water to dilute the concentration to obtain a better drinking experience!

FrontStreet Coffee's preference is to add 60ml of hot water, bringing the ratio to 1:15. This taste is more suitable, very smooth, rich-bodied, and with high sweetness. The pine, black chocolate, and spice flavors of FrontStreet Golden Mandheling are all well expressed!

Conclusion

Overall, the Volcano Pour-Over brewing method belongs to the category of high concentration, low extraction. Using a higher amount of coffee grounds with less hot water to extract soluble substances. Because the water space is limited, it cannot extract all soluble substances from these coffee grounds. Therefore, when the parameters are appropriate, you basically don't need to worry about over-extraction! Give it a try now!

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FrontStreet Coffee

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