How to Practice Water Flow Control in Pour-Over Coffee? What's the Difference Between Large and Small Water Flow?

The quality of a pour-over coffee is not determined by the shape of the coffee grounds after brewing. What truly matters is whether your parameters are suitable for the current beans and equipment, and whether you can properly control the water flow during brewing!

The Impact of Water Flow Control

Both small and large water flows will have different effects on brewing. When you cannot maintain stable water control, the flow will not only fluctuate between large and small but also cause deviations in the water drop point. These situations can easily lead to negative outcomes such as excessive bypass water and uneven extraction. Therefore, what FrontStreet Coffee wants to share today is: how to improve your "water flow control ability."

Precautions Before Practice

Before we practice water control, we need to first select and fix the pour-over kettle for practice! Because different pour-over kettles will produce different effects, we cannot switch between different kettles for water control practice, as this will significantly reduce the speed of proficiency improvement.

The reason we need to maintain consistency throughout is mainly due to the kettle's spout! Different types of spouts produce water flows with different characteristics: narrow-spouted kettles produce smaller water flows, while wide-spouted kettles produce larger water flows. Therefore, the difficulty of water control with narrow spouts is often lower than with wide spouts, and the learning period will be very short.

However, the drawbacks are also obvious. The water control ability that can be mastered without much practice can only be used for narrow-spouted kettles and is difficult to apply to wide-spouted kettles.

Because wide-spouted kettles are more difficult to master, they require more proficiency to control. Although the learning period for wide-spouted pour-over kettles is longer, once mastered, other types of pour-over kettles can be handled with ease. Therefore, FrontStreet Coffee suggests that friends can choose their pour-over kettles according to their needs: those who want to get started quickly can choose narrow-spouted kettles; those who want to obtain higher water control ability can choose wide-spouted kettles~

Now, let's move on to the water control practice tutorial.

Practice Methods

1. Fixed Point Uniform Water Injection

This practice will be quite tedious, but it is also very important because it is the foundation of controlling water flow. Only by building a solid foundation can we better master high-level water control abilities.

What we need to do is fill the pour-over kettle with 2/3 water, then fix the position and continuously pour a uniform vertical water flow, repeat continuously, first practice with small water flow, then practice with large water flow.

It looks very simple, but it's not that easy to do~ Because the water in the kettle will continuously decrease, so the weight will constantly change during brewing. What we need to do is to adjust accordingly as the water amount decreases, in order to keep the poured water flow uniform throughout.

Repeat, repeat, repeat until muscle memory is formed, and you can skillfully pour a uniform water flow to move on to the next stage of practice.

2. Circular Uniform Water Injection

The previous practice step is the foundation laid for circular water injection! We need to continuously circle during brewing to stir the coffee grounds, thereby obtaining higher extraction efficiency! And circling is the culprit that causes the water flow to fluctuate between large and small.

Whether the circles are round is one thing, but what matters most is how you circle and how to keep the water flow stable and uniform - this is the top priority. Many friends use wrist strength when pouring water in circles. Using wrist strength to circle will cause the pour-over kettle to complete this pouring at different tilt angles, which leads to the fluctuation of water flow between large and small.

Therefore, what circular water pouring practice aims for is not to use the wrist to control the circling during pouring, but to use the body to control the entire circular pouring! The specific operation is to stabilize your "base" (lower body), keep your arms still, control the kettle angle with your wrist, and use your body to rotate to drive the kettle to circle. This way, you can ensure that the water flow can continuously and uniformly flow even when circling.

Of course, we can also use wrist strength to circle at a uniform speed, but the difficulty of practicing this is too high. Controlling the tilt angle of the kettle while circling is much more difficult compared to body rotation! Therefore, FrontStreet Coffee would recommend practicing using your body to control the circling~

It's best to start with slow circular movements, and once you can pour a stable water flow, you can increase the speed of circling and gradually increase the difficulty. When you reach the point where you can control the speed and water flow at will, congratulations, you have successfully graduated~

Conclusion

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FrontStreet Coffee

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