What Equipment Do You Need for Pour-Over Coffee? How to Choose Pour-Over Kettles, Drippers, and Scales

Once you've experienced the beauty of pour-over coffee, it's easy to become deeply captivated and unable to break free! Most people start by trying pour-over coffee made by baristas at coffee shops or by friends around them. Over time, coffee made by others can no longer satisfy your needs. So, at this point, most friends start considering purchasing their own set of brewing equipment!

But once you get on shopping platforms, the dazzling array of various styles can be overwhelming. With so many types of equipment, how should you buy them?! Don't worry, FrontStreet Coffee is here to share how to maximize the value of your limited budget!

"Hmm... let me share some thoughts on the best way to buy pour-over equipment." If you think carefully, for pour-over brewing, the necessary core equipment is really just these few: a coffee grinder for grinding beans, an electronic scale for weighing, a pour-over kettle for brewing and pouring water, and a filter cup that serves as the filtering tool! We just need to allocate the budget according to the importance of these equipment to maximize the use of our limited budget!

Coffee Grinder

The coffee grinder is the most important piece of equipment here, without exception! The quality of the grinder determines whether you can brew delicious coffee. Of course, the "good quality" mentioned here refers to whether the coffee particles it grinds can be uniform.

FrontStreet Coffee often says that there are many "bean choppers" on the market masquerading as coffee grinders. They merely chop coffee beans and cannot guarantee particle uniformity. Therefore, the particles ground by them are generally of varying sizes, very uneven, and extremely poor in fineness! Using these differently sized coffee particles for brewing will lead to serious extraction deviations, which is uneven extraction! Therefore, our goal when choosing a grinder is to find machines with uniform grinding capabilities! The price of these grinders basically starts from 200 yuan upwards. The higher the price, the more refined the grinding function, and the more uniform the particles. However, even with the most refined grinders, the ground coffee powder will have some very fine particles. So, FrontStreet Coffee suggests that when buying a grinder, you can also equip yourself with a flour sifter, which can sift out the large amount of fine powder that appears due to over-fine grinding, avoiding the clogging problems caused by fine powder (which can lead to over-extraction)!

Pour-Over Kettle

After we've selected the grinder, the next most important thing is the pour-over kettle! The selection of a pour-over kettle can be filtered sequentially from three aspects~

Pour-Over Kettle Selection — Temperature Control & Non-Temperature Control

Whether to choose a temperature-controlled or non-temperature-controlled version can be decided based on your wallet and whether you have other water heating devices at home! These two don't affect the taste of the coffee. The difference between them only affects the operation. If you choose a pour-over kettle without a temperature control module, then you'll need to equip yourself with a thermometer to measure water temperature, just like FrontStreet Coffee does!

Pour-Over Kettle Selection — Spout

After making a choice between temperature-controlled and non-temperature-controlled options, we need to move on to the core selection of the pour-over kettle — the "spout." FrontStreet Coffee's articles have been covering spout explanations these past two days, mainly because the spout design affects the difficulty of water flow control. Interested friends can move to this article for a detailed understanding of "How do spouts affect water flow?!"

If you want to get started with brewing quickly, FrontStreet Coffee recommends purchasing a gooseneck narrow-spout kettle. Because this type of spout has lower difficulty in water flow control, it's more conducive for beginners to quickly master water control skills; if you want to challenge something a bit more difficult, then you can choose a wide-spout kettle, which will offer more brewing playability once you've mastered it!

Pour-Over Kettle Capacity Selection

The size of the pour-over kettle actually has quite a significant impact on pouring during brewing! Many friends might think they only brew single servings of coffee, so buying a 300ml capacity pour-over kettle would be sufficient! But in reality, a too-small kettle body can easily cause the center of gravity to lean forward, making the water flow difficult to control. Additionally, during brewing, we need to pour more water than the expected coffee-to-water ratio to accommodate various different methods!

Of course, too large is also a problem—it's not only inconvenient to use, but for friends with less strength, it becomes an additional burden. Therefore, FrontStreet Coffee suggests that the best capacity range for a pour-over kettle is between 500ml~600ml~

Filter Cup

Although the filter cup is the most representative item for pour-over coffee, its selection requirements can be slightly more relaxed compared to the first two~ The price range for filter cups is extremely wide, with affordable prices as low as tens of yuan, and expensive pricing up to thousands of yuan! However, the difference between them is different from the price difference of grinders.

The price of grinders is mainly linked to their performance—the more refined, the more expensive. The price of filter cups, however, varies from design patents, materials, and appearance, and these variations have relatively small effects on brewing. Therefore, when choosing from the perspective of cost-performance and functionality, the resin version of the V60 is definitely an excellent choice~ After buying the filter cup, don't forget to buy the matching filter paper! Filter paper may seem insignificant, but it has a certain impact on the quality of coffee taste! The pour-over filter paper that FrontStreet Coffee uses daily is made of bleached virgin wood pulp. Many friends worry that bleached filter paper might contain toxins or have a heavy bleaching smell, but these situations only appear in low-quality filter paper. You don't have to worry about these issues with filter paper from major brands!

So FrontStreet Coffee recommends prioritizing major brands when buying filter paper (for example, Kono, which FrontStreet Coffee uses daily—Kono, send us payment!), and never buy low-quality filter paper just because it's cheap~ Oh, and there's another point to pay attention to when buying: whether the size and shape of the filter paper match the filter cup~ Don't end up with a conical filter cup and buy cake-shaped filter paper, because FrontStreet Coffee thinks they probably won't get along!

Electronic Scale

Visualizing data is the easiest way to get a delicious pot of pour-over coffee, so we need an electronic scale with a timing function to visualize the data during brewing! This way, even if this pot doesn't taste good, we can determine the problem based on the brewing time and liquid weight, allowing us to avoid these issues in the next brewing and thus obtain a pot of high-quality coffee!

Serving Pot/Cup

Containers like serving pots for holding coffee can be optional—just choose cups according to your preference, after all, they don't have any impact on coffee brewing! If you want a sense of ceremony, then get a professional serving pot set~ The price is around 100-150 yuan.

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FrontStreet Coffee

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

Important Notice :

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Tel:020 38364473