Why Do Japanese Brewing Methods Prefer Large Doses of 20g or More? What Is High-Concentration, Low-Extraction?

Do you remember the Japanese-style brewing FrontStreet Coffee shared the day before yesterday? If you followed the link in that article to learn more, you would have noticed that no matter which method is used, the amount of coffee grounds is quite large. That raises a fair question: why does Japanese-style brewing favor such big doses?

Why Japanese-Style Brewing Uses Large Amounts of Coffee

Why does Japanese-style brewing favor large doses? Quite simply, because Japanese drinkers, like FrontStreet Coffee, cannot tolerate bitterness. Although they have a particular fondness for dark-roasted coffee, what they truly value are the caramel aromas that deep roasting brings, the silky, rich mouthfeel, and the sweet aftertaste that arrives on swallowing. Those are the real charms of dark roast, not the genuine bitterness that comes from over-extraction.

Japanese coffee beans are notoriously dark-roasted. You can imagine how loose the structure must be for beans that are approaching the carbonization zone: they are so brittle they shatter at the slightest touch and can even leave oil on your hands. Beans like these not only roughly double extraction efficiency but also tend to produce a lot of fines during grinding. Coarse grinding is therefore necessary to reduce fines and avoid over-extraction.

By grinding coarser, you both reduce how many times the grounds are cut, which lowers the amount of fines, and shrink the surface area in contact with hot water, correcting the extraction efficiency that was "forced" upward. The only drawback is that the gaps between particles grow noticeably larger. After all, the grind really is very coarse. At the time there were no slow-draining cones like Kono to hold back the flow rate, so excessively large gaps would speed up the water and make it hard to extract the essence of dark-roasted coffee. Faced with this, the Japanese hit on the idea of piling up more coffee grounds to slow the seepage.

High Concentration, Low Extraction Principle

Accumulating more grounds increases the thickness of the coffee bed inside the filter cloth or screen. As the bed gets thicker, water needs more time to pass through it, which lets the water extract more material from the bed. Note, though, that the water volume does not increase along with the coffee, so the resulting liquid ends up more concentrated. This is exactly what we now call "high concentration, low extraction."

The coffee-to-water ratio we typically use today is generally 1:15 or 1:16, which gives coffee an appropriate concentration and extraction rate, making it more palatable and acceptable. Japanese-style brewing generally uses a ratio around 1:10 or even lower. More extreme methods, like Matsuyama-style brewing, can reach a coffee-to-water ratio of 1:5 and are then diluted with water. This approach is also meant to avoid pulling bitter flavors out of the tail end of extraction: when the concentration is higher, coffee does not need as much extraction to yield flavor compounds.

Characteristics of Japanese-Style Brewing

Besides large doses, Japanese-style brewing typically has another standard feature: longer extraction times. To let that small amount of hot water extract as much as possible from the coffee, they deliberately slow the flow and give the water enough time to work. This secures concentration while also giving the coffee a sweeter aftertaste. Although the final serving is small, the first sip delivers the rich caramel aroma of dark roast bursting in your mouth, a silky smoothness reminiscent of Dove chocolate, and a very distinct sweet aftertaste.

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FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Japanese-style brewing rewards medium and darker roasts, so a balanced bean is the natural match. FrontStreet Coffee's Brazil Queen Estate comes from Brazil, the world's largest coffee producer, and is a distinctive yellow Bourbon; roasted medium, it shows cream, peanut, chocolate, toast, and sugarcane aromas and sweetness, and it works as pour-over, in a Moka pot, or in an espresso machine. If you want a sweeter, fruit-toned medium roast, the Strawberry Candy Geisha Blend combines honey-processed Costa Rican coffee with washed Panama Geisha, so it offers both orange-blossom honey and rounded sweetness and suits cold brew, pour-over, and espresso alike.

For those who want the caramel-and-nut depth that dark roasts are known for, the Jamaica Blue Mountain No.1 is roasted medium-dark, which blends its acidity, bitterness, sweetness, and body into a strong, elegant aroma with chocolate, roasted nut, cream, and caramel notes. If you would rather explore what a medium-light roast can do in a fruit-forward direction, the 2013 Sun-Dried Typica from Yunnan brings the authentic small-bean character of Yunnan, roasted medium to keep its balance and softness with nut, brown sugar, black tea, and dried apricot notes, all at excellent value.