How to Determine Your Pour-Over Coffee Brewing Method? How to Establish Extraction Parameters for Unfamiliar Coffee Beans? What's the Difference Between Dark and Light Roast Coffee Beans?

If we want to brew a delicious cup of coffee, then a suitable extraction method is absolutely essential. But with so many varieties of coffee, how can we know that this method is definitely suitable for the current beans? This is a dilemma that most friends face when they get new, unfamiliar beans!

So today, FrontStreet Coffee is here to share: "How to develop a brewing method for unfamiliar coffee beans"!

How to Develop a Brewing Method for Unfamiliar Coffee Beans?

Many friends might imagine changing brewing techniques to the extreme, but actually, we can simplify this and not make the problem so complicated. Because generally, people tend to have inertia, and when accustomed to a certain brewing method, making abrupt changes might lead to counterproductive results. Therefore, we only need to adjust the extraction method, which means adjusting the extraction parameters!

The problem returns to the original point: with so many varieties of beans, different bean types, different densities, different roast levels—how can we know what parameters are most suitable for them? FrontStreet Coffee suggests finding suitable brewing parameters by observing the information on the bean bag label. In pour-over coffee, the roast level of coffee beans is our main reference information, because pour-over coffee extraction is essentially divided into two categories: dark roast and light roast. Light roasts are difficult to extract, so extraction efficiency needs to be higher; dark roasts are easy to extract, so extraction efficiency needs to be lower. However! Because everyone's standards for defining roast levels are quite different, most merchants' coffee bean labels won't include roast level information. In this case, FrontStreet Coffee recommends using the flavor information on the label as a reference standard. We can categorize coffee flavor descriptions into the following types:

Floral and Fruity Notes: The floral and fruity notes here refer to acidic fruit or floral flavors. Acidic fruits include citrus, berries, tropical fruits, etc.; florals include white, purple, yellow flowers, among others.

Sugary Sweetness: This refers to flavor descriptions containing honey, sucrose, brown sugar, caramel, and other sweet tastes.

Spices and Nuts: This refers to flavor descriptions containing more roasted, bitter flavors like chocolate, nuts, spices, etc.

Fermented Aromas: This is more special, referring to flavor descriptions that include flavors like alcohol, dried fruits, which only appear after fermentation.

If flavor descriptions contain abundant floral and fruity notes, or high sweetness descriptions like honey and sucrose, then these coffee beans generally fall into the light to medium-light roast category; if flavor descriptions are mainly dominated by slightly weaker sweet flavors like brown sugar, with dark chocolate, nuts, or fruits as secondary descriptions, then this bean basically belongs to medium roast. Based on the secondary flavor descriptions, we can further define it as medium-light or medium-dark; if flavor descriptions are dominated by chocolate, nuts, spices, and other flavors, then this bean is basically dark roast.

Developing Brewing Parameters

Once we've grasped the roast information of these beans, we can start developing their brewing methods. In brewing methods, we need to determine mainly: coffee-to-water ratio, grind size, and water temperature!

Coffee-to-Water Ratio: FrontStreet Coffee generally uses a fixed 1:15 coffee-to-water ratio, because whether it's dark roast or light roast, a 1:15 ratio will produce a pour-over coffee with appropriate concentration. If you want stronger coffee, you can reduce the ratio to 1:14; if you don't want it too strong and want more prominent flavors, then you can use a 1:16 coffee-to-water ratio.

Grind Size: For coffee extraction, grind size is a relatively important parameter, as it determines the particle size of the coffee grounds and whether water can more or less easily extract flavor compounds from the coffee powder. Therefore, friends with the right conditions can directly apply the principle of #20 sieve calibration, where light to medium-light roast coffee beans, after grinding, should have a 75-80% pass rate through the sieve, while medium-dark roast coffee beans should have a 70-75% pass rate. If you don't want to use sieves, then you can skip this step.

Water Temperature: As the extraction solvent, water temperature determines extraction efficiency. The higher the water temperature, the higher the extraction efficiency, and vice versa. Light roast coffee beans have higher density, making them harder to extract, so we need to use higher temperatures to extract them. FrontStreet Coffee recommends using water temperatures in the 90°C~93°C range for extraction. The fresher and coarser the light roast beans, the higher the water temperature used. The recommended water temperature for dark roast beans is in the 87°C~89°C range. Similarly, the fresher and coarser the beans, the higher the temperature within the range, and vice versa.

Beans with special processing methods are somewhat unique. Although most of them are light to medium-light roast coffee beans, anaerobic processing makes their structure more porous, so water flow will be faster. Therefore, although they follow the light roast extraction method, the grind size can be slightly finer to reduce gaps between grounds, increase hot water extraction time, and thereby achieve a complete extraction effect.

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Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473