How Long Should Hand-Drip Coffee Extraction Take? What's the Normal Extraction Time for Pour-Over Coffee? Must the Brewing Time Be Exactly Two Minutes?

When brewing coffee, time is the only extraction parameter that cannot be directly and precisely controlled, as it is the result constructed by various other parameters working together. This also means that time can serve as a standard to measure other parameters. Therefore, theoretically speaking, as long as you can control the brewing time, making a good cup of coffee becomes a routine task.

How Does Time Affect Extraction?

Not only serving as a measurement standard, extraction time itself is an important parameter in coffee extraction. Because when other brewing parameters remain unchanged, the length of extraction time can determine the extraction rate, showing a positive correlation. The longer the extraction time, the higher the coffee extraction rate; the shorter the extraction time, the lower the coffee extraction rate.

As we all know, coffee extraction rate has a generally accepted tasty standard, which is the 18-22% extraction rate of Golden Cup Standard. Although not all delicious coffee falls within this range, at least the vast majority does. To control the coffee extraction rate within this range, we need to reasonably match various parameters, simply put, to establish a brewing framework (formula). FrontStreet Coffee has been emphasizing in this article to use 2 minutes ± 10 seconds to extract a pour-over coffee, because 2 minutes is most suitable for FrontStreet Coffee's current brewing framework: 15g of light roast coffee grounds, 1:15 coffee-to-water ratio, 92°C water temperature, 80% pass-through rate with #20 sieve, three-stage pouring, V60 dripper.

And because time is constructed by these parameters working together (except for water temperature), when the extraction time does not fall within the set range, it means that some parameters may have deviated, or certain conditions have not met requirements, thus causing the coffee's flavor to deviate. If it develops in a bad direction and the coffee is not as tasty, then FrontStreet Coffee will use time to find the "culprit" and correct the flavor.

Next, FrontStreet Coffee will share what factors throughout the entire pour-over coffee process can affect extraction time!

1. Grind Size of Coffee Grounds

To put it bluntly, extraction time is actually the total duration that hot water for extraction passes through the coffee bed, and the coarseness of coffee grounds directly determines the size of water flow gaps. Under the condition that other factors remain unchanged, the coarser the coffee grounds, the larger the gaps, and the faster the water flow rate; the finer the coffee grounds, the smaller the gaps, and the slower the water flow rate. Therefore, the coarseness of coffee grounds is a major factor affecting the speed of time.

And this is based on the condition of relatively high grinding uniformity. If the quality of the grinder is poor and the uniformity of ground particle size is not high with more fine powder, then the increase in fine powder will also cause an increase in extraction time, which is a point we need to pay attention to.

2. Amount of Coffee Grounds

In addition to grinding, the amount of coffee grounds we use will also affect the length of extraction time. Because when the amount of coffee grounds is greater, the coffee bed becomes thicker, hot water needs to pass through more coffee grounds, and the time becomes longer, and vice versa.

3. Pouring Method

The size of water flow we inject when brewing coffee is also an important member in controlling time! When we inject a larger water flow, it means we only need a short time to inject the target amount of water. At the same time, because the injected water flow will be higher than the drainage speed, the coffee bed will be raised, coffee grounds will be dispersed to the dripper walls, the thickness of the coffee bed will be reduced, and the drainage speed will be increased. If the injected water flow is smaller, not only will it take more time to finish injecting the target amount of water, but also because small water flow cannot raise the coffee bed, hot water needs to pass through a thicker coffee bed, thus slowing down the extraction time.

Under the same water flow size, the number of pouring intervals in our brewing method becomes another factor that determines the length of extraction time. The more pouring intervals, the longer the extraction time will be. For example, single-pour and three-stage pouring, although all extraction parameters are identical, the extraction time of single-pour will be shorter than three-stage pouring because it has fewer pouring intervals.

4. Dripper Flow Rate

As an important tool to support filter paper, the construction of the dripper can also determine the length of extraction time. This mainly comes from the protrusion degree of the dripper's guide ribs and the size of the bottom aperture.

When the dripper's guide ribs are more prominent, or the bottom aperture is larger, hot water will flow faster because it has more penetration space. For example, with the same conical dripper, the flow rate of V60 dripper is faster than Kono dripper because compared to Kono, V60 has more and more prominent guide ribs, and the bottom drainage aperture is larger, giving it more drainage space, thus making the flow rate faster.

It's worth mentioning that filter papers from different manufacturers will also affect drainage speed. Their thickness and water permeation aperture size will vary due to different manufacturing processes. So this is also a major point that we cannot ignore. That's roughly it~ So now everyone can understand why FrontStreet Coffee always lays out the parameters in detail in articles~ It's because there are too many factors that can affect extraction time, and when the coffee we brew doesn't perform well, we can determine where the problem lies based on the extraction time~

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