What Does Single-Origin Coffee Mean? Essential Knowledge of Pour-Over Coffee! Why Should Single-Origin Coffee Be Brewed Using Pour-Over Method?

Customer: "Boss, I'll have a single-origin coffee!"

FrontStreet Coffee: "Would you like pour-over or cold drip?" Customer: "Isn't single-origin coffee just pour-over?"

Just like the customer in the dialogue above, many people in daily life equate single-origin coffee with pour-over coffee, believing that single-origin means pour-over, and pour-over means single-origin. In reality, however, the two are completely different concepts. So, the question arises: why do people confuse "single-origin" and "pour-over"? Before revealing the answer, why don't we follow FrontStreet Coffee to review what single-origin coffee is and what pour-over coffee is.

What are single-origin coffee beans?

So-called "single-origin coffee" actually refers to coffee made from beans from a single origin, which is what we now call specialty coffee. Whether brewed through immersion or drip filtration, as long as you only use water and single-origin beans to make it, it can be called single-origin.

What we primarily want to experience from single-origin coffee is the regional flavor of the growing area. Coffee beans grown in different terroirs develop distinctly different flavors. For a simple example, the same variety, if grown in Yirgacheffe, might have the fragrance of lemon and jasmine; while if grown in the Sidamo region, it might present sweet and sour fruit flavors like mango and pineapple. This is what we call "regional flavor." But we need to know that single-origin beans only refer to coffee beans from a single plot, single processing method, and single batch, and do not include "single variety." Because the mixing of different varieties in coffee cultivation is an unavoidable phenomenon, unless manually intervened, it's easy to have a batch mixed with different varieties.

What is pour-over coffee?

Pour-over coffee is easier to understand—it's a specific coffee brewing method! By using a filter to hold coffee grounds and combining it with manual water pouring, it achieves a coffee extraction method that extracts while infiltrating. Because of this, pour-over coffee is also classified as drip filtration extraction.

The reason why many people often confuse single-origin coffee with pour-over coffee is that the vast majority of people choose to use the pour-over method to "cook" single-origin beans!

Why do single-origin beans prefer pour-over brewing?

Although there are various ways to make coffee, few methods can be as outstanding in all aspects as pour-over coffee, making it a "hexagonal warrior."

As long as the parameters are correct, making a delicious cup of coffee is not difficult for any extraction method. But pour-over coffee is not limited to this—in addition to tasting good, it can also do many other things!

Feature 1: Speed

Take major coffee shops, for example. The preparation of a cup of coffee must not only ensure stable flavor but also maintain speed of service. Besides espresso, almost no brewing method can quickly produce a cup of coffee with excellent flavor in a short time. Either because the preparation steps are too complicated, or because the extraction time is too long. For example, smart cups and French presses, although very simple to operate, require much longer immersion time.

And because pour-over coffee requires human intervention throughout the extraction process, it can stably extract a delicious cup of coffee with outstanding flavor and appropriate concentration in just two minutes.

Feature 2: High Potential

Because pour-over coffee requires full human participation in its preparation, this gives us complete control over this cup of coffee. By changing the grind, adjusting water temperature, or replacing brewing methods, we can use the same beans to create two completely different tasting cups of coffee.

For example: if we want the coffee to have more prominent sweetness, we can concentrate the extraction on the front and middle stages, reducing the seepage of bitterness from the tail stage; and if we want the coffee's flavor to be more balanced, we can balance the flavor by lowering water temperature, using a coarser grind, extending extraction time, and so on. Although other extraction methods can also achieve this adjustment, they are relatively more unstable and more difficult to adjust.

Feature 3: High Playability

In addition, in terms of accessories, we also have many different choices. For example, in terms of filter cups, we can choose different shapes, different characteristics, and different materials. Each difference will affect the brewing, so just in terms of filter cups alone, we have considerable room for exploration.

Furthermore, during the coffee preparation process, we can also add various auxiliary tools to adjust the coffee's flavor and extraction difficulty. For example, "Paragon ice balls" that lock in flavor, "Lily Drip" that assists brewing, and so on. Therefore, the playability is extremely high.

Feature 4: Excellent Flavor Performance

Compared to other extraction methods, pour-over, as a drip filtration method, cannot achieve completely uniform extraction of all coffee grounds in the filter cup, resulting in different amounts of dissolved substances due to different extraction rates. This causes the coffee to ultimately present very rich layers and perform more excellently.

Moreover, thanks to the comprehensive coverage of filter paper, there are not too many insoluble substances in the coffee, so the prepared coffee has a very clean performance, and the flavor can be more easily captured by people. So now we can understand why people prefer to use pour-over coffee to prepare single-origin beans. Not only because it can better express the flavor characteristics of the coffee, but also because of the short extraction time, high playability, and high potential~

- END -

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473