Why Do Pour-Over Kettles Have Narrow Spouts? Can a Regular Hot Water Kettle Be Used for Brewing Coffee? Which Professional Pour-Over Kettle is Best?

The Accidental Retirement of a Loyal Employee

Here's what happened: due to a colleague's carelessness yesterday, a long-time dedicated employee at FrontStreet Coffee—the water kettle—was "sent away" (broken). To avoid affecting the store's normal operations, FrontStreet Coffee immediately spent a considerable amount to hire a brand-new water kettle to start work.

Can a Regular Water Kettle Replace a Professional Pour-Over Kettle?

Right after the new water kettle arrived at the store, a customer who saw it asked FrontStreet Coffee this question: "Can it replace a professional pour-over coffee kettle to brew coffee?"

Without even thinking, the answer is of course yes! It can both boil water and pour water, so if the goal is purely to brew a cup of coffee, then a water kettle can easily accomplish it. However! When you're already drinking pour-over coffee, the requirements are certainly not just as simple as brewing a cup of coffee. Brewing good coffee is the ultimate goal. And this goal is somewhat difficult for a water kettle. Why? Because a water kettle can hardly achieve stable pouring like a professional pour-over kettle.

What Makes Professional Pour-Over Kettles "Professional"

The reason why professional coffee pouring kettles are "professional" is because their entire design revolves around the core of better brewing a good cup of coffee. For example, for better water flow control, pour-over kettles are equipped with slender necks and narrow spouts, which not only easily control the thickness of the water flow but also achieve precise pouring—pour wherever you point;

Additionally, to reduce the impact of body shaking on water flow, professional pour-over kettles usually adopt a low-center-of-gravity design with a wide bottom and an outlet connected to the bottom. This can function like a stabilizer, allowing us to pour stable water flow even if our hands shake like those of a cafeteria lady serving food.

In addition to other designs like handles, which have relatively small impact, FrontStreet Coffee won't elaborate here; you can learn about them by searching through previous articles. In summary, a regular water kettle basically lacks all these advantages that allow us to pour better and brew good coffee more easily! And this is understandable, because water kettles were originally designed just for boiling water, so they don't need to have any designs that guide water flow—as long as they can boil water and pour water, that's sufficient. Because of this, it would be extremely challenging for a water kettle costing around 100 yuan to do the job of a thousand-yuan pour-over kettle (referring to brewing a good cup of coffee), but this is not impossible! (tactical lean back)

How to Brew Good Coffee with a Water Kettle

Just like the newly purchased kettle at FrontStreet Coffee, the vast majority of water kettles use a straight-barrel design. This design makes the center of gravity higher, causing shaking when brewing coffee; in addition, water kettle spouts are almost always high-position wide-mouth spouts designed to quickly pour large amounts of hot water, which not only makes water flow more difficult to control but even requires tilting the kettle more when pouring hot water, greatly increasing the difficulty of water control.

If we want to use such a kettle to pour water for brewing, there are two methods that can help us brew a good cup of coffee. The first method will test the user's grip strength because we need to use the water kettle as a pouring kettle for conventional multi-stage pouring, so we need some ways to stabilize the kettle—for example—fill it completely with hot water. Without filling it with water, the kettle's center of gravity will fluctuate due to excessive tilting. And as the water amount decreases, the tilting angle required to pour a stable vertical water flow will increase, making the difficulty of brewing good coffee directly maxed out.

By filling it with hot water, even though it's in the upper layer, the kettle's center of gravity can still be concentrated, not only making pouring more stable but also greatly reducing the tilting angle needed for the kettle to pour water, making water control slightly easier. However, the disadvantage is also very obvious! When your kettle has a large load, holding it for up to two minutes is quite tiring (excluding waiting time, the actual holding time should be around 1 minute). So if you're using a large-capacity kettle, FrontStreet Coffee would usually recommend using the second method to brew coffee. But before that, FrontStreet Coffee will first share how to brew coffee with a fully loaded kettle, and then share the second method.

Demonstration: Brewing Coffee with a Water Kettle

For this demonstration, FrontStreet Coffee used Panama Boquete Geisha coffee beans. With its relatively high density, it has higher requirements for extraction, which can better help us verify whether the pouring is reasonable. The extraction parameters are as follows:

Coffee amount used: 15g
Grind level: EK43 at 10 setting, 75% pass rate through #20 sieve, granulated sugar texture
Water-to-coffee ratio: 1:15
Water temperature used: 92°C
Brewing method: Three-stage pour
Dripper used: V60

Since the water kettle has no temperature control capability, we need to stop boiling when the water reaches 92°C to prevent the water temperature from climbing to 100°C after boiling, otherwise the waiting time needed at full capacity would be too long. When the temperature displayed by the kettle reaches 93°C~94°C, we can start brewing (generally, the water temperature displayed by electric kettles is about 2°C higher than the actual water temperature inside).

First, use twice the amount of coffee grounds in water for a 30-second bloom.

After the bloom ends, we use both hands to control the kettle, tilting it slightly to pour a small stream of water while circling. The target water amount for this pour is 120ml.

After finishing the pour, wait for the hot water in the dripper to permeate to the bottom, then pour the next stage of hot water! For the third stage, we need to pour 75ml of water, using the same method to control the kettle to pour a small stream, then circle in small motions until all is poured.

When all the coffee has filtered through the dripper, the extraction can be concluded. This extraction took 2 minutes and 10 seconds!

Through tasting, we can conclude that there is no difference from coffee brewed with a pour-over kettle. Not only is the flavor excellent and taste balanced, but the mouthfeel is also quite full-bodied—it's the typical Geisha taste from regular brewing. Then the second method is very simple. Although it also requires three pours, because each pour is done all at once, there are no requirements for the kettle's capacity or grip strength. That's right! The second method is pour-over brewing combined with the stirring method, which is the method FrontStreet Coffee used in the article "How to Brew Coffee with 100°C Boiling Water."

Because we use tools to stir during the brewing process instead of water flow stirring, there's no need for any water flow control—just pour all the hot water into the dripper at once and then stir with a tool. The method is very simple; with the right parameters, we can brew a delicious cup of coffee. Since FrontStreet Coffee has already shared the detailed brewing method in the article, we won't elaborate further here. You can learn more by clicking the link above~

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473