A Guide for Pour-Over Coffee Beginners! Can You Brew Coffee with 100°C Water? What's the Purpose of Flow Restriction in Pour-Over Coffee? Is the Bitterness Really Most Concentrated in the Final Stage?

With its high tolerance for error and excellent flavor performance, pour-over coffee has become one of the top extraction methods following the rise of specialty coffee. At the same time, because the operation is simple and the entry barrier is low, many friends have purchased their own pour-over equipment and started learning how to make pour-over coffee at home.

Honestly, learning pour-over coffee on your own isn't difficult because the internet is so developed nowadays. We can easily find various coffee brewing tutorials online. Whether it's coffee equipment, brewing steps, techniques, parameters, or even various other details, we can obtain relevant knowledge sharing online for free. However, because the content is too complex and often lacks systematic organization, friends frequently fall into cognitive and operational misunderstandings, invisibly adding many obstacles for themselves, making it difficult to brew delicious coffee. So today, FrontStreet Coffee will share some pitfalls that beginners might encounter, so everyone can pay attention and avoid them!

1. Misuse of Parameters

Many friends often have misunderstandings about the use of parameters, such as: "The higher the water temperature used, the better the quality of the beans." The implication of this statement is that only high-quality coffee beans can use relatively extreme parameters, such as brewing with water temperatures of 96°C or 97°C.

Admittedly, high-quality coffee beans are less likely to fail even with extreme parameters, but we need to know that the use of parameters doesn't entirely depend on the coffee beans used, but is mainly determined by our brewing method and extraction parameters. Take water temperature as an example: water temperature is not the only variable affecting extraction. Besides water temperature, there are other factors that affect extraction, such as grind size, time, and stirring method. As long as other parameters are properly matched, then even if we use water temperatures as high as 96°C, 98°C, or even 100°C during brewing, we can still easily brew a delicious pot of coffee.

Conversely, the same principle applies to other parameters. Even if the coffee powder is ground very fine and the extraction time is long, as long as the parameters other than themselves can be reasonably matched with them, then a good cup of coffee can be brewed, regardless of the quality of the brewing object.

2. Habit of Using Water Flow to Wash Down the Coffee Powder Wall

Many friends who are just starting to learn coffee brewing like to do one thing (including FrontStreet Coffee), which is to use water flow to wash down the coffee powder that has attached to the edge of the filter cup during the brewing process. The purpose is simple - to allow this portion of coffee powder to also be fully extracted. Because generally, our water pouring range doesn't include the edges, so the coffee powder that has already built up a powder wall on the edges cannot be reached by hot water.

Although doing this can indeed allow these edge coffee powders to be more fully extracted, when used improperly, it can easily make originally delicious coffee less delicious. Because currently commonly used filter cups have flow guide ribs, and the presence of these ribs can increase the space for coffee powder to release gas while also increasing the water flow channel. If we use hot water to wash down the edge coffee powder when using these filter cups, then the water poured onto the filter cup will directly break through the filter paper and slip away from the edge, forming what's called bypass water.

The appearance of bypass water affects coffee extraction and can easily make existing coffee become bland. Moreover, doing this will also make the powder bed thicker and cause the fine powder originally attached to the edge of the filter cup to be easily washed down to the bottom, resulting in more difficult drainage. Therefore, FrontStreet Coffee does not recommend everyone to use this method unconditionally. Although the coffee powder attached to the edge of the filter cup receives less sufficient extraction than that being stirred, this can actually make the coffee more layered due to differences in extraction rates.

3. Liking High-Position Water Pouring

As everyone knows, the height of water pouring affects the stirring intensity of the water column. The higher the water pouring height, the stronger the stirring force of the water column. Then some friends will use a height higher than normal to pour water for a higher extraction rate.

Although high water level can indeed increase stirring intensity, there are limitations. FrontStreet Coffee has found that many friends increase the water pouring height without limit, and the coffee they brew ends up tasting weaker and having a lower extraction rate than before. The reason why this happens is precisely because the water pouring position is too high! In the gap between the hot water coming out of the kettle spout and contacting the powder bed, its temperature will continuously be absorbed by the surrounding air and lost. The higher our water pouring height, the more the water temperature drops. Therefore, when the water pouring height is too high, the hot water will reduce certain extraction efficiency due to large amounts of temperature absorption. (The Matsuya-style brewing method uses exactly this approach to lower water temperature)

Moreover, if the poured water flow is not large enough, then when the water pouring height is too high, the hot water will be unable to maintain its column shape and instead become intermittent water droplets. Water droplets can hardly stir up the coffee powder, so naturally the extraction efficiency will also significantly decrease. Therefore, FrontStreet Coffee does not recommend everyone to unlimitedly increase the water pouring position. Usually, pouring water at a distance of one fist from the powder bed is actually enough. If it's a little higher, then it's two fists away.

4. Lack of Bulging During Blooming Means Coffee is Not Fresh

Next are two topics that FrontStreet Coffee often shares, because many friends ask about these two topics in the background. Many friends, after buying coffee beans from FrontStreet Coffee's online store, will give feedback to customer service, saying that the coffee powder layer doesn't bulge during blooming, and asking if it's because the beans aren't fresh enough.

Of course not, FrontStreet Coffee ships coffee beans roasted within five days, so there's naturally no freshness issue. Whether the powder bed can bulge into a "hamburger"-like large package during blooming depends not only on the freshness of the coffee beans but is also determined by the parameters during extraction. Because we all know that the bulging during blooming is a phenomenon supported by carbon dioxide. Besides the roasting degree and freshness of coffee beans affecting the carbon dioxide content, whether the parameters are reasonable will also affect the degree of powder bed bulging, because the high and low extraction efficiency determines the emission speed of carbon dioxide.

Still using water temperature as an example, the higher the water temperature, the higher the extraction efficiency, and vice versa. When the water temperature is higher, carbon dioxide will burst out of the coffee beans faster, supporting the "hamburger." If the water temperature isn't that high, then the emission speed of carbon dioxide will be slow. Naturally, the coffee powder bed won't bulge so much in a short time. The same principle applies to the grind degree of coffee powder. So we need to know that the size of the bulge during blooming is not only affected by the freshness and roasting degree of the coffee but also related to the parameters during extraction. If the package bulged by the powder bed during blooming isn't as large as usual, then besides checking the freshness of the coffee beans, we can also check if there have been changes in the extraction parameters.

5. Misunderstanding About When Bitterness Appears

Many friends have certain misunderstandings about when bitterness appears in coffee, believing that the bitterness of coffee is mainly dissolved in the tail section. Therefore, we can often see that friends with these misunderstandings will add some "unique" operations during the brewing process to avoid bitterness, such as flow stopping. By cutting off the coffee liquid in the tail section so it doesn't flow into the cup, the coffee won't have bitterness.

But obviously, this is a misunderstanding. The bitterness of coffee is not only dissolved in the tail section. The main reason why many friends have this misunderstanding comes from misinterpreting the sentence "the tail section is when bitterness substances are largely dissolved" as "bitterness is only dissolved in the tail section." In reality, from the moment water contacts the coffee powder, bitterness has already begun to continuously release outward. It's just that the dissolution speed of bitterness substances is relatively slow, so even when extracting to the tail section, after the sour and sweet substances have dissolved almost completely, bitterness is still continuously dissolving.

If we don't use the right extraction parameters, then even if we use the flow stopping method, there will still be obvious bitterness in the coffee. Because the extraction efficiency is too high, bitterness has already dissolved in large amounts before the flow stopping. So we need to know that bitterness is not only dissolved in the tail section, and the best way to avoid bitterness is not flow stopping, but controlling the extraction parameters well. At the same time, flow stopping is not an operation that can be used arbitrarily. So the above are some "pitfalls" that FrontStreet Coffee has recently collected that people easily encounter when learning pour-over coffee on their own. Everyone can check if they've encountered any of these pitfalls~

Important Notice :

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