Journal · Brewing
A Patient Guide to Pour-Over at Home
The pour-over is the brew method we reach for most often in the roastery — not because it's fancy, but because it asks you to slow down, and it pays you back for it. This is the exact recipe we use at the cupping table and behind the bar on SE Ankeny, written down the way I'd explain it to a friend standing in my kitchen.
Why bother with a pour-over?
A drip machine makes coffee. A pour-over makes a cup of this coffee. Because you control the water temperature, the pour rate, and the timing yourself, you taste the difference between a washed Ethiopia and a natural Colombia in a way that's harder to notice otherwise. For light-to-medium roasts like the ones we love to roast — coffees with stone fruit, florals, and citrus — that clarity is the whole point.
The other reason is quieter: ten unhurried minutes in the morning is not a bad way to start a day. Once the recipe is in your hands, it becomes a small ritual that doesn't require thought, just attention.
What you'll need
You don't need a suitcase of gear. Four things matter, in order of importance:
- A burr grinder. Fresh, even grounds matter more than any other variable. We use a Baratza Encore at home and a Fellow Ode at the bar, but any consistent burr grinder will do. Blade grinders chop unevenly and will fight you the whole way.
- A scale. Eyeballing coffee and water is how you get a different cup every morning. A cheap digital scale that reads to 0.1 grams (we like the Timemore Black Mirror, about $60) removes the guesswork.
- A gooseneck kettle. The narrow spout lets you pour slowly and aim precisely. A Hario Buono or a Fellow Stagg both work; the kettle matters less than your ability to pour a thin, steady stream.
- A Hario V60 02 dripper and size-02 paper filters. The 02 size is the sweet spot for one generous mug or two small cups. Rinse the paper filter with hot water before you brew — it washes out the papery taste and preheats the dripper at the same time.
The recipe
Everything below assumes one brewer's worth of coffee — a big mug for one person, or a small carafe to split. If you take nothing else from this article, take the table:
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Coffee | 22 g (medium-fine grind, like table salt) |
| Water | 350 g total (about a 1:16 ratio) |
| Water temperature | 93°C / 200°F (30 seconds off the boil) |
| Bloom | 50 g water, 45 seconds |
| Pours | 3 pours after the bloom |
| Total brew time | 3:00–3:30 |
Grind size is the knob you'll turn most often. Start at "table salt" and adjust from there: if the brew finishes much faster than three minutes, grind finer; if it stalls past 3:45, grind coarser. Temperature deserves its own essay — if you're curious why we land on 93°C for light roasts, we wrote a whole piece about it.
Step by step
1. Set up and rinse (0:00)
Fold the paper filter's seam, seat it in the dripper, and rinse it thoroughly with hot water straight into your mug or carafe. Discard the rinse water. Grind 22 grams of coffee, add it to the filter, and give the dripper a gentle shake to level the bed. Tare your scale to zero. This is the fussiest part of the whole process, and it takes forty seconds.
2. Bloom — 50 g of water, 45 seconds
Start your timer and pour 50 grams of water over the grounds, working from the center outward in slow spirals, making sure every part of the bed gets wet. Then wait. Fresh coffee releases carbon dioxide when it meets hot water, and you'll see the bed swell and bubble — roasters call this the bloom, and it's the surest sign your beans are fresh. If the coffee was roasted more than five or six weeks ago, the bloom will be modest; if it was roasted last Tuesday (as ours usually is), it will dome up like bread dough.
3. First pour — up to 150 g (0:45–1:15)
At 0:45, pour another 100 grams, again in slow concentric circles. Keep the stream pencil-thin and stay off the paper filter itself — pouring directly onto the paper sends water racing down the sides without touching any coffee. Aim for the coffee bed, about a centimeter in from the edge. When the scale reads 150, stop and let the water level drop a little.
4. Second pour — up to 250 g (1:15–1:45)
Same motion, another 100 grams. By now the slurry should look glossy and even, with no dry pockets. If you see a crater forming in the middle, give the dripper one gentle swirl — a light hand, not a whirlpool — to level things out.
5. Final pour — up to 350 g (1:45–2:15)
Pour the last 100 grams and let it draw down. The total time from first pour to the last drip should land between 3:00 and 3:30. When the dripping slows to an occasional drop, you're done. The spent bed should look flat or gently domed — a good sign the water moved through evenly.
"Pour-over doesn't reward speed or strength. It rewards showing up calmly, three pours in a row."
When something tastes off
Every bad cup is telling you something specific. Here are the three complaints we hear most at the bar, and what to change:
"It's bitter and harsh."
Over-extraction — the water spent too long with the coffee, or pulled too much out of it. Grind a notch coarser, or lower your water temperature by a couple of degrees. Also check your pour: if you're agitating the bed hard with a heavy stream, you're extracting more than you intend. Bitterness that lingers at the back of the tongue is almost always a grind or temperature problem, not a bean problem.
"It's sour and thin."
Under-extraction, the opposite problem. The brew finished too fast — say, 2:20 — and the water only picked up the bright acids before leaving. Grind finer to slow the drawdown, or pour a touch slower. If your kettle water cooled while you were rinsing filters, that can do it too; keep it hot.
"It's weak, like tea."
Usually one of two things. Either the ratio drifted (a heaped scoop instead of 22 weighed grams, or too much water), or you're seeing channeling — water finding a crack or low spot in the coffee bed and gushing through it, leaving most of the grounds barely touched. Channeling shows up as a lopsided spent bed with a hole or deep crater in it. The fixes: level the bed before the bloom, pour gently so you don't blast a trench into the middle, and make sure your grind is even — a worn-out grinder full of boulders and dust is a channeling machine.
What it tastes like, done right
To make this concrete: this week at the roastery we've been brewing our Ethiopia Guji with exactly this recipe. It's a washed lot from smallholder farms around the Shakiso district, grown at about 2,000 meters, and it forgives nothing and rewards everything. Brewed at 22 to 350 at 93°C, it opens with apricot and bergamot, settles into a honeyed sweetness as it cools, and finishes with a black-tea cleanliness that makes you want another sip before you've put the mug down. Brewed carelessly — too coarse, too cool — it turns lemony and hollow, which is a shameful way to treat a coffee that traveled that far.
That's the real argument for learning one recipe well: a good coffee has a narrow window where it tastes like the place it came from, and the recipe is how you hold the window open.
A few last things
- Buy whole beans, grind right before brewing, and use them within three to four weeks of the roast date printed on the bag.
- Filtered water genuinely matters in Portland — our tap water is soft and lovely, but if yours is heavily chlorinated or very hard, a simple carbon filter pitcher helps more than any gadget.
- Change one variable at a time. If you adjust the grind, the temperature, and the ratio all at once, you'll never know what fixed the cup.
- Write down what you did. A note on your phone — "22/350, 3:12, a little sour, grind finer tomorrow" — is the fastest coffee education there is.
If you'd like to try this recipe with the Guji mentioned above, it's on our coffees page while the lot lasts — $19 for a 12 oz bag, roasted every Tuesday. And if the "93°C" in the table made you curious, our companion piece Why Water Temperature Matters More Than You Think digs into what heat actually does to extraction. Questions are always welcome — come by the café on a Saturday morning and I'll brew it with you.