Pour Over
Making pour over coffee
At Lou’s we love pour over, it is our go-to favorite way to make and taste coffee.
First the Coffee, for pour over we use 15 gm of coffee per 250 gm of water. You can adjust for stronger or weaker as it suits you. Everyone tastes things a little bit differently.
For this recipe we’ll make 500 gm, 2 standard cups of coffee.
What you’ll need
Coffee - 30 grams of your favorite Lou’s whole bean coffee.
Scale – a digital scale works best for us, one that you can tare to 0 weight (most of them do this).
Grinder – we prefer burr grinders for their consistency of grind but as Stephen Stills says: “if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with”.
Pour over brewer with matching filter – Hario, Melita, Chemex, and so on type. We’re agnostic on this providing it’s got a cone shape and permits the water to be adequately “Time On Grain” for optimal extraction.
Carafe or container - to brew into. Could be a mug, pitcher, coffee carafe or in the case of the Chemex this is self-contained. While it may seem obvious, make sure the container will hold more volume than what you’re expecting to brew.
Kettle – Perfect world is a variable temperature control kettle with a hold-temp function to maintain water temperature off-boil at 90.5 C to 96 C. We enjoy the output of a 96 C pour with our lighter roasts and stick around 90.5 C with our darker roasts.
Water. Clean drinking water. Water tastes different form place to place all over the world and will affect the taste of what you’re brewing. How aware of that you’ll be depends on your individual taste sensitivity. Filtered or non-filtered, guide yourself accordingly.
Now it’s time to Brew
- Bring the water up to temperature.
- Put the filter in the brewer and rinse it. This step serves to get rid of extra paper flavor and helps to remove residual chemicals from paper treatment process. If you’re using a metal filter this step is moot as long as it’s clean. We prefer the paper filter when doing pour over.
- Put the brewer on the carafe/container and set them on the scale.
- Weigh and grind the coffee. The coarseness of which should be something similar to brown sugar, call it a medium grind.
- Put the coffee in the filter so that it is level across the top of the bed, zero out the scale.
- Add water, about 100 gm to saturate the coffee. It will bloom. The bloom is the release of CO2 contained in the beans. Wait 30 to 45 seconds.
- Slowly pour the remaining water in about 3 more similar cycles of 45 to 60 seconds each. Between pours you may want to stir or swirl the water so that the water extracts down through the coffee evenly leaving a flat level surface of extracted coffee grounds once complete.
- Serve and enjoy. Wait anywhere from 4 to 7 minutes before sipping. Explore around this part and notice the difference in the way the coffee tastes at different temperature levels. It’s really quite fascinating.