While at the Drumroaster Coffee Roastery with my dear wife, Andrea – and affable host Geir Oglend – partner and coffee Übermensch – we brewed stunning cups of Ethiopia Sidamo coffee with the Hario V60.
No visit is complete without cups of great coffee, stimulating conversation… and coming away with a bag of coffee and a pile of information that I did not have before.
Today was no different.
Geir brewed a Hario V60 drip pot of Ethiopia Sidamo with the Hario V60 dripper and Hario kettle (photo below).
Here is the deal:
To really excel at drip coffee (and it is, in my mind one of the most superior methods of brewing an individual cup.):
-You need a precise amount of carefully ground coffee
-A supply of hot water just off the boil in a suitable container (not all kettles are created equally…)
-A suitable filter holder (like the Hario 60 above)
-A timer, maybe a scale and one steady hand.
Weigh out the dose. A digital scale is very important here – and no home kitchen should go without one. A 60 grams (coffee) per liter (water) is more or less ideal. A 12 ounce serving (medium sized mug) is about .35L – or around 23-25G of whole beans. Select your grind that yields a total brew time of around 3 minutes – 3 minutes and 15 seconds tops. Like any other gravity brewer or filter holder (like the Melitta #4) the V60 is not flow restricted… so your instincts are critical!
I Preheat all components and rinse the paper filter with about 100ml of hot water. Does it make a difference? Don’t know. But it doesn’t hurt.
Water should be just off the boil. Boil your water and count to 10. You should be in the ball park.
0 to 30 seconds: Add the ground coffee to the cone. Use your index finger tip to make a small indentation into the middle of the ground coffee. Start your timer (at ZERO) and pour in just enough water to saturate the bed of ground coffee (about 15 seconds worth of pouring). Pour in increasingly concentric rings. Avoid the sidewall of the filter. A Hario kettle (see photo) really makes the difference in precise control of the water.
30 seconds to 1 minute: Watch and wait as the water saturates the ground coffee – there may or may not be any coffee dripping at this point.
1 minute to 1 minute 30 seconds: Begin pouring again, in concentric circles out from the middle until the cone is nearly full. Coffee is dripping into your mug.
1 minute 30 to 2 minute mark: Repeat the water delivery to just keep the filter cone topped up.. Good stream of coffee brewing into the cup now.
2 minutes to 3 minutes: By now you have used up your water quota and you are watching the latter stages of the brew cycle. Do not wait for the last drips as you approach 3 minutes as the coffee will be approaching over extraction.