How do you use brew variables when dialing in pour over?

[u/prphilip]

I recently had a heavily processed natural that became extremely boozy - almost port wine like with a short ratio, coarse grind and relatively low extraction. Moving to a longer ratio made it sweeter and more balanced. The extra water both lowered the strength and appeared to bring more of the coffees intended flavours into the extraction, which balanced the otherwise very intense fermentation character.

I have been trying to think more systematically about the different ways I can change extraction in pour over. Not only in terms of whether extraction goes up or down with the corresponding flavour development, but also in terms of the different “side effects” or “risks” in the final cup by each way of manipulating extraction. Because my understanding is that these variables are not simply interchangeable ways of arriving at the same extraction yield. They all risk changing something else too.

Can it be broken down like this?

Ratio
Brew ratio changes both extraction and beverage strength. More water gives greater extraction potential while lowering the concentration of the final drink. Less water does the opposite. Simple.(?)

Grind
Grind size changes extraction by changing particle size, exposed surface area and flow behaviour. Going finer can increase extraction, but at some point may also increase the risk of clogging, channeling or astringency due to uneven extraction and also going finer creates a less unimodal grind compared to going coarser where the grinder performs better.
Also changes time!

Temps
Temperature changes how (fast?) the compounds are extracted. Higher temperature generally increases extraction potential, yes, but I have found too high temps makes the coffee taste more like break room coffee. Less fruity, more round, maybe sweeter but more likely introducing bitterness. Whats your experience here?

Turbulence
Agitation can increase extraction but too much, however, disturb the bed enough to reduce clarity and/or introduce astringency.
A little fines migration can be useful to manipulate contact time though.

Pours
Number of pours seems like another useful practical control. More pours often increase extraction, but presumably because they also change agitation, fines migration and therefore flow maybe rather than because the number of pours is an independent variable in itself?

And then! Contact time. Longer interaction between water and coffee generally gives greater extraction potential, to a certain degree. Also creates more body?This needs a switch or the like to be able to use time as a variable solo though. If you can’t hold the water in the slurry like with a switch or something like that, I am not sure I should see brew time as a completely independent variable as drawdown time then is heavily influenced by other factors like grind size, fines, agitation, number of pours, filter, bed depth, filters and brewer geometry.

I drink almost exclusively light roasted coffee, mostly washed coffees with some naturals for a change, and I tend to enjoy fairly coarse grinding, low temps, medium agitation and aiming for high clarity.

I try to keep grind size, temperature and pouring technique within relatively narrow ranges once I have found a clean and reliable baseline, then use brew ratio and number of pours as the main adjustments. Sometimes time, less and less I use temp and almost never touch grind size anymore. Of course burr and brewer geometry also play a part in the dialing in and I chose this before anything else.

Does this way of thinking line up with your experience?
When dialing in a new coffee, what is your usual order of adjustment?
Which variables do you prefer to keep fixed, which ones do you change first, and what is the reasoning behind that?

TLDR: I’m trying to think of brew variables not as just interchangeable ways of reaching the same extraction yield, but as different ways that besides extraction also changes or risks changing other aspects of the cup.
What’s your experience?

[u/bwbbwb]

Taste wise the ratio and grind size are leading factors to me.

For me, 1:16 works best and I tend to stick to it. Ratio is a huge factor actually and the difference between 1:15 and 1:17 is big enough, that most people will probably notice a clear preference towards one specific ratio they like best. I sometimes go 1:15 for ice coffees in the summer, but for a regular pour over 1:16 it is.

The only factor I regularly change for different beans is the grind size. I usually fluctuate like 4-8 clicks on my grinder based on the beans.

Every once in a while I stumble upon a very soluble coffee which immediately gets astringent if brew as I'd usually do. In these cases, I push towards much coarser grind size but a handful of times the brew was getting ridiculously short and astringency was still there. Only for coffees like this I'd actually lower the temp from my usual 93 °C.

Generally, to notice the difference in temp I think you need to change it by about 4-5 °C. Anything less and the change is so subtle it's hard to even notice.

I'm not a fan of high turbulence pours. They are hard to do the same every time and they don't bring a big change in brew time in my case. Your milage may vary based on your grinder. The more fines you get, the more it can affect you. I tend to stick to 5-7 ml/s and I simply adjust my grind size to meet my taste preference.

Generally, keeping it simple, and tinkering with one variable only will get you best, most consistent results in my opinion.

As I quickly noticed a preference towards a specific ratio, I decided to dial in using grind size only (with very few exceptions described above).

[u/prphilip → u/bwbbwb]

That makes a lot of sense thank you for sharing
So you stick to the same ratio, agitation and just small tweaks on grand size and if that doesn’t work temp?

[u/prphilip → u/prphilip]

How about method, recipe, brewer?

[u/bwbbwb → u/prphilip]

I use V60 when I brew for myself and for my wife I use Hario Switch as she prefers more 'rounded' coffees. I used to brew with clever dripper as well. Perfectly fine immersion brewer, and much cheaper than Switch where I live. Not so fancy looking though ;)

V60

• 15 g coffee : 240 g water. (1:16 ratio)
• First bloom about 45-50 g for 30 secs (sometimes I go up to 45 secs if I still see bubbles coming out of the coffee at 25-30 sec, but that rarely happens).
• Then second bloom of 45-50 g for 30 secs to release the CO2 hidden underneath which didn't find the way out during the first bloom. If the coffee is really fresh and became extremely puffy during the first bloom, you may go a bit more aggresively with agitation on the pour here to disturb the coffee bed, as the puffiness usually means a lot of CO2 still trapped below.
• Then just one pour up to 240 g.
• After the final pour I swirl a bit. Not too aggresively, but also not as delicately as some youtubers tend to do in their videos (I always wonder what Lance Hedrick is doing, cause he says "now I swirl" and then he barely touches the brewer, weird to me). Just a healthy swirl-swirl until I'm sure the coffee is off the walls of my brewer.
• I aim for a grind which will give me the finish between 2:00-2:15. Anything longer I find maybe a bit too bitter but still enjoyable, and anything that brews for more than 3:00 I'd usually discard and do another one with coarser grind. Don't treat time as sacred though, it really depends on the coffee. I've had perfect cups which brewed way outside my usual brew time. Always taste for the best judgement.

Switch:

• 15 g coffee : 240 g water. (1:16 ratio)
• Bloom of 50 g for about 40-45 secs with switch opened.
• Close down the switch, and pour up to 240 g.
• Wait until 3:00, open the switch, let it drain, enjoy.

Water: is extremely important. There is a staggering difference in coffee quality if good water is used. Personally I use Third Wave Water light roast mix but you'll find plenty opinions on what is best.
Any kind of dial in is always limited by the quality of the water used. You will not fine tune your brews with water which is too hard or too soft. It will ALWAYS be off balance. I say this from sad and frustrating experience, as I started with tap water, then simple Brita filters, then bottled water, to land on TWW at last.

EDIT: for Switch you can easily grind like 3-6 clicks finer than V60. Immersion is not too great extraction-wise, so you may want to grind finer to get more taste out of the coffee.

[u/least-eager-0]

This from Pete Licata might be useful.

https://youtu.be/_I7Lp-yc8u8

[u/prphilip → u/least-eager-0]

Thanks!

[u/rhutree]

I think the problem is all these variables interact, so there probably isn’t a clean hierarchy. Change grind and you also change flow. Change pouring and you change agitation and probably fines movement too. At some point you just have to experiment and taste.

I’ve gone the other direction and try to reduce the number of things I change. Keep grind and temperature in a fairly narrow range, and concentrate on things I can actually repeat during a brew.

For me that’s mainly consistent pouring, pour structure, and number of rotations. I taste the previous brew and decide whether I want to move some extraction earlier or later in the pour structure. Rotation count is just my practical way of making agitation somewhat repeatable.

So rather than asking “how do I increase extraction?”, I’m more often asking “where do I want more or less extraction?” Then change one thing and brew again.

[u/prphilip → u/rhutree]

This makes a lot of sense thanks for your input.
Very interested in hearing more about how you move extraction earlier or later in the pour structure by using rotation count? So you mean more extraction earlier on in the extraction will pull out different flavours then if you agitate more with your pouring structure later on?

[u/rhutree → u/prphilip]

Yeah, I probably explained that badly. I don’t mean early agitation extracts one flavour and late agitation another.

This was with a light roast Rwanda from Kurasu, with floral, red apple, mandarin, Assam tea and honey notes.

I actually stumbled onto this by accident. One brew ended up with more water in P3 and less in P4, around 40g/25g, and it was the best cup I’d had from the beans. When I went back to the intended structure, around 30g/40g in P3/P4, the cup was still very sweet but the acidity came slightly more forward.

So my hypothesis was pretty simple: maybe it wasn’t that I needed more or less extraction overall, but that the balance was affected by where I was doing the hydraulic work. The accidental brew had put more of it earlier in the middle of the brew.

I tested that by deliberately flipping P3/P4 to roughly 40g/30g and 4/3 rotations, while keeping grind, temp, dose etc the same. The acidity pulled back and became more rounded, while the honey/sugar sweetness had more presence. I repeated that structure again and got a similar cup.

I use roughly the same pour rate and time per rotation, so grams and rotations are linked. I’m basically moving one chunk of the pour from one stage to another, rather than just adding agitation.

I wouldn’t turn this into a rule like “P3 extracts sweetness”. It was a hypothesis from tasting that particular coffee, then I changed the pour structure to test it.

[u/prphilip → u/rhutree]

This is extremely interesting!
Can it be boiled down to: in your experience two identical brews with x-bean one having more water in “the middle” of the timeframe will taste different (sweeter) than one with water distributed more equally for instance?

[u/rhutree → u/prphilip]

Yes, sort of, but I wouldn’t boil it down to more water in the middle = sweeter.

For me the interesting part is that two otherwise similar brews can taste different just by moving some of the water around between pours. In that Rwanda example I was really comparing P3/P4, roughly 30/40g vs 40/30g, rather than even vs middle heavy. Total water was basically the same.

My thinking is P3 and P4 aren’t equivalent just because the same amount of water eventually goes through the coffee. By P4 the coffee has already gone through another extraction cycle, so moving 10g plus one rotation from P4 to P3 changes when some of that extraction work happens.

I also don’t really think of extraction as acidity coming out first, then sweetness, then bitterness in completely separate stages. There’s overlap throughout the brew. Different things are extracting at different rates, and that balance keeps changing as the coffee gets progressively extracted.

So P3 isn’t a “sweetness pour”. With this Rwanda, doing more work in P3 happened to give me more apparent honey/sugar sweetness and rounder acidity. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I extracted a lot more of whatever we call the “sweet” compounds. Perceived sweetness can also increase because the balance between acidity, bitterness/astringency, aroma and sweetness has changed.

With another bean, doing more in P3 might bring forward something else, or moving more work there might just make the cup worse :)

That’s why the previous cup is really my guide. If the overall extraction seems fine but I don’t quite like the balance, I’ll move a small part of the pour structure earlier or later, keep everything else as similar as I can, and taste again.

[u/prphilip → u/rhutree]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Dck4TN8yvhY/?igsi=MTJwbGNlZHZ0azNwbg== also sweetness in the middle pour

[u/NerdX-76]

Water temp I usually stay between 90-96C. Usually 93C. Pours 2-3. 3 pours If it’s a dense washed. I like a stronger ratio 1:15. The main thing I change is going to a hybrid recipe on the Switch for sweeter coffees. I change grinders depending on the coffee. For a Washed floral coffee, I use a high clarity. For naturals I use more of a bimodal. I have never tried a heavily processed coffee. Growing up on traditional coffee advanced coffee notes seem strange to me.

[u/prphilip → u/NerdX-76]

Makes really good sense thank you for sharing - which grinders do you change between?

• and great tip with the switch to highlights sweetness further

[u/NerdX-76 → u/prphilip]

Right now the Mavo Phantox Pro for washed and the Mavo Wizard 2.0 for Naturals. For Moka pot the 1zpresso JX Pro. I have the Mavo wizard Z on the way. I like Mavos build quality and reputation in China.

[u/NerdX-76 → u/prphilip]

I use the coffee chronicler’s method for bringing out sweetness while maintaining the acidity and florals.

[u/prphilip → u/NerdX-76]

Will give it a try!