Dear Fellow Forum Members,

I have been a lurker on HB for many, many years. Thank you for all the wonderful posts; I've learned so much!

A bit of background: I have home roasted coffee for 10 years. Out of those 10 years, 9 years were spent brewing siphons as my main brewing method. Last year, I got a #2 Hario v60, a Hario range server, Hario white paper filters, and a Hario Buono kettle.

The problem: I cannot get a nuanced cup out of the v60. The cups usually have just one top note of brightness. Lacking are sugar browning notes, distillates, and sweetness.

Any and all help in optimizing the v60 routine is greatly appreciated!

Thank you in advance!

Brew Parameters:

60g coffee : 1,000ml water --> I use 24g of coffee for 400 ml of water.
Water: straight off the boil into the buono. No re-heating.
Coffee: Roasted on a hottop b-2k to no darker than city+/full city. Coffee rarely older than 10 days post-roast. I usually roast high-altitude wet processed beans (kenya, ethiopia, guatemala, colombia, burundi, rwanda, etc.).
Grind: Oscillates between a 14-15 on a Baratza Maestro.

Brew Method:

Derived from this method (which works really, really well for a 200ml single cup serving): https://vimeo.com/groups/45470/videos/46612013

1) Rinse/pre-heat v60 and range server with off-the-boil water.
2) Assemble the rig on a kitchen scale, add coffee, and tare.
3) Pour boiling hot water into the buono kettle.
4) Add 100ml of water, stir vigorously, and let pre-infuse for 30sec.
5) Add another 100ml.
6) Gently shake v60 to ensure even coffee bed.
7) Add 200ml of water.
8 ) Gently shake v60 to ensure even coffee bed.
9) Let the water draw down.
10) Total brew time is usually 2min 30 sec +/- 2 seconds.

Hi,

in my experience, what the V60 needs in order to get a balanced cup is some aid in even extraction. All this shaking and stirring might help in increasing extraction rate, but it does not necessarily promote evenness of the extraction.

What the V60 is is a filter where the paper is spaced from the walls quite well (compare to e.g. Chemex, where the wet paper sticks to the walls), and with a bit of free hanging filter in the bottom. If we fill the empty paper with water, what happens is that the water penetrates the filter evenly at the walls, with faster through-paper-flowrate the deeper we go (assume we keep it filled). At the very bottom the filter is free-hanging, i.e. least restriction AND the pressure is greatest, so here we have the largest flowrate.

Now if we distribute our coffee-bed according to this scheme, we see that we need a "puck" in the bottom cone, to about a cm above where the freehanging stops. Then we need to coat the walls evenly with grounds, the "bed"s thickness decreasing with height. So we want an "inverted cone" that's solid at the bottom, hollow from about ~¼ upwards, with decreasing wall thickness.

To get this, especially with fresh coffee, i find it easiest to dimple the middle of the dry coffee bed, then preinfusing with as little water as possible to wet all grounds - for my usual ~18-22g grounds for ~300ml of total water, this would be ~20-30g for preinfusion depending on the coffee. For preinfusion your stream may touch the walls.

Then when ~15-35sec preinfusion is finished, pour in the center, and pour with a steady, thick stream and lots of rate (i.e., from higher up), while going in a circular motion. This lets a part of the grounds float on the water and ride outwards towards the rim, "folding" them outside against the wall. Your even bed with a puck in the middle/bottom and even coating (hopefully!) of the walls is constructed!

Now pay attantion not to destroy this. Pour only in the center ~½-1cm diameter circle, slowly going rounds and rounds with a stream that's thin, but steady, i.e. no drops which mean turbulent flow and disturbing/moving around grounds.

While the seems a lot, and lots of voodoo, the increased evenness of extraction benefits balanced brews a lot, and actually doing it is just an additional fine-motor-skill training, not requiring any additional time or other effort .

Also, reading that you already brew on a scale, how about adding a thermometer to your setup? It'd eliminate another variable that can lead to greatly unbalanced brews ... and with the v60 not beeing a vacpot that has a kind-of-set thermal profile, it's good to know...


Best Regards,
-Dario

If you are pouring off the boil water into the Buono, you may suffer some heat loss. For me, it's usually 90C INSIDE the Buono.

You can add this to your routine :

1) Pre-heat the Buono with fresh boiling water, ~ 300mL.
2) Bring fresh water to boil ~1.2L (or less, depending on your kettle). The idea is to get the Buono almost full to protect against heat loss.
3) Once the water has boiled, dump the water in the Buono (it should feel kinda toasty on the exterior), and dump the fresh boiled water in immediately.
4) This should give you ~95C or 96C if you are lucky. Start pouring immediately.

HTH.

Your brew method is fine/great. The V60 white papers are excellent and the percolation brew should easily make great extractions. What you say you want is more extraction so you should grind finer.

Also, it's possible your brew temp isn't what you think it is if you are using a ceramic brewer. I only suggest the plastic v60's for their low thermal mass and superior heat retention. A ceramic V60 would have to sit in boiling water for a few minutes to fully preheat; the prerinse does next to nothing. The plastic brewers are cheap, so there's no reason not to have several.

Hi Dario,

Thank you for your reply!

I believe you're referring to a brewing method very similar to this one, right? --> https://vimeo.com/11537624

I've heard many good things about the method you describe. It scored quite well on the Prima coffee comparison done a few years back (see the Tonx Intellivenice entry here: https://prima-coffee.com/blog/v60-brewmethod-review).

What made me turn to Matt Perger's method is that his method does not require one to "ride" the bloom. For some reason, none of my coffees generate big, mushroomy blooms. Perhaps I'm not developing my roasts long enough (usual dev time is between 1:45-2:00min)?

Because my blooms 'deflate,' I have a hard time getting an even coating of coffee grounds on the filter sides.

NebuK wrote:Hi,

in my experience, what the V60 needs in order to get a balanced cup is some aid in even extraction. All this shaking and stirring might help in increasing extraction rate, but it does not necessarily promote evenness of the extraction.

What the V60 is is a filter where the paper is spaced from the walls quite well (compare to e.g. Chemex, where the wet paper sticks to the walls), and with a bit of free hanging filter in the bottom. If we fill the empty paper with water, what happens is that the water penetrates the filter evenly at the walls, with faster through-paper-flowrate the deeper we go (assume we keep it filled). At the very bottom the filter is free-hanging, i.e. least restriction AND the pressure is greatest, so here we have the largest flowrate.

Now if we distribute our coffee-bed according to this scheme, we see that we need a "puck" in the bottom cone, to about a cm above where the freehanging stops. Then we need to coat the walls evenly with grounds, the "bed"s thickness decreasing with height. So we want an "inverted cone" that's solid at the bottom, hollow from about ~¼ upwards, with decreasing wall thickness.

To get this, especially with fresh coffee, i find it easiest to dimple the middle of the dry coffee bed, then preinfusing with as little water as possible to wet all grounds - for my usual ~18-22g grounds for ~300ml of total water, this would be ~20-30g for preinfusion depending on the coffee. For preinfusion your stream may touch the walls.

Then when ~15-35sec preinfusion is finished, pour in the center, and pour with a steady, thick stream and lots of rate (i.e., from higher up), while going in a circular motion. This lets a part of the grounds float on the water and ride outwards towards the rim, "folding" them outside against the wall. Your even bed with a puck in the middle/bottom and even coating (hopefully!) of the walls is constructed!

Now pay attantion not to destroy this. Pour only in the center ~½-1cm diameter circle, slowly going rounds and rounds with a stream that's thin, but steady, i.e. no drops which mean turbulent flow and disturbing/moving around grounds.

While the seems a lot, and lots of voodoo, the increased evenness of extraction benefits balanced brews a lot, and actually doing it is just an additional fine-motor-skill training, not requiring any additional time or other effort .

Also, reading that you already brew on a scale, how about adding a thermometer to your setup? It'd eliminate another variable that can lead to greatly unbalanced brews ... and with the v60 not beeing a vacpot that has a kind-of-set thermal profile, it's good to know...


Best Regards,
-Dario

Hi Lin,

You're right, I was losing quite a bit of heat to the buono.

I pre-heated it w/300ml of boiling water this morning and the resulting brew was better.

dilin wrote:If you are pouring off the boil water into the Buono, you may suffer some heat loss. For me, it's usually 90C INSIDE the Buono.

You can add this to your routine :

1) Pre-heat the Buono with fresh boiling water, ~ 300mL.
2) Bring fresh water to boil ~1.2L (or less, depending on your kettle). The idea is to get the Buono almost full to protect against heat loss.
3) Once the water has boiled, dump the water in the Buono (it should feel kinda toasty on the exterior), and dump the fresh boiled water in immediately.
4) This should give you ~95C or 96C if you are lucky. Start pouring immediately.

HTH.

Hi Marshal,

You're right; I do have a ceramic v60. I'll pickup a plastic one when I order something else from Amazon. The ceramic takes quite a bit of water to pre-heat.

Grinding finer does increase TDS, but I can't say that the resulting cup is any more nuanced. Instead, the brew traverses into over-extraction.

endlesscycles wrote:Your brew method is fine/great. The V60 white papers are excellent and the percolation brew should easily make great extractions. What you say you want is more extraction so you should grind finer.

Also, it's possible your brew temp isn't what you think it is if you are using a ceramic brewer. I only suggest the plastic v60's for their low thermal mass and superior heat retention. A ceramic V60 would have to sit in boiling water for a few minutes to fully preheat; the prerinse does next to nothing. The plastic brewers are cheap, so there's no reason not to have several.

The best thing I ever did for my all my manual brewing using the buono was to get a little portable induction hot plate.

Depending how much water is in the kettle its 2 to 3 mins to a raging boil.

The best thing I ever did for my manual brewing was start using brewing water that approximates the SCAA's water quality standard. We have higher priorities around the house than investing in a $10k water treatment system. So that means using bottled water or similar rather than tap or filtered tap water.

For example, I can find Gerber Pure purified water most anywhere I do. Nestle's Pure Life is also a reasonable alternative. Global Customized Water's "formula" probably get you closest to SCAA standards without a treatment system, but the costs are high as you need to mix these packets with RO or distilled water. (It's a great solution for travel, though, as the packets are very small, and you can find distilled water most anyplace.)

You can "test" your water quality at home quite easily. Just go by CVS and buy a gallon of Gerber Pure purified water. Then brew identical cups at home using Gerber Pure for one cup and your regular brew water for the other. While our filtered drinking water tastes great, the coffee that it brews is pretty rough by comparison to coffee brewed with Gerber Pure.

While the specs on the Gerber Pure water aren't a direct match with the SCAA standard, I don't notice a big difference between coffee brewed with Gerber Pure vs. Global Customized Water's formula. The latter is basically designed to the SCAA standard.

Hi James,

Are you referring to something like this? --> http://www.amazon.com/1800-Watt-Portabl ... 0045QEPYM/

Do you have any concerns about the welds holding the handle to the Buono coming loose?

OldmatefromOZ wrote:The best thing I ever did for my all my manual brewing using the buono was to get a little portable induction hot plate.

Depending how much water is in the kettle its 2 to 3 mins to a raging boil.