Hi all,

*See latest post*

Thanks!

Sam

Same grind; no need to change that, it's totally scalable. Pulse pour allows any duration brew time. Heat is the real issue on small pourovers since it's lost much faster rate. Keep water at the boil, IMO.

I'm brewing 14 grams coffee with 225 grams water in the Kalita 225 glass pour-over for the Wife's decaf. I bloom for 30 seconds with home-roasted coffee (currently Ethiopia Coffein Decaf) and aim for a total brew time of around 3:30 or 4:00 minutes. It seems to be working pretty well, but since I'm not drinking it, I'm not always getting a lot of feedback. I should probably take a sample sip.

I pre-heat the Kalita and like to keep the grounds covered to minimize the heat loss. Prior to the Kalita 155, I was doing a half-batch with the same brew recipe in a covered Clever but I like the Kalita better for simplicity.

Your times and ratios are perfect imo. I did v60s almost identical to those parameters for the past year and they were delish.

endlesscycles wrote:Same grind; no need to change that, it's totally scalable. Pulse pour allows any duration brew time. Heat is the real issue on small pourovers since it's lost much faster rate. Keep water at the boil, IMO.

Wouldn't the grind need to change to allow for a slightly longer dwell? Yes, pulse pouring will extend things, but ill be pulsing much more often with too coarse a grind. And yes, I can hit any toe by pulse pouring but if the grind is too coarse, which I feel 1.45 on the Rosco would have been, but there would have been moments where the bed was dry. Maybe I am misunderstanding.

I'm using Forty Weight's Natural Sumatra. I'm still trying to figure it out. It's at 6 days old now (got it at 5 days thanks to Nemo), so it's right where I tend to like coffees the most. It's a spicy peppery cup with interesting fruit notes, but I find the roast flavors seem to hide the fruit a bit. That made me think about lowering the water temp actually to back off some of that roasty addition - I hardly have full city roasts on hand, so I could be misinterpreting the result of lowering water temps slightly as well.

Sam:

Pulse pour is just a way of controlling the delivery rate, when the percolation rate is faster than desired (lower depth of grounds, for example). That's how you control the contact time. Turns out the wetted grounds are dissolving (extracting) when they are wet - even if they aren't being percolated through. Think of it as series of very strong brew ratio immersion brews that the pulses are rinsing through.

If you fix the delivery rate (as in an auto drip brewer), then yes, you would need to find the grind that compensates for the lower bed depth. But in a manual pourover, this isn't relevant, since you control the delivery rate.

In a way, pulse pour and staged brewing are just variants of each other - one is done when there's no mechanism for controlling the contact time.

The bed is never really "dry" per se. If the grounds are wet, then solvation is happening. Solution saturation of coffee solids is very high - in excess of 20% strength, so it's really just the exponential function working on the extraction based on temp, time, and grind size.

On the flip side, if the grind is too fine on a pourover, it may be impossible to achieve an ideal contact time because the percolation rate is actually lower than any delivery rate that results in the correct contact time for the grind (if the process is gravity-driven, of course). Your choices at that point are fairly limited - but you can still do a great pourover. For example, do the first third of the delivery with hot water, then use ~140°F water for the rest (this stretches the extraction curve so that you achieve the desired extraction at a longer time).

Don't want to over think this, as the coffee I make is delicious at 18g/300ml. It's not a question of brew method, as much it is grind/contact time vs. recipe. It would seem that keeping a consistent contact time is important, as the grind then becomes what you adjust. That's my thought.

I've been working on my pour-though time with the Kalita 155. I think I've still got it ground too fine because it takes a while for it to finally all drain, but one of the variables seems to be how much water you have above the ground bed. When I increase the water, I believe that it increases the flow and when I cover the bed with less water then the flow seems to be reduced, as far as I can tell. I've got it over an opaque cup so I can't really see the flow.

I'd prefer to keep the bed covered to maintain temps in the slurry. Is anyone surfing the depth of the water above the coffee bed to change the flow rate beyond just the grind and dose?

My Kalita grind varies from 18-23 depending on the coffee in order to get extraction. I aim for a 3:30 contact time (pour ending at 3min). Nick Cho's videos are fantastic on the Kalita subject. I find that the height of the kettle from the coffee bed increases perc speed, but I keep my pouring identical each time with regards to distance from coffee bed. I can then just get the grind where I want it and produce consistent results.

I've also found that being sure to go all the way out to the edges it helps slow the drawdown. After the wetting/gassy phase in the beginning of the pulse pour, being sure to have an even bed with no clinging grinds makes for a nice drawdown. I've had no issue hitting 3:30 brew times with grinds from #18-23 on my Virtuoso.

The Kalita drains very slowly, so as long as you keep the spout of the kettle as close as possible it allows gravity to do its work. I suppose that would mean that a higher pour leads to water pushing through faster, but can't be sure.