drgary, you have me inspired to take this further. I think I'll go on a home brewing binge for awhile to deal with this. Thanks for addressing my original question about cowboy vs. dripped brews, too.

Speaking of freezing beans at their peak, Perger says that they grind more evenly frozen than they do at room temperature.

You're welcome. Others say you do better to thaw them first, even warm them a bit. I just do what's easy, grinding them right out of the freezer. Whatever route you take there's a point where it gets OCD, and that's not my thing. It can still taste very good to take beans at peak and grind them for a fresh brew.

maigre wrote:
Speaking of freezing beans at their peak, Perger says that they grind more evenly frozen than they do at room temperature.

This is true. Grinding directly from the freezer makes going between coffees of different roast levels easy, even for my B. vario. Loosening the grind is required, compared to the same beans at room temp, probably from the increased fragility of the beans when frozen. Makes sense to me...

Grinding (from frozen) first, THEN warming (if you're so inclined), allows the best consistency of all. But who doesn't like a little temperature surfing from time to time?

If it's primarily bitterness that bothers you, I would recommend trying to extract a little less and see if it goes away. That's assuming it's over extraction, though. Another thing you can try is adding a bit of water to the bitter brew. Sometimes if a coffee is just too strong it will be perceived as bitter. If the bitterness goes away, then it was just too strong, so use a little less ground coffee. If it gets weaker and still tastes bitter, it is over extracted, in which case grinding a little coarser should help.

Modest as my experience may be, I'm well past that point. I get all that and have been working with it for months. The theme of all this is that the introduction of a filter into things is getting me less appealing cups of coffee than cupped brews are too much of the time, both at home and in cafes.

I mentioned a cupping I was at put on by a major third wave roaster a few months ago in which the pourovers they made of one of the coffees we cupped wasn't half as good as the cupped one. At another such event put on by an equivalent roaster of similar renown, we cupped 6 different coffees, all of which I liked quite a bit. I brought some home, a Rwandan, that I was able to make very nice brews out of. There were a couple of other African coffees we cupped that I liked more during the cupping. The grounds of one of them, a Kenyan, had an intoxicating aroma. Just breathing in the scent of the grounds of some coffees are good enough, even if I don't drink them. A V60 of that coffee they brewed on the spot wasn't nearly as appealing as the cupped version.

Of course, these pourover brews were not optimal, otherwise, they'd have tasted better, not just to me, but to others, too. A dialed in pourover is much nicer than a cowboy coffee. That's why I'm trying to figure out how to get there more consistently. My purpose here was that the cowboy coffee more easily and consistently extracts well rounded, sweet, nuanced flavors than most pourovers do. That's what I'm exploring. Not just pure technique, but what does the filter do in this regard, what does the nature of the two processes do, etc.?

One observation based on making a bunch of cups testing things out this morning - something you'll all know better than I did. If I pour off the dripped bloom water and taste it, it's sour and salty and one might expect from coffee so underextracted. This got me to thinking more about how a pourover brew is an amalgamation of drippings of coffee at different stages of extraction. That bloom water is very underextracted. The drippings after the pour is finished, but water remains in the dripper are much more extracted. So the overall brew is a mixture of coffee at different ranges of the extraction process. To get a good brew, the products of these stages all have to play nice together. I've never loved immersions as much as I do a good pourover, but an immersion, which a cupped brew is, benefits from all the grounds extracting more similarly to each other over time than a pourover does. It strikes me that finding a way to get the pourover to behave closer to that is a good thing. I may be very wrong about this, though.

maigre wrote:The theme of all this is that the introduction of a filter into things is getting me less appealing cups of coffee than cupped brews are too much of the time, both at home and in cafes.

I'm curious, have you tried filtering an immersion type brew like described in 2015 US Brewers Cup Championship recipe?

Thanks so much for this, Joe! I was trying to use my V60 as sort of an immersion brewer yesterday on one of my brews, but I set it up wrong and it didn't work. I had a couple of other ideas along these lines that I haven't gotten to. So this is particularly timely.

...30 minutes later... I brewed a cup of a Yirgacheffe I have following Anderson's approach. The results were good. Great creamy body, nice acidity, some stone fruit, adequate sweetness. I don't love this coffee, but I like it. And I feel like it's a solid extraction. The flavors are clear, there are no signs of underextraction or overextraction.

This is very informative for me. For one thing, the filter itself isn't the cause of my issues (even if it might not be for most other people's palates). Good to know that. At least if I get a pourover brew, whether at home or at a cafe, and I'm getting the negatives I'm complaining about, and the coffee and water are fine, I can figure it's probably the brew.

This is a technique that I'll continue to use, both for enjoying a cup of coffee and as a method to establish a baseline for coffees I'm still trying to brew well with pourover techniques. I'll take all of your thoughts into account and will explore refining my own technique to get things more consistently where I want them.

If you like the results you should also give the "Aeropress long brew" a go. In my experience the results are similar while the Aeropress method is a bit less of a hassle.

See for details.

I tried it earlier today, Joe. I liked the result, though I liked the Brewers Cup method you posted a little more. I got a little better body and more well rounded flavors out of that one. I'll play around with this, though. Worth having.