Good pour over comes down to four numbers and one habit: a coffee-to-water ratio, a water temperature, a bloom, and a steady pour. Get those roughly right and almost any fresh single origin will taste bright, sweet and clean — the way the roaster meant it to.
Here is the short version. Weigh your coffee and water. Use about 60 g of coffee per litre of water — that is close to a 1:17 ratio and a safe starting point for a cone dripper.
Grind medium, wet the grounds with twice their weight in water to bloom for 30–45 seconds, then pour the rest in slow spirals so the whole brew finishes in three to four minutes. Everything below is just detail on those steps.
Start with the ratio and a scale
The single biggest upgrade to home coffee is a kitchen scale. Volume scoops lie; weight does not.
Most brewers land somewhere in the 1:15 to 1:18 band — grams of water per gram of coffee. The SCA's Golden Cup benchmark is 55 g of coffee per litre, roughly 1:18; many roasters suggest starting nearer 1:17 for a cone like a V60 or a flat-bottom Kalita Wave.
A reliable first recipe:
- 20 g coffee
- 340 g water (that's 1:17)
- Medium grind, about the texture of table salt
If you like a stronger, rounder cup, move toward 1:15. For a lighter, more tea-like cup, go to 1:18.
Change one variable at a time so you can taste what each move does. The brew calculator will scale these numbers to any dose or cup size for you.
Get the water temperature right
Water should hit the coffee at around 93°C (200°F), within a 195–205°F window. Too cool and you pull out sour, underdeveloped flavours; too hot and you drag out bitterness.
No thermometer? Bring the kettle to a boil, take it off the heat, and wait 20 to 30 seconds before you pour. That's close enough.
Roast level shifts the target. Light roasts are dense and need heat to give up their flavour — brew them hot, near the top of the range.
Medium roasts are happy a touch cooler, and dark roasts, which are already soluble and prone to bitterness, do best lower still. Since most specialty single origins on this site are light roasts, err hot.
Rinse the paper and bloom the coffee
Before you add any coffee, pour hot water through the empty paper filter. This does two jobs: it washes away the papery taste and it preheats your dripper and mug so the brew doesn't cool on contact. Tip that rinse water out.
Now add your grounds, level the bed, and start with the bloom — the most important 30 seconds in the whole process. Pour about twice the coffee's weight in water (40 g for a 20 g dose) just to wet everything, and wait.
Fresh coffee is full of trapped carbon dioxide. When hot water hits it, that gas off-gasses fast, bubbling up and physically pushing water away from the grounds.
If you skip the bloom, the CO₂ blocks even contact and you get a hollow, patchy extraction — sour in some spots, weak in others. Letting it degas for 30 to 45 seconds clears the way so the main pours reach every particle evenly. Very fresh, light-roasted coffee blooms more vigorously and may want the longer end.
Pour slowly, then read the cup
Once the bloom settles, pour the rest of your water in stages. Start in the centre and move outward in a slow, steady spiral, then back to the middle.
Keep the stream low — about 5 to 10 cm above the coffee bed — and avoid pouring straight onto the filter walls, which lets water bypass the grounds. Aim for the whole brew, bloom included, to finish draining in three to four minutes.
That timing is a proxy for extraction. Roughly 30% of roasted coffee will dissolve in water, but the sweet spot most people enjoy is 18 to 22%.
Land under that and the cup tastes sour and vegetal; push past it and it turns bitter and drying. Your palate is the real gauge:
- Sour, sharp, thin — under-extracted. The fix is almost always grind: go finer.
- Bitter, harsh, hollow — over-extracted. Go coarser, or drop the temperature slightly.
Grind is the first thing to adjust when a cup tastes off, because grind size has the largest single effect on flavour. Only after you've dialled grind should you touch ratio, temperature or pour speed.
What to brew first
Pour over is a microscope — it rewards clean, aromatic coffee and exposes anything dull. A washed light roast from Ethiopia is the classic starting point: floral, citrusy and forgiving of small mistakes. This one is inexpensive enough to practise with and delicious enough to keep buying.
If you want something with more punch and structure to test your technique against, a washed Kenya delivers bold blackcurrant and a firm acidity that makes extraction errors obvious.
Start with the 1:17 recipe, brew the same coffee three days in a row, and change only the grind. Once the cup tastes sweet and balanced, you've dialled it in. From there, explore the flavours you like and let the calculator handle the maths.
