Brewing
How to brew coffee at home
There is no single right way to make coffee. There's only the cup you like. Once you know what that is, everything else follows from it.
Pour-over at home has a lot of variables, but all of them come back to one question: how do you like your cup of coffee?
Do you like it bold? Smooth? Very clean and crisp? Do you mind a little sediment at the bottom of the cup, or would you rather it were completely clean? Those answers are the guide. The same beans brewed by different methods will give you a genuinely different experience, and narrowing down which one you're after is something each person has to do for themselves.
The short version
Each step is explained properly underneath.
Start here: what sort of cup do you want?
You want a paper filter doing the work, and you're willing to be involved in the brew.
→ V60 or ChemexImmersion brewing, coarser grind, very little technique required.
→ French pressShort brew time and hard to get badly wrong.
→ AeroPressThe finest grind of all, and the least room for error.
→ Espresso machineThen match everything else to it
| Method | Grind | Water temp | Brew time | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| V60 | Mid-fine | 88–94 °C | ~3.5 min | Clean and crisp, clear in the cup |
| Chemex | Medium-coarse | 90–94 °C | 4–5 min | Very clean, lighter body |
| AeroPress | Fine to medium | 80–90 °C | 2-3 min | Smooth, concentrated, forgiving |
| French press | Coarsest | 92–94 °C | 4 min | Bold and full-bodied, some sediment |
| Auto-drip | Medium | Set by the machine | ~5 min | Consistent and hands-off |
| Espresso | Finest | 90–94 °C | 25–30 sec | Intense and concentrated |
The four that matter most
| What to do | Why | |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Fresh beans | Buy specialty beans and check the roast date, not the best-before | Coffee starts losing aroma and body from the moment it's roasted |
| 2. Grind | Match the grind to your method. Espresso is finest, French press coarsest | The wrong grind will under- or over-extract whatever you do next |
| 3. Water | Filtered, and never boiling. Let it sit a minute or two off the boil | Heavy water dulls the cup; boiling water burns the coffee |
| 4. The pour | Bloom first, then pour slowly and keep the water moving | Even saturation and turbulence mean every ground extracts equally |
Pick your beans
Start with the roast profile, because it does more to shape the cup than anything else you'll choose.
Higher natural acidity and a citrusy edge, with much more fruit character. Smooth and gentle rather than bold.
Balanced. The acidity and the bitterness are both kept in check, which gives you what we call a round cup.
Dark caramel notes and a higher perceived sweetness. The acidity almost disappears entirely.
If you want to go further than roast level
There's another layer below roast profile, and it happens at the farm rather than the roastery: how the coffee was processed after picking. The most common method is washed and then sun-dried. Beyond that there's honey process and natural process, and then the more manipulated ones. Anaerobic fermentation, cultured ferments, all sorts of experiments.
In a lot of cases they deliver something remarkable, drawing out nuances you would never get from the bean otherwise. It's worth exploring once you know which roast level you like.
Coffee doesn't go bad. But from the moment it's roasted, it starts losing freshness.Why the roast date matters more than the best-before date
Because the expiry date on a bag is usually about a year out, people assume the coffee is fine until then. It is fine. It isn't going off. But the aroma, the body, the fragrance, the structure, the aftertaste all fade, and those are the things that make coffee an experience rather than a hot drink. Look for the roast date, and buy the freshest you can find.
Ours is printed on every bag
We roast in Oakville every weekday, so the coffee on our shelves was roasted in the last one to five days, and online orders are roasted the weekday before they ship. Whichever roast profile turns out to be yours, you can check the date before you buy it.
Shop coffeePick your brewing method
Your method decides three things at once: the grind size you need, the water temperature you should aim for, and how much of the result is down to you.
There's the V60, the Chemex, the French press, the AeroPress, auto-drip machines and espresso machines.
Pour-over is the method that involves the most from the person making it. It takes more knowledge and more precision, because the outcome is entirely in your hands. You have to understand your beans and what you intend to do with them.
How the V60 works
The V60 is the most popular pour-over at home. The cone is a V at sixty degrees, which is where the name comes from, and it holds a paper filter. Filters vary by material, but what really separates one cone from another is the size of the pores, and that's what determines the grind you need.
For the V60, we're looking for a mid-fine grind.
Match your grind to your method
If you can have a grinder at home, do. It lets you dial in precisely to the filter you're using, and you grind only what you're about to drink.
If you don't have one, that's fine. We'll grind for you. Just tell us what cone you're using and which brand, and which paper filter. Hario is a very popular one and we know it well, so we already know how your beans should be ground for it.
If we grind it for you, buy smaller amounts
Once coffee is ground, that loss of freshness speeds up considerably. So don't take home a big stock of it and store it. Buy what you'll get through, and come back.
This is honestly one of the biggest reasons coffee tastes better in a café than at home. In the shop it's freshly roasted, freshly ground and freshly brewed, all three. At home, most people only manage the third.
Water: quality first, then temperature
Quality
Tap water in southern Ontario is a little heavy. Use filtered water, or boil it first, let it cool, then reheat to the temperature you want. Bottled water works perfectly well. What you're after is water that's clear and essentially tasteless, and lighter than what comes out of the tap.
If you want to go further, some people add specific minerals to the water and build it deliberately. That's a rabbit hole, and a rewarding one.
Temperature
Never use boiling water. It will burn the coffee during brewing. If you don't have a kettle with temperature control, bring it to the boil and then let it sit for a minute or two so you know it has dropped off the boil.
If you do want to be precise, useful temperatures run from about 86 °C up to about 94 °C, depending on the roast profile you're brewing.
And if you want to go further still: altitude changes the boiling point of water, so it changes what any given temperature is doing. At sea level 88 °C might be right for you. At two thousand metres, 92 or 93 °C may work better.
The pour
How fast you pour the water onto the grounds matters as much as anything above it. You have to let the coffee breathe. Here's the three-pour method I use on my V60.
Juan's three-pour V60, for a 12 oz cup
-
0:00
Pour 80 g and let it bloom
The bloom is the coffee's first reaction to water. The CO₂ naturally held in the beans starts coming out, and the bed rises into a small dome. That's what you're looking for. Let most of it drain away before you go again.
-
1:00
Add 100 g, for 180 g total
Pour slowly and keep the water moving. I go in a spiral, starting in the middle and working outwards, then back in again. Some people pour a figure of eight, some draw a flower.
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2:00
Add another 100 g, for 280 g total
Same slow, moving pour.
-
2:30
A last 40–50 g
As the brew goes on, the grounds soak through and start settling and tightening together. This final pour adds enough weight to push the rest through.
-
3:30
Done
The whole thing should be finished at about three and a half minutes.
Why the shape of the pour matters
Spiral, figure of eight or flower. Pick whichever feels natural to you. Each will give you a slightly different cup, and all of them work. What matters is that the water keeps moving.
You're doing two things. First, soaking all the grounds uniformly, so every part of the bed gets the same amount of water at the same flow rate. Second, creating turbulence inside the cone so the grounds are moving around and all of them extract.
Pour straight into the middle and hold it there, and the sides won't get the same water. Nor will the coffee sitting at the very bottom of the cone. You'll have under-extracted coffee in the same cup as properly extracted coffee, and you'll taste it.
If you have ten minutes rather than three
Every one of these adds time and improves the result. How far you go depends on how much of your morning you want to give it.
- Sort your water firstFilter it, or boil and cool it, before you start anything else.
- Grind fresh, and take your time over itOnly what you're about to brew.
- Pre-rinse the paper filterRinses out the papery taste and seats the filter against the cone.
- Warm the cup or carafeSo the coffee isn't losing heat into cold ceramic the moment it lands.
Each extra step takes a little more time, and each one makes the cup better.
Two pieces of kit worth having
- A gooseneck kettle The narrow curved spout gives you complete control of the flow and lets you aim the water exactly where you want it to land. For pour-over it makes a real difference.
- Something that tells you the temperature A kettle with a digital readout or a temperature setting is easiest, and they're affordable and easy to find now. Failing that, a food-grade thermometer in the water while it heats does the same job. Take it off the heat when it reads what you want.
Start with the beans
All our coffee is Colombian, roasted here in Oakville every weekday, with the roast date on every bag. Tell us how you brew and we'll grind it to match, free, while you wait.
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Come and see us
Six cafés. Tell us how you brew and we'll grind to match.