Pour-over at home, without the fuss

We get asked, more than any other question at the bar, what someone needs to make good pour-over at home. The honest answer is: less than you'd think. A V60 or Kalita Wave, a kettle (any kettle), a paper filter, a scale, and a grinder that gets it to roughly the consistency of coarse sea salt. The grinder is the one thing worth spending on — but "worth spending on" means $100, not $500.

Here's the recipe we teach in our Saturday classes. It works for almost any of our lighter coffees. Twenty-two grams of coffee. Three hundred and sixty grams of just-off-the-boil water. Total brew time, three to three-and-a-half minutes.

Bloom: forty-five grams of water, poured in concentric circles over the grounds. Set the timer. Watch the coffee bed swell and exhale. Wait forty-five seconds.

First pour: bring the total water to two hundred grams, also in slow circles, ending at about one minute and fifteen seconds. The grounds should be evenly saturated, no dry spots.

Second pour: bring it up to the full three-sixty by one minute and forty-five. Let it draw down. If your timer reads three-fifteen to three-thirty when the bed goes flat, you're in the right ballpark.

Taste it. If it's sour or weak, grind finer next time. If it's bitter or astringent, grind coarser. Coffee is a feedback loop — the same recipe is a different cup with every new bag, and that's the whole point.