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Today we're making a little follow up video
to the V60 technique for a one cup brewer
that I published I think just a few days ago.
Now I'm very happy with that technique,
I'm very proud of that technique,
but it did generate a bunch of questions,
and I thought it was appropriate to make a video
to answer as many of them as I could
to kind of clarify a few things around the brewing technique
including the most controversial one of all.
Was I wrong?
Did I give you bad advice?
We shall find out.
Anyway, here's how it's gonna work.
There's about 10 different questions
or topics that I wanna talk about today.
We're just gonna go through them one by one
and hopefully answer the many different questions
that you had.
So the first question is kind of a question
around swirling versus stirring the bloom.
Generally, I like swirling the bloom for a few reasons.
It's quick, it's easy, it requires no additional tools.
It's pretty easy to be consistent.
But as I point out in the video
excessive swirling can kind of clog the paper.
And for people that have a grinder that produces say
more than average fines, it's a cheaper grinder.
Is this still the best thing to do?
And I would say maybe
but it's probably worth trying a stir.
A stir is something I used to recommend
before I kind of got into swirling.
Stirring might be a better way.
The goal is just to make sure
that all of the coffee is getting wet
as soon as possible
without excessive agitation of the coffee.
If you stir one bit a lot,
you'll start the extraction of that bit
going more aggressively
and you maybe don't wanna to do that.
So, you're just looking to have
a kind of even distribution of water from the beginning.
And again, you're just trying to get the grounds
that you can see that are still dry into the mix
and that's it.
So really not too much work, not too much stirring going on.
Just a thorough mixing of water and coffee.
When it comes to the end of the brew though,
I would still recommend that just gentle swirl at the end.
You don't need to use a spoon a second time.
Now, a lot of people asked
can you use the same technique on a two cup brewer?
And there's kind of two ways to interpret this question
so I'll start with the the easy one.
Can you use 15 grams to 250
and the same ratios and everything else in a two cup brewer?
And the answer is 100%, yes.
They are, as far as the coffee's concerned,
pretty much identical.
The hole at the bottom is the same size,
the angle is the same, the ridges inside are the same.
So all the same things apply.
If you've only got a two cup brewer,
you don't need to buy an additional one cup brewer.
A two cup will work well
for a single 15 gram dose of coffee brewed to 250 mils.
Don't worry about it.
The more complex question would be
could I scale this technique
up all the way to say 30 to 500 grams?
And I guess you probably could
and it would probably work well.
I like the original V60 technique
because it was kind of the simplest technique
to get to good coffee.
And I know that didn't work across the entire range
as well as I hoped,
as in it wasn't perfect for a one cup brew.
But I think for two cup brew, I really like it.
I think it's simple.
Relatively easy to do and easy to be consistent with.
But if you wanna experiment with this, please do.
I haven't done all the work to calculate, you know
what the ideal pour rate is for that deeper,
heavier bed of coffee,
but it should still basically work well.
If you do experiment, compare the two.
Let me know your thoughts down in the comments below.
Another very common question
was about applying this technique to flatbed brewers.
These are brewers like the April that I have here,
or the Kalita or the Stagg
or a bunch of others, sort of flatbed brewers.
And the answer is probably, but I don't know.
To try and come up with a good technique,
we do a lot of testing
and that is kind of going narrow and deep.
We haven't done a lot of testing with this brewer.
We haven't done a lot of testing with other brewers either.
It is on the agenda,
it's on the list of things we would like to do,
but I can't with all certainty say yes,
this will work perfectly well on those brewers.
Though I can't immediately see an issue with the technique
in terms of why it wouldn't work well,
but if you experiment, again, let us know
down in the comments below what worked and what didn't.
So let's talk grind size
because this is very heavily requested topic,
particularly for the Comandante,
where people asked how many clicks on the Comandante
was my grind setting.
And the answer is, for the Comandante,
a little easier than the other one.
The answer here is around 25 to 30,
really depends on the coffee,
it depends on the water that you're using as well.
But it was that kind of a ballpark there for light roasts.
For more developed medium roasts,
I might be a little coarser.
For dark roasts, I might be coarser again still.
I don't really feel comfortable
giving say a sort of target micron range
of like 600 microns as a target size
because particle size distributions are extremely variable.
And just because your peak is there,
it doesn't mean your total surface area matches mine.
So your extraction will be different,
your flavor will be different,
your experience will be different.
The best guidance remains, frustratingly, taste.
Does it taste good?
Does it taste empty, hollow?
Is it missing something?
Does it taste a little dry and a little bitter?
You know, those are the kind of taste feedback things
that you're looking for
to guide you to the right grind size.
But yeah, that's kind of it.
I would say if you're desperate to know,
start maybe around 30 for a typical coffee on here.
You might need to go finer,
you might need to go a touch coarser.
But that's the kind of ballpark from absolute zero
on the Comandante that I have here in the studio.
Another common question was why did we use 10 second pauses
between the pulses?
Why that particular number?
And that's a good question.
We did experiment with longer pauses
and letting the bed drain out, you know, entirely.
What we saw there was once the water drains outta the bed,
that bed rapidly cools down, which is kind of interesting,
it just loses its thermal mass and it cools down
and your next pulse heats it back up again, but not as much.
And so we found that keeping sort of some water
in the cone at all times
helped with temperature stability throughout the brew.
But that 10 seconds helped stretch the brew out,
increase the contact time,
give the bed a chance to settle again
and not constantly be churned over and over again.
Which could lead to more unevenness,
more channeling potentially.
There may be a better number.
This may be 12 or 15,
but 10 seemed nice, easy, easy to replicate.
And that is a big part of what I'm chasing
with the techniques
which is it's easy to remember and it's easy to do,
because the more finicky and overly specific it gets,
and I know this is a more complex technique already
than the original, but if I take it even further than that,
it's just more frustrating to make coffee that way
especially before you've had coffee.
Now the next two questions are kind of linked to each other.
It's about established
and existing techniques that were out there ahead of time.
One question is often is this just Matt Winton's recipe?
Now, if you don't know Matt Winton
he is a very skilled coffee professional.
He's won the World Brewer's Cup
and he has a five pour technique on HARIO's website
and I'll link that down below.
You can check it out.
His is a little different.
It's not as focused
on kind of controlling agitation the same way that mine is.
And I think he's using a slightly coarser grind
and going for a different style of brew.
But I still think it's a good technique
and I still think we probably ended up at the same place
for very similar reasons.
I didn't watch his technique before making the video.
I didn't really watch anyone's techniques.
The way that we do testing is we kind of go
variable by variable
and then slowly start to build it up into a total recipe
and test it out and see what works.
So, I was aware of him
and I had sort of a vague recollection of it,
but I wasn't sure of it.
But I think if you brewed his recipe and mine side by side
there'd be a different level of extraction.
I suspect I'm chasing a slightly higher overall extraction
in terms of technique and style and end cup.
But I think both would potentially be delicious, I hope.
Coffee has no one good answer.
And so, I would definitely recommend trying his version
of the technique
and seeing what you like and what you don't.
The other question I got a lot was is this just
Tetsu's 4:6 method sort of with a new spin?
And the answer is, I don't think so.
Again, there are a bunch of similarities and again,
I suspect we ended up at similar places for similar reasons.
As I've said, what I'm chasing with mine
is replicable agitation
and kind of control over the sort of entire brew.
I think the 4:6 method is designed
to be a much more flexible brew method
where you kind of push and pull extraction around
in different places to end up with different results.
I think that's interesting, but it's ultimately
a very different philosophy of coffee brewing.
And again, I suspect the coffees that we each brew often
or were sort of being brewed for that method
and what I'm using might be a little bit different.
Like I said, there's no one good answer.
If you haven't tried it, you should totally try it.
Moving on.
One question that has popped up a few times is,
can you use a WDT tool
to kind of do a stirred bloom phase?
What some people are calling the wet WDT technique
or the WWDT just to make things impossibly complicated.
Now there's been a few people have talked about using these
as part of the kind of bloom process.
I think it definitely is interesting.
If you have one, have a play with it.
It's kind of fun.
It's amazing how clean these things come out
having stirred wet ground coffee.
They seem to come out pristinely clean, which is wonderful.
It's worth an experiment.
It's absolutely not worth buying one of these
just to make a V60 with,
but if you've got one in your coffee making setup,
then yes, have a little play.
I like the brews I get,
but I'm constantly chasing the least possible tools
and sort of stuff in my coffee making.
So I tend not to use it.
I think in espresso,
it's getting to the point of being essential
in a lot of home espresso prep.
But for a V60, fun to play with.
And if you think it really improves your cup,
then keep with it.
But, but overall, just an interesting
little sort of mixture of different styles of coffee prep
in one place.
Now we have to talk about the elephant in the room.
The thing that was the most controversial thing I said
in that video.
The thing that got the most criticism
and the thing in which people think
I am the most wrong about.
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So it's time to address the area
in which I might have been wrong.
I might have made a mistake.
I might have caused some controversy.
Pretty mild controversy, frankly.
The topic is preheating the brewer
when you're rinsing the paper.
I said it's perfectly acceptable to use the hot water
from a kitchen tap 'cause I thought it was less wasteful
and many of you disagreed with that
and it's gonna take us to some strange places
in terms of an answer, right?
So one quick thing.
Let me tell you why I prefer to use hot water
from a kitchen sink.
A few different reasons.
Firstly, the hot water turns up pretty quickly
most of the time.
And so, I don't feel particularly wasteful
when I run the hot tap.
If yours takes ages to come through, yes,
that should definitely factor into your decision.
Secondly, I don't like sort of boiling water in a kettle
to pour through this thing
because that water's either gonna be tap water
which is really hard and I'll get scale in my kettle.
I don't want that.
Or it's gonna be my coffee water
which is ultimately relatively expensive
and I don't really wanna waste that either.
I make recipe water
for all the sort of water we brew with here.
So it's always consistent across testing, across videos,
all that stuff.
So that's why I like the hot water from the hot tap.
If you do wanna use water
from a kettle that I want you to use as little as possible.
If you just pour your hot water on top
and have it drain through,
it does very little preheating with the plastic brewer.
It really makes almost no difference at all.
So you kind of need a steep phase.
To do that, the best way,
make sure your sink is clean obviously.
Put your brewer in the sink and you know
if the sink base is a little bit wet
this will kind of form a seal
and you can pour hot water in it,
it will just sit in the brewer
and very slowly drain through
and do much better kind of thermal transfer.
Much better heating of the brewer.
A few of you suggested another way
of preheating the brewer that is kind of interesting.
I'll show it to you now.
It makes me unsettled and I can't really explain to you why.
A lot of you suggested using a kettle
sort of to preheat the brewer
by using the brewer as a lid for the kettle.
And like I said, this feels kind of weird.
Don't put it on this way
'cause it turns out this does nothing useful.
It just makes the base of the V60 warm
and the cone, the bit that you need to be warm,
doesn't get that much warmer it turns out.
So you've gotta put it on upside down
like a funny little hat.
I don't like it.
It works, right, if you put it on this way around
and you boil your kettle.
(beeping)
Yeah, that, that's preheated, that's a hot brewer now.
So that definitely works.
But it's definitely not
how your kettle is designed to be used.
And so that kind of freaks me out a little bit.
Obviously not every kettle has the right sized hole
at the top.
Some kettles have little lids, that's not gonna work.
So in many cases this is probably not a viable option,
but in some cases it may well be.
Like I said, it feels weird to me to recommend it,
but I can't deny it.
In certain circumstances it does work
to very effectively preheat a brewer
and it would work well for a ceramic or glass or metal
that would do a very, very good job should it fit.
I'm not gonna make a third video in this series,
but if you do have a great question
I'll try to answer it down in the comments below.
Lemme know your thoughts
if you experiment with different techniques,
if you experiment with preheating in different ways,
if you are having great success with the brew method or not,
I want to hear from you down in the comments below.
But for now I will say thank you so much for watching.
And I hope you have a great day.