- Today we're gonna be talking about
how to brew with the Hario V60.
How to get the best results you can
through a simple, repeatable technique
that will give you a delicious cup of coffee.
Now I have designed this technique
to work in a cafe as well as at home.
To work whether you have a beautiful pouring kettle
or whether you just have a regular kettle.
It shouldn't matter.
And even if you have your own preferred technique
and way of brewing,
I think there's gonna be something in this video
that you'll find useful
to just elevate what you're doing a little bit more.
So this video is focused just on the V60
for a couple of reasons.
It's quite a different brewer to other brewers out there.
It is a pure kind of cone shape,
unlike say a flat bottom brewer or the Melitta style brewers
and the brewer itself provides
really no resistance whatsoever.
Other brewers typically have three sort of small holes
that will slow the water as it drains out of the cone.
So the Hario has a large open area
at the bottom of the cone,
which means it provides no resistance.
For those reasons,
I wanted to make a video just focused on this,
because techniques that work here
may not perfectly apply to the other brewers.
So before we jump into the technique,
I wanna run through the list of kit
that I would recommend you have
on hand before you start brewing.
And first and most obviously, you need a V60.
I like the plastic ones.
They're the cheapest,
they're really hard to break
and they do a great job
from a sort of heat retention perspective.
Most of the time,
I actually use this which is the Hario drip decanter,
which is a nice glass body and a plastic insert
so it's all of the best bits.
These are actually pretty cheap now,
and I recommend them quite highly.
When it comes to filter papers
I have made a video previously that are linked down below
covering the differences between
the sort of Hario filter papers out there.
I'd recommend giving that a quick watch after this one
and you're gonna need a digital scale.
Now this thing is gonna make your life 100 times easier.
It's gonna make brews more reputable.
It's gonna take all the guesswork out of it.
You want something accurate to .1 of a gram,
ideally some sort of spoon,
teaspoon, soup spoon, dessert spoon,
I don't really care, just some sort of spoon
and you're gonna need a kettle of some sort.
Now my preference is that you pour the water into the V60
from the kettle that you boil it in.
Which means something like this,
which is an electric pouring kettle
is kind of the best possible outcome.
This, a regular electric kettle is absolutely fine.
It's perfectly good.
You can pour from this with no real issues.
These things, just straight pouring kettles,
they're okay if you're gonna heat the water in it,
but if you're decanting from a kettle into one of these,
you're gonna lose some temperature
and that is gonna affect your brew
and then you need coffee beans.
Great technique, it's just gonna give you transparency
on your ingredients.
The best technique in the world, beautifully executed
but with low quality coffee
will just give you a perfectly terrible cup of coffee.
Now the other ingredient is of course water
and it's a hugely important ingredient
It's gonna make up 98% plus of your cup of coffee
and it's gonna have a huge impact on the extraction itself.
Now what you want basically
is good tasting, relatively soft water.
In some cases,
you can fix it with something like a Brita filter,
if your water, it's a little bit hard.
In other cases,
it might be worth buying bottled water
as much as I dislike that idea.
It is possible to make your own recipe water
with the right combination of minerals in there.
I will leave some links
in the description down below on water
if you want to dig in a little bit deeper.
Now while this will work with pre ground coffee,
I would absolutely recommend you buy a Burr Grinder.
On the cheaper end there are things like hand grinders
if you're willing to do a little bit of work
but these days electric Burr Grinders
are pretty approachably priced,
they are a fantastic investment in how you start your day
and will give you that extra layer of control
to get the best out of the coffee that you buy.
So let's get into the technique.
Now here I'm gonna recommend
a ratio of 60 grams per liter or per kilo of water.
That's kinda of the point of preference.
If you wanna use 65, 70 or if you wanna use 55,
that's entirely up to you.
It's not right or wrong.
I just think it gives you a nice resulting
strength in your cup of coffee.
In the example today
I'm gonna be brewing 30 grams to 500 grams,
which is enough coffee for two people.
I think it's a nice amount to share.
Now in terms of grind,
I would recommend something that's
on the slightly finer end of kind of medium.
Now, it's really hard to communicate grand size in a video.
I can show you some examples
of the ideal grand size for a 30 to 500 ratio,
next to say some espresso grounds
or next to something for scale
but we'll talk at the end
about sort of tuning your grind to taste.
So you wanna weigh your beans right before you brew
and grind them fresh
and at the same time
you also wanna rinse out your filter paper.
That will help remove any potential papery tastes
and it will also preheat the brewer.
If you have a plastic V60,
then you can probably do that with a really hot tap water,
but if you have a glass or ceramic or even metal V60
I would recommend doing that
with the hottest water possible.
Add your grounds carefully to the center of the V60
and then once you've done that,
create a little well in the middle of the grounds.
This is gonna be really helpful in the next phase,
which is the bloom phase,
to make sure that we're evenly saturating
all of the grounds.
You wanna make sure
you're using your water as hot as possible.
Certainly with lighter roasts.
If you're using a pretty dark roasted coffee,
it's okay to wait 15, 20, 25 seconds
after the water is boiled before starting to pour
but if you're brewing something very light,
the hotter the better.
So make sure your scale is zeroed,
start your timer and immediately start to pour
and we're gonna gently pour
two grams of water per gram of coffee.
So here about 60 grams of water
and we wanna make sure
that we're trying to get all of the coffee wet
in that initial phase.
If you've got a large pocket of still dry coffee,
you can use more water
but I really wouldn't use
more than three to one in the bloom phase.
As soon as you've added your water put the kettle down
and grab your brewer
and begin to swirl in a circular motion.
Now what we're trying to do here
is make sure that all of the water
and coffee are nice and evenly mixed together.
Some people like to do this with a spoon
and to stir it together,
but in testing, swirling tasted much better,
and you're gonna keep an eye
on the sort of slurry as you swirl,
until you see it look nice and evenly mixed.
If it looks lumpy, keep swirling.
We're gonna let it rest and bloom for up to 45 seconds.
If you're in a cafe, you may only wanna wait 30
as the returns do diminish a little bit beyond that,
and I certainly wouldn't wait longer than 45 seconds.
The theory is that we're allowing CO2 out of the grounds,
making those grounds easier to extract
in the remaining phase of our brew.
And then we're gonna pour the rest of our water in
in kind of two phases.
Even though it's gonna be one pretty continuous pour.
Here's what we're trying to do.
We're trying to get 60% of our total liquid in,
in the next 30 seconds.
So we're gonna aim to have 300 grams in total
poured into the V60 by one minute and 15 seconds.
This phase is actually really critical.
Now when you pour water into a V60
you disrupt that coffee bed, right?
You churn it up a little bit.
And it seems to me that in testing,
there's a kinda of ideal amount of churn.
In situations where you don't disturb the bed at all
they've produced very slow brews that didn't taste that good
and will encourage you to grind coarser,
which will mean you extract less.
Pour too aggressively
and you create channels and pockets
through which water seems to run very quickly,
essentially, under extracting the coffee
and making it taste bad.
Here, we do just a little bit of agitation,
but not so much that we have an uneven extraction.
Now this means that
with a smaller V60, if we're brewing just a one cup
and say 15 to 250,
you actually want a gentler pour
because there's a smaller bed,
which is why aiming for 60%
gives you a kind of matching
flow rate for the dose that you're using.
So once you've hit 60% of your total brew weight,
you'll see your cone is pretty full and that's a good thing.
We want the cone to be full
for most of the brew to maintain that thermal mass,
keeping the temperature high
is actually really, really important.
What we're gonna do now is pour a little slower
and keep that cone topped up.
We're gonna aim to have a 100% of our brew weight in
in the next 30 seconds.
During this phase we're gonna pour gently.
We're gonna pour slowly.
If you're pouring with a kettle without a pouring spout,
it's okay to pulse a little bit.
Just try not to pour too aggressively
because you will disrupt the coffee bed
unnecessarily at this point.
Once you get to your total brew weight,
pop the kettle down
and grab a spoon and give the V60
a little stir in one direction
and then a little stir in the other direction.
What we're doing here
is trying to knock off any grounds stuck
to the sidewalls of the paper
and not create a sort of swirling motion that lasts
'cause that'll create a dome
in our ground coffee which we don't want.
Allow the V60 to drain
just a little bit more until it feels safe to do so
and give it one final swirl
and that's really gonna help keep the bed flat.
At the bottom at the end of the brew
and give you the most even possible extraction.
But now we're into the draw down
and the draw down is a really interesting
phase of this brew.
Lots of different factors will affect your draw down
and they're not always what you would think.
One of the most surprising for me was temperature.
In brewing identical brews,
side by side with 95 Celsius and 85 Celsius water,
the draw down in the cooler brew took 30 seconds more.
Not only did this taste worse, it was a waste of time.
So that's why I'm not a huge fan
of taking water from a hot water source
and putting it into a cold pouring kettle.
I think often about cafes, I see doing this.
This is just a waste of the baristas time
and the customers time.
If we brew hotter, we brew faster.
As I mentioned before,
the paper that you use
will have an impact on your draw down time.
My preference is always for the faster papers.
It doesn't have a massive impact on extraction
if your paper slows your draw down a little bit.
Most of the brewing is done at this point already.
It doesn't taste quite as good as a faster paper to me,
but your results may vary.
So one more quick thing.
Most of V60 videos will tell you
not to pour directly onto the paper.
You've always got to pour into the coffee
or into that kind of slurry.
They'll tell you this,
because they say that if you pour on the paper,
the water goes through the paper,
misses the coffee
and you dilute your coffee and it'll make it taste bad.
This is not true.
In my testing, I poured solely on the paper.
I aimed to miss the coffee for the entire brew
and what happened is
that the water just ran down the side of the paper,
and in doing so it didn't disturb the coffee bed at all.
In fact, it resulted in
the single longest draw down of any brew
that I had and as a result,
a slightly higher extraction than the other brews,
but it tasted really bad.
Now, the end when the cone has fully drained out
what you wanna see is a nice flat bed of coffee.
There will always be some fine pieces of coffee
stuck to the edges of the walls.
They will not come off
but there should be no large pieces of coffee left.
It should've all fallen into the middle.
Throw that paper away, drink your coffee, and enjoy it.
And I would recommend for the most part,
changing your extraction solely through changing your grind.
If you find that coffee to be empty, hollow,
a little acidic and unpleasant, go a little finer.
In fact, most of the time keep pushing finer
until you hit this sudden wall
of bitterness, harshness and astringency.
At that point, you've gone too far
and you do want to come back a little bit coarser
but when you come back that little bit,
you are kinda of at the maximum extraction
for your grounder,
for your setup, for your coffee,
and it should taste really, really great.
This is my ultimate technique.
This is what works the best for me.
I really like the results from it.
I'm not saying other people's techniques are wrong
or that there's nothing to learn from them
but I think there's lots here that is hopefully useful
to improve the coffee that you make every day.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
I'll say, thank you so much for watching
and I hope you have a great day.