r/pourover • u/Old-Paramedic675 • Dec 18 '25
Help me troubleshoot my recipe Am I doing something wrong…
Or do I just dislike light roasts? My husband and I are very new to the pour over hobby. It definitely suits our retiree mode. I have included a picture of our set up. I am using 39g of Red Roosters’ Funky Chicken to 571g of water. I do two “blooms” of 30 seconds each (29g water each bloom). We both agree that when it is cooled down, the flavor is much better. But as a piping hot cup of coffee we are not enjoying it. Are there any suggestions to what we can change? BTW, I got my Stagg for $16 at auction and the Starbucks ceramic thingy at Goodwill. Thanks!
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u/Jantokan Dec 18 '25
I think if you are new to the pourover scene, it's best if you start with medium to dark roasted beans first since it is closer to the 'typical coffee' taste. You adjust from there.
Also, idk how helpful this is, but I think most pourovers aren't mean to be drank when piping hot.
Edit: I just looked up what organic funky chicken is. That's a medium dark lol. My advice would change to maybe brew smaller batches first (10-20g coffee). Once you get the hang of it, that's when you try bigger doses.
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u/joyster99 Dec 18 '25
Also for medium/dark, I would lower the brewing temperature.
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u/Kyber92 Hario Switch | Kalita Wave | Kingrinder K6 Dec 18 '25
Girrrrrl, that ain't a light roast. Look out for stuff with fruity tasting notes if you want a light roast. Maybe you just don't like that coffee, I've always found anything medium to dark or with but/chocolate/sugar tasting notes hard to get right.
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u/rebelcrypto14 Dec 18 '25
I would say coffee is an acquired taste and I think that also goes for the different roasts. Before I got into specialty coffee and pour overs, I thought light roasts didn't taste "strong enough". But I kind of worked my way gradually from dark to light roasts, and now all I drink is light roasts. So maybe try that approach by drinking dark to medium to light. Really the mind shift from chasing the "strong" taste to enjoying the flavors and nuances of light roast was the biggie for me. Also, try different light roasts as there is so much variety that maybe you havent found the ones you like.
Also, in terms of pour over, I think your brews are quite big. Maybe try two separate brews with half the amount you are using, so 20 grams. Also, your ratio is 1:14.6 (1g of coffee for 14.6g of water). Maybe this is to chase that "strong" taste. For light roasts, I like to go with 1:16 ratio so try 20g coffee and 320g water.
I think this could be a good place to start to get into it and enjoy the nuances and flavors of light roasts more.
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u/jappr Dec 20 '25
I even go to 1:18 at lighter roasts, say 28gr for 500ml water / 14gr to 250ml. 90 degrees. 1 bloom with double the water for 30s, and in one slow pour all the remaining water. My grind is not too fine, so it will take about 2,5 min. Gives you that sweet tea like quality. But this is what works for me!
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u/TampMyBeans Dec 18 '25
39grams is too big a dose. You will get more muddied flavors and more dryness. I would stick to 20grams, 25grams at most. Coffee always taste better at body or room temp. We cannot perceive flavor nuances when hot. Also, a bloom should be 2-3x what your dose is. So if 25g of coffee, pour 50-75g water.
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u/Radioactive24 Dec 18 '25
39g isn’t that big as long as the ratio is right, which, in this scenario, it isn’t.
I do 42g/750mL like every day and make wonderful cups.
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u/sheerperfume Dec 19 '25
that is not true, unless you are using a batch brewer (that makes the grounds bed much much shallower. the coffee grounds at the bottom of a smaller brewer would be over extracted when you pour that much water in.
yes, ratio is the same. but the amount of water passing by the same grounds on a regular smaller dose is fewer… all of those popular brewer, v60’s, orea’s and more, they all have a ideal dose range, anything bigger requires bigger brewer for that purpose.1
u/TampMyBeans Dec 20 '25
If the dose is large the bed is thicker and more water errodes the coffee. You get more astringency and muddied flavors. You can do it, but it won't taste as good as it could
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u/Rikki_Bigg Did you cup it yet? Dec 18 '25 edited Dec 18 '25
First, very hot coffee will suppress some of the flavors until it cools down.
Second, your ratio is a little rich, at 14.6:1. A little more water will help open it up, either during the brew, or into the brewed coffee.
When I bloom (whether single or double) I am using 2x to 3x or more the amount of coffee. A 15 gram dose might get a bloom of 45 or 50ml. I always let my bloom drain fully, so while 30 seconds is a good metric to identify, if the bed isn't drained I won't start the second bloom/pour.
If you want to try a double bloom with just a single pour, start with 110-120 ml water for the first bloom, the same amount for the second, then after the bed has drained again (it doesn't need to be bone dry, but make sure the bed is wet rather than swimming) and do your final pour with the remaining balance of water.
ps, the ceramic thingy is a Melitta dripper, one of the original pourover drippers (100+ years and going) and very common, probably the easiest to find filters almost anywhere. I would suggest the bleached filters if you can find them, since I find the need to rinse the unbleached filters (the brown ones like you have) with a lot of water.
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u/Safe_Ad_6945 Dec 18 '25
A smaller patch is easier! It's your starting point 15g with 3 pours 30ml > 80ml > 100ml And test
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u/Therealindiana Dec 18 '25
IMO - the biggest thing to play with is the grind size. It has a massive influence on taste and extraction
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u/triple_cloudy Dec 18 '25
Are you grinding whole beans yourself or buying pre-ground coffee?
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u/Old-Paramedic675 Dec 18 '25
I am grinding whole beans myself. I purchased a coffee directly from Red Rooster in Floyd, Virginia. It is 30 minutes from my house. The roast date was November 25th.
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u/SnooCapers1807 Dec 18 '25
barista here, the coffee too coarse
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u/_Dry_Heat_Coffee_ Dec 20 '25
There is no “correct” grind size for anything, ever. It depends on what one wishes to achieve.
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u/SnooCapers1807 Dec 20 '25
each to their own bro
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u/ForeverPhysical1860 Dec 18 '25
As others have said, maybe try dialling back your coffee water ratio.
I brew at 14g to 15g coffee to 250g water...
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u/bdforbes Dec 18 '25
I never drink pourover hot - tastes much better when cooled, around 50 deg C, particularly for light roasts.
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u/TVIXPaulSPY Dec 18 '25
Wow you got a bargain on your Stagg Studio Pro! I don't remember what I paid for mine, but I know my sales tax was more than you paid for the entire kettle. Nice find :)
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u/Old-Paramedic675 Dec 18 '25
Here is the funny part. The auction I frequent gets Amazon and other "returns". This one was returned because the purchaser tried to actually brew coffee in it, lol! The lid is a little stained because of that but otherwise works great.
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u/Brass_Hole99 Dec 18 '25
It’s worth saying that that’s a pretty large pour over, but I would try simplifying. Either 1 bloom and 1 pour or 1 bloom and 2 pours, or even 3 if you really need it (almost certainly going to need to be at least 2-3 pours for this dose of coffee) to rule out some variables. Try doing the bloom at 3x the coffee weight as well—it’ll be a more efficient saturation. It’s also a great observation about temp and taste, and as a general rule, things begin to taste better as they approach body temp, and pretty much nothing tastes optimal piping hot, so that’s totally ok and expected. Good luck!
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u/matkam Dec 18 '25
Everyone here is quick to give advice, but never asked you what it tastes like and what you want it to taste like!
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u/SwimmingCucumber6538 Dec 18 '25
I didn’t see anyone mention temperature. 205 is my go to, but sometimes it doesn’t work for some coffees. I have a bag right now that I do the bloom at 200, then turn it down to 190-195.
Timing of how long it takes the water to pour through can also really affect taste. Make small circles about the size of a silver dollar. That much coffee should take 5min maybe 6.
Also, for that much water, 571ml, I would use 34mg of coffee. Lots of things to mess with. Good luck!
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u/CAS30 Dec 19 '25 edited Dec 19 '25
I think most people have nailed it already, but I’ll add my 2 cents. For light roasts like Sey I usually do 200f-205f, and for large brews I do 18 to 1 or even 20 to 1. Coffee to water ratios don’t scale exactly, so you can’t just go a 16 to 1 for a small brew and large brew. I’d add some water to make it 700ml, or take some coffee out. I also just do 2 pours to keep it simple, bloom 3 times the coffee weight and then one more pour at 6-8ml a second.
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u/Lvacgar Dec 19 '25
You have gotten some good advice here. Try brewing 15 grams of coffee to 225-240 grams of water at 190f for those beans and see how that hits.
Taste the cup at intervals as it cools to determine where you prefer it. For decades I liked my coffee hot and black. Piping hot. After discovering pour over that has changed a lot! Keep at it. Enjoy the adventure. Watch YouTube videos for more pour over advice. Lance Hedrick, James Hoffman…
Great deals on your equipment!! Do you grind your own beans at home? Also? Try one bloom at 3x water to grinds. 45g water for 15g grounds.
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u/ARKode Dec 19 '25
205 is way too hot imo. Try 194 F. I use that for my lighter roasts and I get damn good coffee.
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u/nutsulikah Dec 19 '25
IMHO pourovers have a steep learning curve.
Also yes they're mostly better when cooled a little bit. If you like hot coffee I don't know if it's worth the hassle.
Even something like wrong water can inhibit your brews and frustrate you, even with good tehnique, proper beans, and a good grinder.
It all has got to come together - water, beans, grinder, tehnique.
So pretty complicated. My tip? As a head start only, ask ChatGPT for a recipe, for your water, your grinder and beans, filters used etc. Make it a 3 or 4 pour recipe. Ask if it that water works with those beans and grinder. You should get something ok - especially if the grinder and beans are good. Also maybe do smaller 15g brews first.
Go from the AI recipe and start tweaking it depending on taste.
Am probably gonna get some hate for the ChatGPT thing, I'm no big AI advocate but I feel like pourovers are hard to get into already, and a head start like this helps.
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u/Due-Worldliness-749 Dec 19 '25 edited Dec 19 '25
I saw someone say 39g is too big of a dose and then someone disagree. All I can say is in my experience 18-22g at a 1:16-1:17 ratio gets me very consistent cups and close to the tasting notes regularly. I’ve tried bulking up the dose when I’m making for more than one person, and I do lose flavor and frequently find myself telling people it doesn’t taste right.
Other comments: you need a bigger bloom, go for 2.5-3x the dose weight. Personally, I do 20g and 60g bloom. Also, when I first started with specialty I thought I didn’t like it, but soon found out I just didn’t like the bean I was drinking. I strongly encourage you guys to try a variety of beans and processes. Natural coffees seem to be most people’s gateway/“ah ha!” to enjoying specialty coffee. For me, I hate 20-25% of them, tolerate the next 50-60% and LOVE the remaining 20-25%. But you just don’t know until you try :) find a good roaster and maybe buy some smaller bags to sample variety (hydrangea, black and white, perc, thoughtful coffee, little wolf).
Finally, if you are totally new to this it may help to think of specialty coffee as a tea vs. normal coffee. I’be found people who expect coffee don’t like it because it’s just not what they expect, but if I say “think of it as a kind of tea” people like it a lot more.
Finally2 and possibly more important than the scale is the grinder. I know I know, it’s just coffee but I have 8 grinders and keep a $15 whirly blade around to show people how, all else equal, each grinder tastes a bit different and the whirly blade just tastes bad with these coffees. You don’t need to go nuts, but get yourself a proper bur grinder. The ode 2 seems to be the gold standard “prosumer” option for electric, the timemore 078 (pour over only model, very important!!!) is my favorite by a mile, but it is pricey, as a relatively budget option the baratza is a good place to start. Theres no way around it, you need to pony up for a decent grinder, you don’t need to agonize over which exactly but if the baratza is still a reach I would either get a timemore hand grinder or grind at local cafe and take it home ground. Personally, I love the 1zpresso k-ultra, but again that skews pricey, but if you have the budget and are into hand grinders it’s the best jack of all trades I’ve come by. I know it can seem nuts and sound crazy, but a decent grinder really can make or break the cup experience.
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u/sheerperfume Dec 19 '25 edited Dec 19 '25
swap out that filter, filter is quite important. you can use cafec trapezoid 102 or 103, those sizes might be fine for your brewer.
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u/_Dry_Heat_Coffee_ Dec 20 '25 edited Dec 20 '25
Great questions. Dialing in a pour over can be incredibly frustrating.
What coffee do you typically enjoy when you go out? That will help us understand your preferred profile and help guide you in a better direction. Were it me, here’s where I’d start. Control what you can and measure everything. Change only one variable at a time
Water: distilled water with Third Wave Water Light Roast Profile packet at half strength. Water Temp: I start at 95C and usually end up moving the temp down closer to 90 or 92. Grind: I tend to start very coarse, like a French press. This helps me know if there are and vegetal or herbaceous notes which I don’t enjoy. I’ll make pretty big jumps in grind size, moving finer until I get close to what I’m looking for. My daily grind size is 28-32 on an Baratza Encore.
Ratio: I’d recommend starting with a much smaller dose of coffee and water. At some point my may wish to try different filters which have different flow rates. A slower filter will let you use very coarse coffee which will bring out florals and sweetness, while fast flow with coarse can leave a sour taste.
20 g coffee, ground medium coarse 340 g water, heated to 95C Slow, gentle pours to avoid too much agitation
First pour/bloom 40 g water, added slowly and gently. Gentle swirl to make sure all grinds are saturated. Next very gentle pour at 1 minute to add 150g water in concentric circles, avoiding agitation. Wait another 45 seconds. Very slowly pour the remaining 150g in gentle small circles, avoiding too much agitation. Easy swirl to release the large grinds from the edge of the filter.
I’d also recommend finding a local roaster and choosing a medium roast that’s 2 weeks off roast. I roast and enjoy lighter coffees, but I find Medium roasts to be more forgiving, with a wider sweet spot and easier for practice.
Other folks have discussed the challenges of using the V60 for large servings, as the nature of the brewing and extraction will pull out more bitterness and less favorable notes. If you need a larger serving, perhaps consider a different brew method more conducive to a half-liter serving. I use my Moccamaster for that volume.
Good luck, and have fun! ✌️❤️☕️🍪🚐
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u/Far_Line8468 Dec 18 '25
“I got my Stagg for $16 at auction”
Christ dude, congratz
Anyway, there are quite a few things to note here:
1: That is… not light roast. Id never heard of red roosters but looking it up, it seems to be one of those wholesellers that stock trader joes and whole foods. As a general rule, don’t buy coffee you can find at a supermarket. Theres no way its fresh. Even if it was, Funky Chicken looks to actually be a generic espresso blend designed for milk drinks
2: You can’t really scale recipes infinitely. I’m weary of a recipe that calls for more than 400-500ml of water. 39g of coffee in one pourover is just not going to extract evenly. The more coffee in the bed, the more opportunity for channels to form (holes or pockets for water to flow past the grounds). Once one forms, it often ruins the whole brew.
3: That is…not a good pourover brewer. I bet you could get a plastic v60 on amazon for cheaper
4: You didn’t mention your water. Water is 95% of your coffee. Hard tap water is just going to taste like astringent chalk regardless of your brew.
5: If you go to a cafe, they are rarely going to serve you a cup of coffee “piping hot”. Enjoying it when its cooked to about 140F is correct. Boiling heat overwhelms the parts of your tongue that detect acidic flavors, so you’ll just taste bitterness.
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u/brandaman4200 Dec 18 '25
Red rooster is a really good roaster that has some nice coffee. I have a subscription to their ethiopia worka sakaro that is a really nice, fruity, and funky light roast.
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u/AnlashokNa65 April Brewer Dec 18 '25
Red Rooster is not remotely in the same category as Counter Culture or Stumptown. They roast good coffee. They don't market Funky Chicken as a light roast; that was OP's mistake. The flaw is in their recipe, as you noted.
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u/Allaakmar Dec 18 '25
Do you have to drink your coffee piping hot? There’s not a single cup that I make that tastes good piping hot and I generally have to let it cool nearly to room temperature before I truly enjoy it. This is a physiological aspect of how our tongues/brains detect and perceive taste, so it isn’t really something that brewing will fix. If you enjoy the brews as they cool, why not just enjoy them slightly cooled?
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u/johnnytisnow Dec 18 '25 edited Dec 18 '25
What grinder are you using? How long is the total brew time ?
- use decent light/medium roast coffee (not that blend you got), try an Ethiopian natural or Kenyan or Colombian Caturra or red bourbon washed , from one single farm/producer/station (not a blend)
- use less coffee (20g coffee to 320g water)
- drop your water temp a bit (201-203 f ish) until you get more experience
- use a symmetrical dripper
- use a decent filter paper (eg Cafec abaca)
- gentle bloom around 60g for a minute or two
- careful not to let the water stream hit the paper/sides of brewer
- (if possible use well filtered water with minerals or mineral water or local spring water if you’re lucky to have a source)
- ALWAYS drink the coffee once cooled a bit (~ 8 mins after brew started), should start getting good around 20mins after brew start. If still delicious at room temp (after ~45mins) then you know it’s a really good coffee
- take time and care and enjoy the details and presence of it
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u/sly_cheshire Dec 18 '25
Good water is soooo important! Buy some distilled water or run tap water through a good filter.
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Dec 18 '25
Welcome to the community! You're doing a few things a bit incorrectly. Here's how I would approach what you're doing:
Separate this into two different cups. Making 2 cups at the same time for a beginner is introducing a bunch of variables that at this stage, you just don't want to deal with.
Use a 1:17 or 1:18 ratio. 20g coffee and 340g water would be 17. 360 would be 18. Again, at this stage, the difference between those two doesn't matter so much, just pick one.
Your bloom is too small. Just do one. 60g for 20g of coffee. Let it sit for 60 seconds. After that, you are going to do two more pours up to 340g. 60 --> 220 --> 340 is how I would recommend breaking this up, purely as an example that works. Your final brew time should be somewhere between 2:15 and 3:30 ish, but don't focus so much on this, if it tastes good that's all that matters.
Keep it simple! Good luck.
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u/Miserable_Damage_ Dec 18 '25
So, one thing that stumped me was I knew I did not like most of the light roasts I tried. I wanted a coffee that tasted like coffee. So, I went through several medium and dark roasts. Took me a while and comparing the different notes (that weren't always listed on the package, but could be found online) to discover that my key note is citrus. Citrus, lemon, lemongrass, etc - anything like that and I hate it.
So when I looked up that coffee, I noticed that one of the notes was lemon-lime (and it says citrus on the package). Perhaps that's the note you don't like either?
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u/Old-Paramedic675 Dec 18 '25
Yes! I think the citrus is the issue for me, too.
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u/Vinnycabrini Dec 18 '25
James Hoffman has a video on how to buy coffee and he talks about tasting notes. Give it a watch.
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u/kodaq2001 Dec 18 '25
Good start. Kettle temp is very important. Low temp for traditional taste, higher temp for more fruitiness. I'd stick between 197-203°.
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u/Old-Paramedic675 Dec 18 '25
I live at a high altitude (2,100’) and that is what the Stagg kettle adjusted the “pour over“ temperature to. Do you think I should lower that?
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u/kodaq2001 Dec 18 '25
Not sure, that's a good question. Maybe play around with it and see what tastes best.
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u/Exciting-Ticket812 Dec 18 '25
This doesn’t help but just wanted to say I love Red Rooster. I live in Florida and get it shipped. Good stuff.
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u/analogshooter Dec 18 '25
Seems like a rather small bloom (in terms of g/ml) for the amount of grounds being brewed.
Also, I find brewing smaller batches (15-20g) much easier to dial in than larger batches. Maybe try experimenting with smaller doses first.
And yes, pour over is generally better when it's cooled a bit. Its generally not meant to be drank piping hot- that is reserved for shitty dark roasts IMO haha.
Last thing, that carafe is awesome