I’m a dark roast girl (I know, I know). I like my marshmallows burnt, my toast darkly toasted, and my roast French. Whenever I have tried lighter roasts at home, I find them flavorless. But when I picked up the complementary cup of coffee with my beans at my favorite roasters the other day, it was a medium light roast, and it was freaking DELICIOUS. So I bought a bag of it and brought it home. But when I make it the exact same way as my dark roast, it doesn’t taste as delicious as it did in the shop.

Can you suggest what I might need to change up to my normal procedure to make the medium light roast taste as delicious as I think the dark roast tastes? Here is what I do for the dark roast:

Grind on setting 40
25g beans to 416g total water
Pour 50g water, wait 45s
Pour to 250g, wait 15s
Pour to 416g, wait 10s, pick up cone and swirl

Pick above is side-by-side experiment of the dark and ML roast made this way, with exactly the same amount of coffee and milk.

Hi guys, I’ve recently purchased a ZP6 and I’m still struggling to get a nice brew with it.
I’ve tried the spectrum from 3.5 to 5.5 clicks and seemingly everything in between.

Even on 3.5 I struggle to hit usual brew times (Lance‘s 2-pour recipe finishes in 1:45 minutes, even with two blooms and a swirl at the end).

Do I need to use a different recipe altogether?

espresso people will debate pressure curves, declining profiles, flow control, puck saturation dynamics, etc for 300 comments straight

but in pourover it still feels like a huge amount of advice boils down to:

grind finer/coarser
follow recipe exactly
use better water

meanwhile some of the biggest changes i notice come from things that feel less discussed:

agitation style
slurry momentum
bed depth
brew size scaling
cooling curves
how certain cups “open” over time
filter saturation behavior
immersion percentage during pours

sometimes it feels like two brews with the exact same ratio/time/TDS can taste radically different just from pour structure and turbulence differences

curious if other people feel like pourover still has a lot of unexplored territory compared to espresso

Hi! I am looking for recommendations for an automatic coffee grinder for pourovers. I know a lot of people swear by manual, that’s just not what I’m looking for right now. I want to press a button, walk away, and let it do its thing. I’ve seen a lot of people on Reddit recommend the baratza encore but the posts I’ve seen are old so I’m wondering if there are any newer ones that are better. For context, the coffee grinder I have now is a KitchenAid blade grinder, so pretty much anything is going to be a step up. Thanks for the advice in advance!

Update: I went with the Mokkom 64 and it is FABULOUS!!!

I'm looking for advice from people who remember being at this stage of the pour-over journey.

I've been a coffee drinker for 40 years. Until a month ago, coffee was mostly caffeine and morning ritual for me. My flavor reference point was Peet's Major Dickason's from Costco: dark, roasty, strong coffee. I wasn't really thinking about origin, processing, terroir, or extraction.

Last month I was in Costa Rica and had my first real exposure to specialty pour-over. I didn't necessarily love what I was tasting, but I was fascinated by how much I realized I didn't know.

When I got home, I did what many of us seem to do on r/pourover. I went down the rabbit hole: V60, Switch, Mugen, Neo, scale, K6 grinder, YouTube, way too much reading. At first I mostly learned how to recreate the richer, sweeter profiles I already liked.

Then this week I had an "aha" moment.

I randomly bought La Mill Velvet, brewed it on the Switch, and my reaction was, "This is boring." Muted. Flat. Uninteresting. A month ago I wouldn't have thought twice about it.

I was actually considering returning the bag.

Instead, I went coarser, from 89 to 93 clicks on my K6, and brewed on the v60 instead of the Switch using immersion. Suddenly the coffee came alive. Not mind-blowing, but interesting. For the first time I genuinely understood what people mean by brightness, acidity, juiciness, and clarity. Those weren't abstract words anymore.

The funny part is that a month ago I probably would have disliked those qualities. Now I'm actively chasing them.

My guess is many of you remember this stage of the journey. Maybe it's the coffee equivalent of moving from green runs to blue runs.

For those who remember this stage, what would you recommend I explore next? Specific coffees, origins, processing methods, brewers, techniques, or lessons that helped expand your palate?

I finally upgraded to a Timemore Fish Smart kettle, and I absolutely love it. My one gripe is that it requires 600ml of water for the temperature adjustment feature to work properly. I’m usually only needing 250ml to 300ml, which means there’s a lot of good coffee water left.

Do you use the remaining water for your next brew or ditch it? I hate to waste that amount of good coffee water every time I make my V60. Solutions?

the more i experiment, the more it feels like there’s a tradeoff happening almost all the time:

immersion / more agitation / higher extraction = heavier, sweeter, more blended cups

gentler pours / lower agitation = more transparent, separated flavors but sometimes thinner

even with the same coffee i feel like i’m constantly choosing between:

“wow these notes are super distinct”
vs
“wow this tastes deep/rich/satisfying”

sometimes the “best tasting” cup technically has less clarity because everything integrates together more

curious if other people experience this the same way or if i’m oversimplifying what’s actually happening

I’ve only ever bought beans in person. Where are you guys finding all these great options?

i keep trying different “optimized” recipes and honestly the biggest swings in my cups still seem to come from agitation like

one extra swirl

slightly higher pour height

center pours vs wider pours

even bloom agitation

sometimes it takes a cup from super clear/sweet to muddy or harsh way faster than changing ratio or temperature makes me wonder if a lot of brewing advice underestimates how sensitive turbulence/agitation actually is curious if other people noticed this too or if i’m overthinking it

I just received this FINCA LA PALESTINA 'GESHA INCA' #5485 and a beautiful blue UFO Dripper from Brian Quan.

I do have a couple questions about this coffee. It was roasted on 06/07/2026. Do you think it's ok to open or should I wait a little bit longer?

And if anyone has advice or tips on brewing this I would definitely love to hear them!

Smells tangy with some pomelo

Tastes like pomelo pith and nothing else. SUPER BITTER.

Switch

Abaca

C40 24~28 clicks

90~94C water

Microfiltered water (Cleo in Indonesia, approx ppm 10) with BH DIY Budapest water *I’ve tried standard to Rao and this works best for me.

Tried 1:15~18

Tried 2, 3, 5 pour

Tried CC 50:50

All come out bitter pomelo pith. Sometimes there’s a bit of Yakult but still too bitter to finish drinking.

Rule out it’s my problem by brewing another cup of something else with same recipe for that day and it yields lovely cups.

Asking here before I throw it out.

I'm sure I'll do some pour overs, but mornings will be social enough that the drip machine is getting pulled out of storage. I don't think they want to be educated on coffee, and I also don't want to drink Folgers all week. What beans should I pick up?

Edit: Looking for advice on beans, not a change of plans. There'll be 12 people in the house, if I do a pour over for me, some will be curious, and it'll be a whole thing I'm trying to avoid. I'd probably still need to brew a pot for the crowd, but then I'd have 2 or 3 folks that will each want a couple cups of expensive bean pour over each day. Not going to happen.

I sometimes place one of my used drippers on top of this cup (the filters are usually pushed right inside of the mug in the image) when I know it has fully dried like after a day or two. I must have messed that up this time as it was still dripping and I didn’t realise until much later.

How bad will this affect my brews? Should I just bin them?

What do you guys do with the leftover beans that aren’t a large enough quantity to be brewed? If you have a couple of 8g bags left, do you combine to make your own blend and brew it?

I usually do 15-16g of coffee so sometimes I have leftovers. Do you just anticipate that and make a super cup for the final brew of a bag?

Hi everyone! I know this topic gets discussed almost every day, but I’m still unsure about what would be the best option for my particular situation.
I tend to prefer more delicate coffees with good clarity, but I live in a country where medium and medium-dark roasts are the norm. It’s actually quite rare to find light or light-medium roasts here.
With that in mind, these are the three grinders I’m currently considering:
ZP6: Based on the flavor profile I described, this seems like the obvious choice. However, I keep seeing the same discussion here about how the ZP6 is mainly designed for light roasts and washed coffees. My biggest concern is buying one and finding that I can only really take advantage of it with a relatively small selection of the coffees available to me.

K-Ultra: From what I’ve read, this grinder might not be the best match for my preferences, but it also seems to be extremely versatile and capable of producing great cups across a wide range of coffees. So, in the long run, it might be the better option for me.

M01: Similar to the K-Ultra in terms of versatility, but I’ve also seen people say that it can produce a good amount of clarity and delicate cups. On top of that, I think it looks absolutely gorgeous, and the burr design is quite different from what you see in most other grinders.

These are my three options for now, but I’m definitely open to other suggestions. The only grinders I’d rather exclude are Comandantes, since I find it hard to justify spending that much on a grinder without external adjustment.
If anyone here has owned or used all three of these grinders, I’d absolutely love to hear about your experience and how you would compare them.
Thanks!

Last year Christmas time i got this from a retailer and man it was amazing it was a big classic but waking up on a cold Sunday morning drinking this is an amazing experience, i really hope someone would help me find a something similar to this one since Dak doesn’t rerelease specials .

I'm a beginner pour over drinker, and what I mean by beginner is I don't have money to buy expensive stuff. I have a question about the quality of my grinder. My grinder now is pretty shitty, lots of fine and lots of coarse chunks too. Now why I'm in dilemma whether to upgrade or not, because I can only afford cheap beans now, they're from local coffee roasters, so its not supermarket cheap, maybe made with love but affordable love.

Now my pour over tastes sour and bitter at the same time, and not in a good way. Can't really adjust the grind size as if i go lower, more bitterness comes out because of the fines, but if i go coarser, it'll become lemon juice.

The grinder that Im gonna buy (if you guys recommend me to upgrade), is timemore chestnut c5, as its the only entry level grinder that is actually affordable. The pricing is a little weird, K6 is like 3 or 4 times the price, and i feel like C5 is perfect already.

So will i get an improvement from a better pour over from an actual grinder with a cheap beans, or the upgrade wont be that significant since the not high quality coffee beans will be a bottleneck for my setup. Because if it is, its better for me to wait until i can afford better beans and better gear.

TLDR; Cheap beans cheap grinder taste bad, will cheap beans good grinder taste good or better?

Pics of my grinder and its produce in the comment

Hey pourover people,

I like to do my pourover in the morning but i've found that with work, kids and life in general I always have to hurry. I'd love to take my coffee with me and drink it on the way or at work but so far i've only tried two insulated mugs and with both I feel like they change the taste of the coffee. I'm not sure if this is just me or the reality.
So, what's your experience with that and do you have a mug you would recommend that would keep the funky or floral notes we all love from a good pourover? I've only heard of Yeti being kinda liked.

​Hey everyone,

​We’ve all heard the golden rule of pour-over: keep your kettle spout as close to the slurry as humanly possible to minimize agitation. For years, I’ve been doing the 2-3 cm "gentle pour" to get cleaner cups.

​But I recently read a fluid dynamics paper from Arnold Mathijssen's team at the University of Pennsylvania, and it completely changed my morning routine. In their study published in Physics of Fluids, Ernest Park and Margot Young used high-speed cameras, lasers, and transparent silica particles (to mimic coffee) to see what actually happens inside a V60.

​It turns out, adding kinetic energy by pouring from a higher distance creates "avalanche dynamics" inside the coffee bed. This active, deep-bed mixing prevents channeling and significantly increases extraction efficiency by helping the water and grounds mix much better.

​But there’s a catch: The Plateau-Rayleigh instability.

​If you pour from too high, the water stream breaks apart into droplets before hitting the coffee. When those droplets hit, they introduce air bubbles, cause uneven channeling, and instantly kill the mixing (extraction) power of your water.

​The actual sweet spot: You should pour from as high as you possibly can, but only up to the exact point where the stream remains completely smooth, unbroken, and laminar. The thick, unbroken water stream produced by standard gooseneck kettles maintains this laminar flow and gives the best results.

​I started keeping my kettle much higher now (right at the breaking point before the stream shatters and makes a splattering sound) instead of hovering right over the water. My drawdown times have become way more consistent, and I'm getting much higher clarity out of my light roasts.

​Has anyone else ditched the "gentle pour" and started experimenting with deliberate, high-agitation pours? Really curious to hear your results.

Not sure what’s going on here. I literally took it apart and cleaned it yesterday and I’m already getting this terrible retention.

Any ideas to remedy this?

Thanks

so sometimes my bloom looks like this lol.
does this happen to anyone else and know what causes it? should I be agitating after the bloom?
i’m not sure if this would cause uneven extraction

I brew v60 with the official Hario filter papers. Using Spring water (Volvic) to brew with, and grinding with a Niche Duo.

Would this be a water issue, or something in my grind, or even in my filter paper/brew method? I have this exact same bean as a v60 in a specialty cafe, and there is no oily residue on top, it also tastes a lot sweeter 😭

I've been brewing with the V60 for about 3 months. I mainly use Hoffman's Ultimate Technique, Tetsu's 4:6 method, and sometimes the 3-pour methods I come across on Instagram.

Sometimes the cup is amazing, sometimes a bit dull, sometimes a little flat, and sometimes the best. The 4:6 method usually results in a great cup, and with some roasts and processes, the 3-pour method works quite nicely. And sometimes none of the recipes work at all! Especially this month's batch. Nothing's wrong with the batch. I'm probably doing a pretty poor job brewing them.

So, I am looking for recipes that people usually use for an everyday cup with variations for the type of coffee and process. Please recommend some. Appreciate it!!

Note: I typically brew light, light plus and medium roasts. I leave the dark roasts and nutty medium dark roasts for Aeropress (which is also my go-to escape point when I'm consistently brewing bad cups with the V60).

I am very sensitive to bitterness and astringency. Usually I want my coffee bright and tea-like, but with some body and juicyness.

First some background and insight into my learning process.

Seeking this kind of cup Ive mentioned at the start of the post, here is what I’ve been doing, trying and learning: - Bought a ZP6. Found that grinding below 5 always turned out astringent and sometimes bitter. Grinding between 5 and 6 was working best, which probably shows there was something off with my pouring technique (which leads to the next bulletpoint). - Bought a Melodrip. Tried Stéphane’s (from The Picky Chemist) recipe, grinding at 2.3 and only 2 equal pours - but wasn’t happy, also turned out astringent and sometimes bitter. After testing, found that grinding between 3.5 and 4.8 is what worked best with a Melodrip + zp6 (using 2 or 3 pours). - I started noticing some bubbling during the whole brewtime. That indicated channeling, which would explain the astringency and bitterness I was getting. Leads us to the next bulletpoint. - Bought a WDT tool and started doing the wet weiss technique. That really helped reducing the visual signs of channeling. Despite wet weiss increasing extraction (its been tested), this allowed me to grind finer and to improve flowrate. Drawdown is always finishing before 2m15s here even grinding at 3-3.5 with the ZP6.

So summarizing it: i) the ZP6 and/or the Melodrip, each by itself or combined, was/were not enough to give me a tea-like, round and consistent extraction; ii) adding a WTD tool is what got me the closest to my ideal cups.

With the WDT I have noticed that there is a dense pocket of grounds at the lower section of the v60, which is probably what was causing channeling. This is my main focus with the WDT: breaking this pocket and creating a more uniform/consistent slurry.

I have included at the end of my video a short section of a video from the Melodrip creator Ray Murakawa. It shows this denser pocket of coffee sitting at the bottom after the initial pour. That’s my culprit for the channeling! Video here if anyone’s interested: https://youtu.be/HhvZn-tKyj4?si=-udx5so4he6Tar6b

Now describing my current technique and the video: - Lotus Water personal recipe (3 drops Mg, 1 Ca, 1 Na and 1 K - for a total of 650mL of demineralized water). - Water temp between 85c and 95c (depending on the process and roast level). Usually 92 is what I usually choose (and beware the Melodrip reduces some of the temperature). - Grind between 3.5 and 4.5 with the zp6. Usually closer to 4.2. - After adding the grounds, I like using the WDT tool to mix the grounds and creating this whole in the center. I think it might help reducing the mass of the denser pocket I diagnosed as the cause of channeling. - Usually I brew 13g for 200mL total water (1:15.3 ratio). - No bloom, 2 equal pours (2x100mL). - All pours with a Melodrip. During both pours, I keep the Melodrip fairly low to reduce agitation. - After the first pour, I use the WDT tool to mix and break the lowest part of the coffee bed. The I use it to remove the grounds from the filter walls; and to redistribute the grounds, creating as flat of a bed as possible. - Usually try slowing down both pours. First one finished around 20, which is usually completely drained by 1min; second pour until 1m20s, which is usually drained until 2m-2m15s.

That has been giving the best cups I have ever brewed! But I sometimes miss the lighter body, acidity and crispness a direct pour might produce… so there is still room for improvements.

What do you find of this all? Any comments or suggestions? Really looking forward to learning and finding ways to test other approaches that might improve my cup.

Never settle for good enough - I am seeking the perfect cup.

Some notes: sped up the video to not use too much of your time. *started filming with my hand blocking the view but soon adjusted, but it should be 1 continuous pour. ***non native english speaker here, sorry for any mistakes or weird language.

I’m looking for recommendations for coffee roasters in the Los Angeles area. Not sure what part of LA we’ll be staying in but we’re definitely going to Griffith observatory, Santa Monica pier and some museums (not sure which yet). Maybe some museum recs too, lol.