We are going to be talking about brewing N10Coffee with the Hario V60.

 

What is a Hario V60? The V60 Coffee Dripper is made by Hario. The name comes from the shape of the device. It is “V” shaped with angles of 60 degrees. The internal sides also have interior ridges which help with air flow during the brewing method. For this reason, the V60 is one of specialty coffee’s favourite brewing methods. This method also encourages you to be present while brewing your coffee.

The V60 has become increasingly popular in recent years. It delivers incredibly clear flavours and aromas, allowing coffee lovers to enjoy even the subtlest notes in their coffee.

The Technique

 

Let’s explore how to get the best results you can through a simple, repeatable technique that will give you a delicious cup of coffee at home.

This technique was designed by James Hoffmann a youtuber who talks about coffee and how best to get the best out of every ounce of coffee you brew. It was designed to work whether you have a beautiful pouring kettle or whether you just have a regular kettle.

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.

What you need for this process.

Before we jump into the technique, let us run through the list of equipment that we would recommend you have ready before you start the process. And first and most obviously, you need a V60. We prefer the plastic one. they are hard to break and they do a great job from a heat retention perspective. There are a lot of filter paper on the market so I would leave that up to you to choose the one that you see fit. You will also need a digital scale. The scales is going to make your life 100 times easier. It is going to make brews more reputable. It will take all the guesswork out of the process. You want something accurate to .1 of a gram, ideally some sort of spoon, teaspoon, soup spoon, dessert spoon, and a kettle of some sort.

The next step will be to pour the water into the V60 from the kettle that you boil it in.

Now while this will work with pre ground coffee, I would absolutely recommend you buy a grinder. You can look at electrical grinder or hand grinders are good, if you are willing to do a little bit of work to start your day.

We recommend a ratio of 60 grams per litre or per kilo of water. That is kind of the point of preference. If you want to use 65, 70 or if you want to use 55, that is entirely up to you. It is not right or wrong. It just gives you a nice resulting strength in your cup of coffee. In terms of grind, we would recommend something that is on the slightly finer end of medium.

Your Choice of N10Coffee

Next weigh your beans right before you brew and grind them fresh and at the same time you also want to 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 hot tap water. Add your ground coffee carefully to the centre of the V60 and then once you have done that, create a little well in the middle of the grounds. This is going to be helpful in the next phase, which is the bloom phase, to make sure that we are evenly saturating all the grounds.

Water

You want to make sure you are 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. Make sure your scale is zeroed, start your timer, and immediately start to pour and we are going to gently pour two grams of water per gram of coffee.

So here about 60 grams of water and we want to make sure that we are trying to get all 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 have added your water put the kettle down and grab your brewer and begin to swirl in a circular motion.

What we are trying to do here is make sure that all the water and coffee are nice and evenly mixed. Some people like to do this with a spoon and to stir it together, but in testing, swirling tasted much better, and you're going to 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 are going to let it rest and

Next, we are going to pour the rest of our water in two phases. Even though it's going to be one pretty continuous pour.

Here is what we're trying to do. We are trying to get 60% of our total liquid in, in the next 30 seconds. So, we're going to aim to have 300 grams in total poured into the V60 by one minute and 15 seconds. This phase is critical. When you pour water into a V60 you disrupt that coffee bed. You churn it up a little bit. And it seems to me that in testing, there is an ideal amount of churn. In situations where you don't disturb the bed at all they have 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.

This means that with a smaller V60, if we're brewing just a one cup and say 15 to 250, you 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.

Once you've hit 60% of your total brew weight, you will 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 really, important. What we are going to do now is pour a little slower and keep that cone topped up. We are going to aim to have a 100% of our brew weight in the next 30 seconds.

During this phase we're going to pour gently. We are going to 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 going to 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, but it was also a waste of time. So that is why I'm not a huge fan of taking water from a hot water source and putting it into a cold pouring kettle.

Now, the end when the cone has fully drained out what you want to 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.

. This is our ultimate technique.

Hope you enjoy it.