All Rounder
Pour Over Recipe
The Beauty of simplicity…
I wanted to create one recipe that simply worked for everything. Coffee can be frustrating when you’re adjusting every coffee to fit in such a tight variable range. Many grinders and roasting machines often require very different brew parameters to achieve a consistently tasty cup, some even require completely different styles of brewing.
This All Rounder recipe is meant for your brews to taste good 100% of the time…no ifs, ands, or buts about it! To make things even more enjoyable, this recipe allows you to tweak every single variable, without much limit, if you want to really explore your coffee.
I’m incredibly excited to share this simple and incredibly hard-to-mess-up recipe with you all! Use this as a starting point, & shoot for the stars!
DEVICE
Brewer: Origami Porcelain Medium/02 size (bigger size + material gives you more options).
Filter Shape: Conical.
Filter Type: Any. Even 01/smaller sized filters.
WATER
Water Temperature: 208 Bloom, then declining (down to at least 203).
*In celcius that’s 98 and 95.
*We want to kickstart the extraction by using hotter water for the bloom, which will also cool down rapidly due to the ceramic brewer. For more info about this visit the “Ceramic vs Plastic” section below.
Water Mineral Content: Any.
We prefer Third Wave Water, Lotus Coffee’s Bright & Juicy recipe, Aquacode, and Nashville Water (75mg/L + 68mg/L Alkalinity + 11mg/L Sodium) and surprisingly the (sometimes) very soft (around) 30TDS water of Crystal Geyser (just be sure to measure this with your own cheap TDS meter) for an incredible array of flavor and texture profiles.
RATIO
Coffee Dose: 22 grams.
Water Amount: 366 grams.
Brew Time
~2:00-5:00+
This recipe is VERY forgiving on time. Though time will depend on the grind setting used, grinders burr geometry, filter papers, water filtration process, and kettle pour techniques + agitation.
GRIND
Dont worry too much about grind size. Your coffee should taste great regardless of grind. Just tweak according to your flavor preferences! Update: I have been using just one grind size for all of my coffees and they have been tasting fantastic! I suspect the peak particle size is somewhere around 750-800 microns.
Grinder Micron Size Range: 600’s-800’s.
*EK43 w/ 98mm Titus SSP Brew (burrs touching just before 0) grind size: 9.5-13.
*EK43 w/ stock burrs grind size: ~10-13.5.
*Bentwood grind size: ~590-900 (burr touch at 40). Update: I also have been grinding every coffee at 800 microns (burr touch at 40) and it has worked extremely well for me regardless of brew time.
*Comandante MK3 grind size: ~20-30 clicks.
*Comandante MK4 grind size: ~17-27 clicks.
*Fellow Ode Gen 2 grind size (hard to say based on alignment): Try 4’s-5’s.
*Fellow Ode Gen 1 grind size (hard to say based on alignment): Try 3’s-4’s.
*Baratza Encore grind size: ~14-21.
TDS
TDS Range: Varies depending on grind size, brew time, and sample collection methods used. It’s fairly useless to talk about, but in case you’re curious, here’s my readings.
*VST TDS Range: high 1.30’s to high 1.50’s.
Now…Let’s Get Started!!
0:00 | Bloom 66g water.
Rao spin brewer aggressively 5-10 times to wet bed.
Turn kettle down to 203 degrees (95 celsius). Let it steadily decline as you brew, yet not go under temp.
0:35 | Pour to 160g.
Rao spin brewer gently a few times.
1:10 | Pour to 260g (or as much as your filter would let you if you use a small one and grind fine).
Rao spin brewer aggressively about 5 times to agitate and level bed.
1:50 | Pour to 366g (or as much as filter would let you if you use a small one and grind fine).
Rao spin gently about 3 times to level bed.
Additional Tips & Tricks
Ceramic vs Plastic
I’m often not a fan of higher heat retention in filter brewing. I like ceramic because it absorbs more heat from the water at the beginning, and will start to release heat towards the end which keeps its thermal stability. Think of this like a frozen whiskey ball or the flash-chilling technology Nucleus Coffee Tools released to preserve aroma volatile compounds. Ceramic is doing a similar thing (but at higher temperatures) because it takes a long time to heat up due to its heavier weight. So you are blasting the grounds (directly) with hot water, yet that slurry temperature cools down rapidly once it comes into contact with the ceramic walls. Simultaneously, ceramics thermal conductivity is similar to plastic and also loses temperature at much slower speeds when it’s fully heated. You will never get a slurry as hot as one in a plastic brewer by the end of your brew cycle with typical methods, but i don’t think coffee excels at the hottest possible temperatures, in fact i’ve found using kettle temperatures around 203-206 degrees (95 celsius), post bloom, to often be the sweet spot for what I like to taste out of a coffee when using ceramic and metal brewers. Of course, this varies with a given brewer, its material, and the amount of water being used.
For example, on my modded metal brewer, I love a 208 bloom for about two and a half minutes followed by a 203 degree kettle brewing temperature. But because we’re working with a ceramic brewer, and I don’t want to bloom that long for this brewer (long blooms don’t work well for most brewers, ime), we need hotter water to heat up the ceramic more to get the slurry to be around, or close to, the same temperature as my metal brewer with a long bloom. We could use 210-211 degree water, but then we’d be starting our first post-bloom pour at a much higher temperature, which I personally am not a fan of. So, the simplest things to do would be to shorten the bloom time to just 0:35 seconds (compared to the 2:35 I use on the metal brewer) and the hotter post-bloom pour will actually be reduced in temperature from the thick ceramic, which gets us in the ballpark of what we like. It also is convenient because going from 208 degrees to 203 degrees would be impossible in a typical kettle in only 35 seconds! And if it is possible, you definitely need a more heat-stable kettle…lol!
Brewing coffee with specific goals in mind always requires sacrifices and trade-offs. There are pros and cons to any method, and it takes a skilled brewer to analyze before developing a recipe what they’re after and to asses afterwards what they favored and what they didn’t. It can be a constant game of development, if you so choose. That’s what makes it fun and also what creates great Brew Masters!
Conical vs Flats
I’d imagine many people reading this have already asked themselves “why conical filters?”. Though UC Davis Coffee Center is actively investigating why exactly different brewer geometries, like conical vs flat bottom brewers, offer different flavor attributes, I think most good coffee tasters and decent brewers have an idea of what it tastes like.
When we think of different coffee brewers, we must think of the “mass transfer” process happening where molecules move out of their solid coffee grounds housing, drain down through the brew bed and end up in the end cup. It’s a simple speculation that can get so incredibly complex. We still have yet to have "crystal” clear answers written in stone….But we’re getting there….Most of us have to understand through taste and speculation.
My reasoning for choosing a conical brewer geometry is because of its thicker bed depth and its shape to actively filter out insoluble particles and bitterness via the coffee bed. When you have a thicker bed depth, water spends more time in contact with a greater amount of the coffee bed. You are increasing the water to coffee contact and increases the rate of overall extraction across the brew bed (assuming the coffee dose and water amount is the same). Not only does a thicker bed do this, it also works well to be a natural filter, so the slurry has a higher chance at reaching equilibrium due to the thicker bed, but now it also gets filtered more and more.
Why does coffee bed filtration matter?: It’s speculated that coffees bitterness is related to an insoluble particle, meaning the only way to lessen its concentration in your end cup is to filter it out above. A conical shape will taste cleaner and have less body because of this filtration process (assuming all other variables are held equal).
When we have greater filtration of the brew bed, along with more even water to coffee contact, we are also given a wider sweet spot range across a much wider array of grind sizes.
Even though It’s fairly common for people to say conical brewers are much harder to work with, I think they’re mislead by the brewer geometry itself (certain ribbed brewers can taste terrible with specific brew methods) and probably most importantly, their comparison - It was common to dose higher in flat bottom brewers and grind coarser than the conical brewers on the market at the time when this way being said often. So obviously people would have a much easier time brewing with flat bottoms using higher doses, more water, more agitation, more time, and coarser grinds than brewing with lower doses, less water, less agitation, less time, and finer grinds that give them a MUCH smaller sweet spot range. I think this is where that saying came from.
*this is also a reason why people say brewing ultra-light roasters with lower fines burrs has a tighter sweet spot…They are trapping themselves into using these variables similar to how people brewed with conical brewers in the past. Your sweet spot range is relative to your process, not your grinder.
More About Thermal Stability & Stabilizing Proteins
I find it funny that our industry resorts to using expensive, external tools based on popularity, yet does the complete opposite of what those tools are meant to do. Like brewing with a plastic brewer and ignoring ceramic or similar materials/heavier-weighted brewers but using a flash chilling device below their brew to trap more “aroma volatile compounds” (we’ll talk more about this in a second).
If you’ve ever tried aggressively flash-chiling espresso (while keeping it undiluted) vs gently cooling that espresso over a period of a few minutes, you will notice a massive flavor quality difference. With aggressive flash chilling (i.e. the slurry as a whole, not the stream over time like with these whiskey balls) the coffee tends to taste more bitter and rancid.
I’ve heard that flash chilling is actually retaining flavor components instead of aromatics, which they are actually being lost. I’ve experienced this in Sey’s Brooklyn cafe where they used their own technology to “flash chill” batch brew (keep in mind I believe they are cooling it in stages to preserve flavor, and not all at once). The washed Ethiopian flash chilled cup had no smell whatsoever, yet it was an explosive flavor bomb of florals upon first sip…which VERY quickly declined as it warmed.
When we try to preserve coffee by flash chilling, we need to preserve BOTH aromatics and flavor components. That is how you stabilize a protein.
“Stabilization of protein and protein-like molecules translates into preservation of both structure and functionality during storage and/or targeting, and such stabilization is mostly attained through establishment of a thermodynamic equilibrium with the (micro)environment.” (Victor M Balcão, Marta M D C Vila, “Structural and functional stabilization of protein entities: state-of-the-art”, 2014).
If you put those two espresso shots in milk, the slower chilled one would taste significantly better. What’s incredibly interesting is if you dumped a freshly-pulled hot espresso into milk, it would taste just as good, if not better than the slowly chilled one in my experience. Is this stabilizing a protein in the best way? Reaching a greater equilibrium by stabilizing in milks temperature vs flash chilling with MUCH colder surfaces for the coffee to only become much hotter again? I’m not too sure.
Nucelous Coffee Tools tests, in my opinion, look incredibly inconclusive for a wide range of coffees. It’s also easy to modulate test data, as i’ve heard through the grapevine is all too common. Maybe what we should be doing is paying attention to the brewer MATERIAL we use at the source to trap BOTH aroma compounds (which hasn’t been done well) and other flavor compounds (my experience with slow, incremental flash chilling) by stabilizing proteins better through thermodynamic equilibrium. This is an interesting topic I hope some people will experiment with, as it’s much over my head!
Dosing High For A Wide Sweet Spot
I always keep my dose around this amount as it works very well to be a natural filter of the coffee bed, as the coffee bed filters out insoluble compounds and bitterness. This higher dose leads to an often coarser grind, and cleaner cup with more depth and dimension as opposed to using lower doses and finer grinds. Also, keep in mind higher doses require more water, which will help heat up and stabilize the brewer throughout the brew process while also helping to keep the slurry much hotter compared to lower-dosed/less water brews.
If you’re using coffee from modern, light roasters that operate on Loring-style roasting machines or similar machines, this method also works well for extracting them with 22 gram doses. You may want to grind just a bit finer (not too much) and aim for longer brew times (they should automatically give this to you if you’re using a washed processed coffee from these style of roasters) to extract these coffees more efficiently.
Please don’t down-dose this recipe and expect everything to work the same with smaller amounts. It will not…
Pouring Pattern
This is for the 3x~100g pours after the bloom. Use a similar spiral pattern for the 66g bloom, but obviously with less rotations (the bloom doesn’t matter as much since we’ll be aggressively agitating/Rao spinning afterwards).
Flow Rate: 6-10 mg/Second (I like to aim for around 8).
Although I recommend you to explore, I like to keep my pouring pattern and flow rate the same for every coffee. Here is my pour recipe:
Start in center, spiral pour outward with 5 full rotations until you reach near the outer sides of the brewer.
Now, start spiral pouring toward the center for another 5 full rotations (rotations 5-10).
When you’re at the center around the 10th rotation, stay there and pour for ~2 seconds to increase center agitation and flow rate while kicking up fines.
Now, start your last 3-5 rotations until you reach your end pour weight. You should have made about 13-15 full spiral rotations for each of these ~100g pours.
*all of this should be done in one pour, while aiming to keep your kettle flow rate the same throughout. This takes some practice to do consistently. Also, be sure to check in on yourself over time to make sure you’re not pouring too slowly…This also happens to me from time to time and I need to pour faster.
It should be said your kettle height should be consistent throughout. I see some people like to raise and lower their kettle throughout a pour, which is extremely inefficient towards even extractions.
Brew Time
Please do not associate brew time within a specific time range to prevent under or over extraction. This method was created to make brew time not much of an issue, and your coffee should taste great no matter the time as long as your grind is fairly dialed in to the wide sweet spot grind range.
You may notice one brew is at a different time than another, even though the parameters and coffee were all the same. That is entirely ok! & is part of the joy of conical bypass brewing.
Specifically with this brew method longer brew times give off more sweet cooked-note flavors while shorter brew times give off sharper, more clean-note flavors. If your brew time is fast, you’ll get a different flavor presentation compared to it being slow, but all of the brews should be tasty, that’s the benefit of this method! Just enjoy the experience!
Adapting to Different Roasters Development Styles
Sometimes when brewing certain roasters that develop their coffee slightly more developed than I’m used to, or I know they’re in a higher altitude area where their water boils much lower, I like to lower my kettle temperature to around 197-200 degrees (~91-93 celsius). This removes a muddled or muted flavor profile that comes from higher temps. Even when using a coarser grind it is still noticeable unless the temp is reduced.
Keep in mind I will still be brewing at 208 for the bloom and letting my kettle decline throughout. The tail end pour/s will just be below our previously recommended setting of 203 degrees, where the kettle will start heating the water again unless told not to.
For even more developed roasts, I’d consider dropping the bloom temp to reach closer to that 197-200 degree range faster.
If your brew is on the faster side and your kettle isn’t declining in temp down to this temperature, you can just bloom with slightly cooler water, or you can use two kettles at different temperatures if you don’t mind the hassle. If you’re curious, blind test the two and see what you prefer.
Slow Feeding Your Grinder
Depending on the grinder i’m using and its mechanics, single feeding a couple beans at a time into your grinder (or one bean at a time with the Niche) is an interesting way to taste new flavor profiles. If you want a cleaner cup with less fines this can significantly help or not really help much at all depending on many factors of your grinders build and how it feeds and grinds beans.
With most entry-level home grinders, this can significantly help improve the flavor quality of your cup. On the other hand, it can be fun to avoid this technique if you favor more texture/body and sweetness.
If you’d like to slow feed a hand grinder, you can tilt the grinder while grinding to slow feed the beans into the burrs.
The Joy of Filtration
What separates coffee from nearly every other extraction method for common beverages like wine and tea is that coffee HAS to be ground within a very precise range to extract well and in return, it must be filtered for percolation-style brewing.
The type of filter porosity and thickness determines how the brew will not only extract, but how evenly it will extract depending on the grind size being used. Finer grinds often like thicker filter paper that is less prone to clogging and simultaneously flows slower to avoid channeling/clogging that can come from a faster flow rate. While coarsely ground grinds can favor a filter paper that flows faster to bump extraction in a shorter amount of time and retain more flavor compounds that have not yet evaporated, and the brew can also contain more insoluble compounds that lead to greater texture and sweetness, creating brews full of depth and dimension. BUT coarser grounds can also favor the same filter type as finer grounds if you’re after a much slower brew with more rounded, sweet, cooked simpler flavors.
The choice of these flavor profiles is up to you to explore! Let this brew method guide to to using a wide variety of filter papers rather than new coffee grinders…It’s MUCH more of an affordable way to enjoy the differences in cup profiles by having more or less fines filtered out of your brew. Just like what grinders are doing, but with filtration.
If you’re curious about sieving out fines, I’d advise against it unless you’re brewing a fully immersion brew, without percolation. In my limited experience with sieving I’ve found that sieving often chokes my percolation brews and significantly alters the flow rate more than any grinder on the market could do.
The Joy of Bypass + Minimizing Head Pressure
If you were to try this method on other conical brewers with ribs or smooth-walled ones that don’t allow for much bypass, you will get unwanted flavors and astringency. It is seriously surprising how this specific method hates brewers that offer less bypass, especially smaller + ribbed conical brewers.
Having the ability for head pressure to be minimized by allowing the coffee slurry to bypass out the sides of the brewer, rather than forcing it to work its way downstream, helps to avoid (sometimes) significant astringency and promote cup clarity.
By dosing higher and grinding coarser, this is already controlled much more than low dosing and finer grinding, but combining that with a bypass-prone brewer allows this recipe to have a MASSIVE sweet spot of what tastes great for a wide range of brew times and grind sizes.
Saint Anthony’s Phoenix70 brewer is a perfect example of this style, and why it works so well. Hell, it may even be better than this Origami…Time will tell when I get one! But since this Origami is so popular, I’m so excited to share this recipe! I know a lot of you can use this immediately!
As for bypass, remember…There is beauty in the faults.
Do What You Want
This is a method where you can develop your own techniques. Please don’t feel the need to pay attention to these variables if it prevents you from developing your own! This is what I’ve found that works best for me to be consistent for when I want to introduce a new variable while keeping everything else the same and to help get consistently even and fool-proof extractions, without resorting to dramatic methods.
Remember…
KEEP IT SIMPLE, enjoy the experience, &
HAVE FUN!
Do what you want and who cares if you dont follow every variable if it means youre making tasty cups! Use this guide as a starting point for you to explore coffee in your own way, that pairs well with your own brewing ecosystem!
If you have any questions, email me at connor@pitstopcoffeeco.com or DM @pitstopcoffeeco on instagram!
