The Nonesuch Pourover Guide

While we enjoy coffee brewed every kind of way at Nonesuch HQ, there’s nothing we love more than a good pourover (V60 style). Often spoken of with a kind of mystique, pourover brewing is nothing more than just manual drip brewing: at its core, it’s brewed in roughly the same way as the ubiquitous coffee pot permanently domiciled on counters in homes and break rooms across the United States.

We say roughly, though, as pourover brewing offers much more precision compared to the typical coffee pot. That precision is – despite the aforementioned mystique – also fairly easy to achieve. Read on to learn a little more about our approach to pourover brewing, or skip ahead to the recipe.

The equipment you’ll need

You will need the following to get started with brewing pourovers:

A coffee grinder (ideally a burr grinder);
A scale that can measure grams (and ideally tenths of grams, though an ordinary kitchen scale that measures grams will suffice – the tenths measurement is more useful for measuring coffee itself);
A kettle (ideally a gooseneck kettle);
A dripper;
A vessel for brewing your coffee;
A filter;
A kitchen probe thermometer (unless you are using a temperature-controlled kettle);
A timer;

For context, at Nonesuch HQ, we use a Fellow Ode (V1) grinder, a Hario pourover scale, a Hario Buono enamel kettle, an Origami size 1 ceramic dripper, an Origami Aroma server, Origami size CUP2 triangular paper filters (though these are essentially Cafec filters, and we also like Hario filters), and a Thermapen thermometer. While we might have different recommendations for someone looking to build their first pourover setup or for people looking to upgrade, we do feel that everything fits our needs well.

If you have a tight budget, we do think that you can pare back your setup if needed. In the old days – long before home roasting and Nonesuch – we used an inexpensive Hario ceramic hand grinder, an standard digital kitchen scale, and water from an electric kettle left off the boil for a few minutes and regularly brewed great cups of coffee. It may be harder to diagnose issues with your cup and you might not brew as consistently, but you can still achieve great results without spending too much on your first pourover setup.

A note regarding water quality

Several years back, coffee brewers had an epiphany: if coffee is mostly water, doesn’t the water quality have a profound effect on the flavor of the finished cup? This led to a number of debates and conversations, and an entire subset of brewers emerged championing filters, distilled water, and mineral packets as solutions for brewing the perfect, consistent cup of coffee.

We don’t dispute the chemical explanation for any of this – these solutions take the water chemistry aspect of brewing out of the equation entirely by making that aspect of brewing truly consistent from cup to cup. That being said, we tend to think that – in many cases – such solutions are unnecessary.

At Nonesuch HQ, we use unfiltered New York City tap water for every coffee we brew. In some ways, this is simply due to the fact that the municipal water in Brooklyn has a neutral flavor and a good blend of minerals for extracting coffee. That being said, when we were living in Northwest Arkansas (and way before Nonesuch existed), we made coffee using tap water that had stronger chemical flavors, sometimes had unfortunate lake flavors, and had less-than-ideal mineral concentrations for brewing … and still managed to brew pretty good cups of coffee (we needed hotter water there than we do in NYC). And in London – a city where ’hard water‘ doesn’t even begin to describe the mineral concentrations of its water – I’ve had several lovely pourovers, all brewed with municipal water.

This is all to say that, in many cases, you can still brew a good cup of coffee with less-than-ideal water, but you’ll need to adjust grind size, brewing temperatures, ratio, and brewing time (though this is largely a factor of the aforementioned variables) to do so.

Note that in the above statements we say in many cases and not in all cases. Depending on where you live, a bare minimum of water filtration could be a necessity if your water safety is in question, and in some areas, it really is challenging to consistently brew a good cup of coffee using municipal water due to the combination of chemical flavors and mineral contents. We do have several customers we’ve chatted with that live in areas with less-than-ideal water (think desert regions of the US) who add mineral packets to distilled water and love the results. We simply recommend that you first try to brew using your local water (assuming that it’s safe to do so) and adjusting variables like grind, dose, and temperature before reaching for an expensive solution to fix your water.

A note regarding pourover technique

When we were first roasting coffee on the stove during the pandemic, we tried a lot of different pourover techniques. Eventually, our favorite method was a variation on Matt Winton’s method, which shares a lot in common with Tetsu Kasuya’s 4:6 method. Over the years, we’ve adapted the technique to make a process that suits our needs (pours to numbers that are easier to remember, manual agitation since the height-based pouring approach didn’t work so well for us. etc.).

All that being said, we’d recommend trying a lot of different methods and seeing which one works best for you. Popular methods include techniques from James Hoffman, Lance Hendrick, Scott Rao, and – of course – the basic Hario method. Depending on circumstances, one of these methods could work much better for your setup than the one we outline (though we can say our method works reliably with our roasting style when brewed in New York City).

We also want to emphasize that while technique is important, there’s a psychological aspect to doing anything, and the technique that works best for you may end up being the one that comes most naturally to you. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t want to focus closely on brewing, you might do better with methods that involve fewer pours. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys the attentive daily rhythm of brewing, you might do better with more complex methods involving many pours and waiting for specific water temperatures. We do encourage you to try out a variety of different methods and approaches to figure out what works best for you, as it may differ widely from any of these recommendations (and please don’t hesitate to share a recipe with us!).

A note regarding filter rinse and agitation

We read a number of tutorials about making pourovers before we wrote this guide, and many of them mentioned rinsing the filter prior to brewing. The reasons given often mentioned washing away papery flavor, ensuring that the filter established its shape, and warming up your brewer and vessel so that it lost less temperature once you started brewing.

We can’t speak to every reason above – though we can say that we’ve never tasted papery flavor in a coffee that came from any of the filters we buy – but we can say there’s a much simpler reason for rinsing your filter: it generally will improve the flow rate of your brewer. We recommend a prerinse for this simple reason.

Agitation is a bit trickier, and it isn’t something we recommend for every coffee. In short, agitation helps to extract the grounds in a pourover more evenly by exposing grounds at the bottom of the bed that may not have been in contact with water as much as the grounds above. This sounds like a good thing; however, for some coffees, it can lead to more volatile compounds to extract in higher concentrations than they might otherwise, leading to a worse overall cup. In our brewing notes (those QR codes on the back of every bag we sell), we identify (somewhat inconsistently, though we’re working to improve that!) the coffees that we think benefit from agitation.

For agitation, we like to stir using two chopsticks held firmly together. It’s an old trick used for making tempura batter, and we find that it allows us to reach the bottom of a triangular filter more effectively than a spoon. Once we got used to the method, we also found that chopsticks had a lower risk of tearing paper filters.

A lot of methods alternately use a high kettle pour – the idea is that gravity itself agitates the grounds. This can be an effective alternative to manual agitation, though it involves getting the pour height correct. Basically, you should aim to pour from as high a height as you can without creating any upward splashing from the water line – the upward splashing means that the pouring action isn’t reaching the depth of the grounds themselves. We will say that we find manual agitation to be more effective overall, though this method can work well if you find manual agitation clogs your filters.

Our pourover recipe

Note that the following method uses 300mL water heated to 196 °F, coffee ground to ~800 µm, and a 1:15 brewing ratio of ground coffee to water. You can adjust each of these variables to affect the cup profile as outlined in the note below. Depending on your brewing circumstances, you may enjoy your cup more if you agitate the grounds – we recommend doing that immediately after the second spiral pour to 200 grams.

If you need help identifying the micron size of your grinder, we recommend starting with this guide – it likely isn’t perfect, but it is quite comprehensive and was in the ballpark for every grinder we tested it against.

Set up your brewer and filter.
Fill a kettle with water and heat to 198 °F.
Grind 20 grams of coffee to ~800 µm.
Once the water has been heated, pour ~50 grams of water into empty paper filter. Aim to wet the entire filter. Let the water drain, then discard water. Add grounds to the filter, shaking the filter to create an even bed of grounds.
Allow kettle to cool down to 196 °F. Put your brewer on a scale and tare.
Start a timer and pour ~45 grams of water over the grounds.
When the timer reaches 0:30, begin a slow spiral pour, starting with small circles at the center of the grounds and increasing the circumference of your pour as the water line rises. Stop pouring once the total weight of water is 100 grams.
Begin a second spiral pour once the timer reaches 1:30, starting in the center of the grounds and making bigger circles as the water line rises. Stop pouring once the total weight of water is 200 grams. If you like to agitate your grounds, stir the grounds delicately for about 10 seconds.
Begin a final spiral pour once the timer reaches 2:30, starting in the center of the grounds and increasing your circumference as the water line rises. Stop pouring once the total weight of water is 300 grams.
Wait for coffee to drain. We find that this generally happens once the timer is between 3:00 and 3:30. If your brewing time is faster or slower than this and you find the cup sour (too fast) or muddy (too slow), you may need to adjust your grind size.
Remove the brewer (or filter, depending on your setup) once all the water has drained. Stir the coffee and serve.

Brew adjustments

You can adjust the following settings to change the overall character of the brewed cup. Be advised that each of these will have an effect on the total brewing time, so it’s something to keep in mind as you make adjustments. Also keep in mind that the effects outlined below are subjective and partially dependent on technique – we’d recommend that you keep your own notes on how these variables affect coffee flavor.

Grind

In some ways, grind has a fairly simple relationship to coffee extraction: a finer grind leads to more extraction because there’s more surface area exposed to water. In many cases, a finer grind will often enhance flavors and bitterness while a coarser grind will enhance acidity. Sounds simple, right?

The issue is grind also has an effect on brewing time – it takes water a bit longer to get through a bed of fine grounds than it does a bed of coarse grounds. Because of this, we recommend you grind for your brewing time first and then make small adjustments from there, going finer if your cup is too acidic or lacks flavor and going coarser if the cup tastes flat or is too bitter.

Dose

As with grind size, you can likely intuit how dosage affects coffee at a chemical level: a higher dosage leads to higher extraction. In our experience, increasing dosage produces a cup with stronger overall cup flavors. In particular, increasing dosage seems to produce more body and sweetness and can eventually mask more nuanced cup flavors.

We recommend dosing up if your coffee is watery or needs more flavor – especially sweetness – and dosing down if your coffee seems too flavorful or muddled or has too much body. While dosing up increases brewing time and dosing down decreases brewing time, we find the overall effect is negligible when the adjustment involves fewer than a couple of grams.

Of course, rather than adjusting dosage, you could stick with a dosage and simply increase or decrease the volume of water in the recipe for the same net effect, though do keep in mind that this can have a slightly larger effect on total brewing time than adjusting dosage.

Water Temperature

Coffees brewed with hotter water will extract more solids, often leading to more lively acidity and increased bitterness; in some cases, these two can combine in a way that increases perceived astringency. Due to this relationship, we recommend only adjusting water temperature after making adjustments to grind and dose, adjusting temperature slightly up if your cup is lacking acidity. Lower temperatures are also helpful for darker roasts to control bitterness, and – in our experience – can also be helpful to preserve floral characteristics for delicate coffees (e.g., some washed Ethiopian coffees).