How to brew a better pour-over at home

A good pour-over is one of the most rewarding ways to make coffee at home. It's cheap to set up, quick once you get the hang of it and shows off a coffee's flavour more clearly than almost any other method. It's also easy to get wrong. Here's the recipe we teach, plus how to fix the most common problems.

What you'll need

• A pour-over dripper (V60, Kalita or similar) and paper filters
• Freshly roasted beans, ideally used within a month of roasting
• A burr grinder, since blade grinders make uneven grounds that brew unevenly
• A kitchen scale and a timer
• A kettle; a gooseneck kettle helps a lot but isn't essential

Start with water

Coffee is mostly water, so this matters more than people expect. Delhi tap water is hard and full of minerals that make coffee taste dull or chalky. Use filtered water. If you have an RO purifier, mixing RO water with a little bottled mineral water gives you something closer to what cafés use.

Heat it to just off the boil, around 92 to 96°C. If you don't have a thermometer, let a boiled kettle rest for about thirty seconds.

The recipe

Our everyday starting point is 15 g of coffee to 250 g of water, a ratio of about 1:16.

1. Grind 15 g of coffee to medium-fine, roughly like table salt.
2. Rinse the paper filter with hot water to remove the papery taste and warm the dripper. Throw that water away.
3. Add the coffee, shake it level and put everything on your scale. Zero it.
4. Bloom. Pour about 40 g of water, just enough to wet all the grounds, and wait 30 to 45 seconds. Fresh coffee will bubble as it releases gas.
5. Pour the rest slowly in small circles, keeping the water level steady, until the scale reads 250 g.
6. Let it drain. The whole brew should finish between 2:30 and 3:30.

Swirl, pour and taste before you add anything.

Troubleshooting by taste

• Sour, thin or sharp? It's under-extracted. Grind finer, or use slightly hotter water.
• Bitter, dry or harsh? It's over-extracted. Grind coarser, or pour a little faster.
• Weak but not sour? Use more coffee: try 16 or 17 g for the same water.
• Brew taking over four minutes? Your grind is too fine or your pouring is too aggressive and clogging the filter.

Change one thing at a time. It's tempting to adjust everything at once, but then you'll never know what fixed it.

Small habits, big difference

Weigh instead of using scoops; beans vary in size, and a scoop of light roast weighs differently from a scoop of dark. Grind just before brewing. Store beans in an airtight container away from sunlight, not in the fridge.

Once the basics feel easy, try the same coffee at different ratios and notice how it changes. That's when brewing stops being a chore and becomes the best part of your morning.

Want to learn this with a barista beside you? Brew Better at Home covers pour-over, Aeropress and French press in one morning. Or let us do the work. Our V60 of the Week rotates through a different Indian single-origin every week.