Are your pourover brews draining too fast? Need to increase your total brew time to boost extractions?
Flick the kettle on, and try out these tips to slow your brews down and tease out more of the good stuff.
First though, we should probably set some parameters for what we're about to do ...
What's a good target brew time for a V60 brew?
In our guide on how to brew V60 coffee, we recommend a brew time of somewhere between 2:45 - 3:30.
But: this is heavily dependant on what V60 recipe you're using.
Whether you're brewing a 1 cup or 2 cup recipe, how light or dark the roast is on the beans, even the specific filters you're using ... all of these things are important in determining what an ideal target brew time (TBT) should be.
Always let your taste buds guide you.
- Astringency / drying finish? You're probably over extracted and need to brew faster.
- Hollow / underwhelming / too sour? You're likely under extracted and need to slow down your TBT.
Time is just there to help you repeat a great brew. Not to dial one in. Don't think of it as a variable, it's a data point.
Alright, now, with that said, let's dig into the top reasons why V60 brews (or any pourovers for that matter) can drain too fast, and what you can do to slow them down.
1. Your grind is too coarse
Just like all brew methods, grind size matters.
With the V60, it really matters.
The big difference between pourover and immersion style brewing is that, with pourover, you're relying on the bed of ground coffee to help you control your total brew time. Everything you'll read in the rest of this post is going to focus around different things you can do to alter that bed of coffee, and how each of these will in turn effect your total brew times and overall extractions.
One of the biggest variables you can change to either slow down or speed up your V60 brews, is grind size.
- To slow down your brew: grind finer.
- To speed up your brew: grind coarser.
Small changes on grind size in an immersion brewer likely won't be quite so noticeable.
But small changes in grind size on a pourover brewer will have a direct correlation with your total brew time, and so too the cup.
2. Pour technique
After grind size, pour technique is the most common problem when troubleshooting tricky brews.
There's so much to unpack about pour technique, there's no way we could cover it all in a blog post.
Things to think about with pouring are:
- Flow rate (how fast/slow you pour).
- Pour height
- Pour pattern
Let's break each of those down just a bit further.
Flow rate:
If you have a fancy coffee scale that can tell you your flow rate in real time, then great: use that as your guide.
If you don't, then time how long a pour takes you, and work out your flow rate in grams per second.
If your flow rate is too fast, you might be causing some of the water to crash through the bed of coffee. This will bring down your total brew time, but it'll also leave you with an uneven and mostly under extracted cup.
Slow up that flow rate and see what happens to your brews. As a guide, aim for a flow rate of about 5g/s.
Pour height:
You might think the higher you pour from the more deeply you disturb the bed, but that's actually not true.
Or rather, it's true up until a point.
Eventually, at a certain height, your stream of water will break up before hitting the slurry, and when you get to that point, you'll actually end up disturbing the bed significantly less.
Why does any of that matter?
Well, the height you pour from directly effects how much agitation you introduce.
More agitation = more fines migration. i.e. more of those fines will end up at the bottom of the bed where they can effect draw down time. But also, more agitation will also increase extraction.
If you ended up reading this blog post because your pourover brews are draining too fast... most likely you feel like your brews are under extracted and therefore that you need to increase total brew time.
But if increased agitation can help you increase extraction, you might not necessarily need to increase your total brew time at all.
The answer might not necessarily have to be more time. I've had great V60s at 2:15 total brew time. It depends on how everything else in the brew plays together.
Pour pattern:
2 common options here are a circular spiral pattern out from the middle to the edges, and a slow and steady centre pour.
Different pourover recipes will call for different pour patterns, but the main thing to understand is that each one will effect the coffee bed differently.
Circle or spiral pours impact the whole of the bed and therefore increase overall agitation. Which in turn can slow down brews.
A center pour only agitates the middle of the bed. This reduces overall agitation and can speed up total brew times.
For a much deeper dive into pour techniques, this video is a fantastic watch:
3. You may need to split your water into more pours
More pours will slow down your total brew time.
This is something we touched on in our recent post top tips for better pourovers.
A higher column of water above the bed will drain faster.
So if you split the same amount of water into more pours, your water column remains lower, and therefore will drain a bit slower.
4. Uneven bed
Water is lazy.
It'll always take the path of least resistance.
If your bed of coffee at the bottom of your brew is uneven, more water will flow through the shallower parts of the bed.
That means that the coffee in the part of the bed with higher flow rate will be more extracted than the coffee in other parts of the bed, and your brew times will be faster than they otherwise would be.
Most likely that's going to show up as either over extraction or uneven extraction in the cup.
So what you want to do here, is slow your brew time down while also getting a more even extraction.
How do you do that?
Try giving your brewer a very gentle swirl just after your finish your final pour.
You'll need to practice this a couple of times to get the feel for it, but really you're aiming to do the least amount of additional agitation possible in order to achieve a flat level bed.
Remember too that you also want to do something repeatable, so that when you nail that banger brew, you'll be able to replicate a similar velocity and length of swirl and get to the same place again.
5. Too much bypass
Water drains MUCH more quickly at the contact points between the filter and the brewer.
If you pour water that hits the sides of the brewer, some amount of that is going to bypass the bed of coffee altogether.
Circular spiral pours are good - but stop just shy of the very edge and avoid pouring water that's more likely to bypass.
If you're getting a lot of bypass, brew times will be quicker and the bypass water will also add to the under extracted / hollow feeling of the cup as you're diluting your brew with straight water.
