Something I have suspected for a long time. I guess it is time to test it properly.
I always suspected that most of the extraction happens in the beginning of the pour, and very little towards the end. Now I am suspecting that almost all of it happens right at the beginning, and that there is perhaps no extraction at all towards the end. When I pull up the filter and observe the colour of the water dripping, it is fairly transparent—just like regular water.
This means there is no point in continuing a pour-over after a certain point. It becomes a waste of effort and time. If I do get a very strong coffee to my liking, I might as well add water later directly into the extracted coffee.
There is another effect as well. Water that comes through the coffee after the initial extraction tends to be bitter. Today, while trying to observe the colour of extraction towards the end, I incidentally let the steep go on a little longer. Even though I was two grams short on coffee beans for my usual 200 grams of water, the final coffee was slightly bitter. This is the first time I didn’t like my coffee from this batch of beans.
This essentially means that even the transparent-looking water did carry bitter chemicals from the coffee grounds. Which again means that, whether less or more, there is always going to be some bitterness extracted in the last section of water.
Which brings me to another thought.
If my target extraction is, say, 90% of my usual extraction achieved using the first half, one-third, or two-thirds of the water (the exact proportion still needs experimentation), and I then add as much water as I need directly into the extracted coffee, I may actually get a better-tasting cup. It also avoids the wasted time and effort of pouring water into the coffee bed after the initial extraction.
I know that many people already recommend this practice of adding water and diluting later. But those recommendations are usually for situations where a larger volume of coffee is needed to serve many people. My objective here is different: to get a better coffee while minimising effort.
A transparent cup to filter into is one easy way of actually seeing when to stop pouring water into the filter.
Further, even by common sense, it is only in the beginning that the finest coffee comes out. Then why bother pouring more water onto the bed at all?
And if someone does need it, this method also gives a hotter coffee at the end, since hot water is added directly for dilution instead of letting it slowly seep through the bed and cool down in the process.
If temperature uniformity matters, hotter water added directly at the end should also allow better mixing of the high-extraction portion with the later-added water, instead of relying on the cooler liquid that comes through at the end of a pour-over.
I need to try this method and see if my logic holds good.
PS: Some after thoughts of repeating my coffee now with the procedure described above. For the sake of consistency, I used again only 10 grams of beans instead of the 12 that I usually grind. I stopped pour over after 130 grams of water and directly added the remaining hot water into the extracted coffee. The coffee is a bit weak owing to the 2 grams short on beans, but at least it was not bitter or bad otherwise. This confirms bitterness was more influenced by late-stage percolation than by dose strength. I should try again with my regular 12 grams of beans and stopping pour over at different proportions of water and see what comes out further, and better.
Comments