Bigger is Not Always Better

This is another post about coffee. What did you think it was about? Pervert.

In order to really appreciate this post, you’ll first need to watch this video:

As I stated in my last post about coffee, I use pour over. I dabbled a bit in French press and wasn’t im-pressed¹kill me now, but that’s mainly because there is a surprising amount of technique involved in brewing French press, including timing and all that nonsense. Pour over is easy: you just put the grounds in the top thingy and swirl hot water around in it and it makes coffee. Easy, right?

Well, yes and no. Yes, you can make coffee that way, and if you buy good beans and don’t grind them too fine, you’ve basically made a decent cup of coffee. Which is what I’ve been doing for years now. I’ve been purposely “diluting” my coffee because I don’t want to drink too much caffeine (sort of, keep reading); thus, 15g of coffee in my big Powell’s mug, which holds about a pint of liquid. Every so often I would check websites to see the ideal coffee-to-water ratio, and it seemed more or less like I was spot on, except for doubling the water.

In my mind (which, to be honest, works poorly sometimes), adding double the water just meant that I was extracting more coffee. Perhaps not as much caffeine, but perhaps more than you would get in a typical 8oz mug. Right?

Then I started down the James Hoffman rabbit hole. Lots of intensely noodly nerding out about coffee. Things I hadn’t really considered. Using a scale to measure your water! Testing the best scale! Hell, he even has a video about making coffee soda. The man does it all, coffee-wise.

But this most recent video was sort of an eye opener to me. First, because I use a plastic V60 (or whatever cheap equivalent mine is). In the video, James says to heat up your V60 with hot water beforehand for a more even extraction. What! I had never thought of that. He also says to rinse the paper filter; I know this is in part to get rid of the “paper” taste but I’ve never really tasted paper with a dry filter, but whatever, I’ll do it now anyway.

Moreover, that video has a surprisingly detailed time scale for brewing a good pour over, and I just had to try it out. At first, I thought I would scale it up for my 16oz Powell’s mug, my beautiful, beautiful baby. But the calculations meant using around 30g of coffee, which was too much, both for preferred caffeine content, and for my coffee bean rationing, which I try to keep at around 15g/day because specialty coffee is expensive. So I decided, instead, to scale down to an 8oz mug.

This morning I brewed a cup using James’s²I want to go on a brief tangent here: for most of my life I thought you shouldn’t put an ‘s after a word that ended in s, and that it should just be an apostrophe alone. But that’s not the case! An apostrophe without an s is for plural possessives. The difference between “The whale’s day” (singular possessive) and “The whales’ day” (plural possessive). James is singular (as far as I can tell) so you have to put the ‘s even if it means you are saying Jameses. English: very annoying. method and the results were excellent. A much fuller, richer, and nuanced cup of coffee than I was brewing previously. Yes, a large part of that had to do with water and over-extraction, hence the title of this blog post: bigger is not always better.

Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Josh, ‘bigger’ usually refers to comparing the size of things, like, say, ‘That elephant is bigger than a bicycle.’ I think what you mean is ‘More is not always better,’ because ‘more’ usually refers to volume, like, ‘There is more water in this mug than in that mug.'” Well listen here, you little shit. “Bigger is better” and it its inverse are time-honored phrases, plus there’s alliteration in there which people like! Okay! Get off my back!

So anyway, if you brew using a pour over technique, I recommend trying out James’s method. His “pulse” method of water introduction I think is what makes the whole thing work. If anything, it feels more … kind to the coffee. I’m getting a little new agey here, but one of the things I genuinely appreciate about making coffee in the morning is how it feels like a little ceremony, one that involves patience and repetition, and one where it honestly feels like being kinder to the beans makes for a better tasting coffee. I like to think that concept can be extrapolated to the world in general.

• 1
  kill me now
• 2
  I want to go on a brief tangent here: for most of my life I thought you shouldn’t put an ‘s after a word that ended in s, and that it should just be an apostrophe alone. But that’s not the case! An apostrophe without an s is for plural possessives. The difference between “The whale’s day” (singular possessive) and “The whales’ day” (plural possessive). James is singular (as far as I can tell) so you have to put the ‘s even if it means you are saying Jameses. English: very annoying.