Pour Over at Home: The V60 Recipe We Use at the Roastery

The Cleanest Cup You Can Make at Home

Pour over coffee has a reputation problem. The slow pouring, the fancy kettle, the barista taking four minutes to make one cup. It looks like coffee showing off.

Here's the truth. It's one of the simplest brews there is. Coffee in a paper filter, hot water on top, gravity does the rest. No pressure, no plunging, no machine.

And nothing else in your kitchen makes a cup this clean and bright. The paper filter catches the oils and fine particles that make a plunger brew heavy. What lands in your mug is clear, sweet and light on its feet. If a coffee has interesting flavours in it, this is the method that shows them off.

The V60 is the cone most people use. About $15 for the plastic one, and the plastic one is genuinely all you need. Here's exactly how we brew on it.

The V60 Recipe We Use at the Roastery

This is James Hoffmann's one cup method, tweaked at our roastery to suit our blends. Hoffmann is a former World Barista Champion and the closest thing coffee has to a peer reviewed source. His recipe is the backbone. The temperatures, grinds and pour counts below are ours, dialled in for each blend. As written here it's set up for People Everyday, and it makes one solid mug.

Weigh everything. Grams of coffee, grams of water. A scoop of coffee and a splash from the kettle is how you get a different cup every morning. If you don't own a scale yet, it's the best $30 you'll spend on coffee.

Step by Step

1. Rinse the filter. Pop a paper filter in the cone, sit it on your mug or server, and pour hot water through it. This washes out the papery taste and heats everything up. Tip the rinse water out.

2. Add 15g of coffee. Medium grind, about the texture of regular sand. Give the cone a little shake so the bed sits flat.

3. Bloom with 50g of water. Start your timer and pour 50g to wet all the grounds. Give the cone a gentle swirl so nothing stays dry. Now watch it bubble and puff up. Wait until 0:45.

4. At 0:45, pour to 100g. Slow circles, about the size of a 50 cent coin, spiralling out from the centre. Take about 10 seconds over the pour. Don't pour down the sides. That water skips the coffee entirely.

5. Keep pulsing, 50g at a time. At 1:10 pour to 150g. At 1:35 pour to 200g. At 2:00 pour to 250g. Same slow circles every time. The small pours keep the brew hot and the extraction even, which is the whole point of Hoffmann's method.

6. Swirl after the last pour. One gentle swirl so the coffee bed settles flat. A flat bed means the water drains through evenly. No stirring needed.

7. Let it draw down. Done at around 3 minutes. The bed should look flat, not cratered. Grab your mug.

What the Bloom Actually Does

That first small pour isn't a ritual. It's physics.

Fresh coffee is full of CO2 from roasting. When hot water hits the grounds, that gas rushes out, and gas pushing out means water can't get in. Skip the bloom and you're pouring water over grounds that are actively repelling it. Half your coffee extracts, half doesn't, and the cup tastes thin and sour.

The bloom lets the gas escape first. Forty five seconds, then the coffee is ready to brew properly.

Bonus: the bloom is a freshness test. Fresh beans bubble up like a rising loaf. Stale beans just sit there flat. If your bloom does nothing, check the roast date and read how to store your coffee properly.

The Mistakes That Wreck It

Boiling water straight on the grounds. 100°C scorches coffee. Let the kettle sit for 30 seconds first. That gets you to about 94°C, which is the sweet spot for our medium roast. Your kettle matters more than you think here.

Dumping all the water in at once. The V60 rewards slow, steady pouring. Flood it and the water carves channels through the bed, racing through some coffee and missing the rest. Slow circles. That's the whole technique.

Grind too fine. If your brew takes well past 4 minutes and tastes bitter, the water is fighting through the bed. Go coarser. Think water through pebbles versus sand. Finer grind, slower flow.

Grind too coarse. If it drains in under 2 minutes and tastes sour and weak, the water flew through without picking anything up. Go finer.

No gooseneck kettle? Don't let that stop you. A gooseneck gives you more control, but a normal kettle poured slowly and carefully still makes a good cup. Buy the gooseneck when you're hooked, not before.

Dialling It for Each Blend

Hoffmann built his method around light roasts, and it suits People Everyday as written. Our darker blends want a gentler run at it. Darker roasts extract faster, so they get cooler water, a coarser grind and fewer pours. Less agitation, less time in contact, no bitterness.

For No Sleep Till Brooklyn and Hyperdrive, keep the 50g bloom, then do two bigger pours instead of four small ones. Same slow circles, just fewer of them. The brew finishes around 2:30 instead of 3:00.

The V60 is also the best home method for single origins. All those distinct flavours that make an Ethiopian taste nothing like a Brazilian come through clearest in a paper filter.

Why We Trust This Method

Here's something from the production floor. When we're testing a new coffee at the roastery, we cup it first, then brew it as a pour over. The paper filter hides nothing. No oils to smooth things over, no body to bury a flaw behind. If a roast has a problem, the V60 finds it before our customers ever could.

That's exactly why we love it at home too. It's the most honest brew there is. And when the coffee is good, honest is exactly what you want.

One last tip. We don't list a V60 grind at checkout because our AeroPress grind is the same medium grind the V60 needs. Order AeroPress grind and you're set for both brewers.

Ready to pour?
Shop our signature blends, roasted in Perth and ground to order. Or check the full brew guide for step-by-step recipes across every method.