Rediscovering the known - Filter Coffee

Growing up in Germany, filter coffee used to be pretty much the only way to make coffee at home.

Filter papers, ground coffee, and water dripping through the coffee to create a nice pot of coffee.

Most people will be somewhat familiar with filter coffee, and while I can't find any pictures from our 90s kitchen, this is how it might have looked.

90s filter coffee machine used at home

When I got older, my parents replaced our filter coffee machine with a more automatic machine (pre-made pads that brew a quick cup), and it was two things: 1) an upgrade for ease of use and 2) a downgrade for taste.

It now only took seconds to make a coffee with a little sachet of pre-ground coffee compared to the minutes it took to prepare a batch of filter coffee, but the taste wasn’t as good.

My first own machine was one of these, eventually upgrading to a french press, a fully automated brewer and then a Moka pot.

classic Moka pot coffee maker

Whenever I go to a cafe, however, I look for a filter coffee; a filter coffee from a machine will do.

It's just so clean and smooth, easier not to screw up, and the clarity brings out the flavour when drinking it without milk, which I do.

My absolute favourite way to drink coffee.

Particularly in coffee shops in Australia and New Zealand, where large espresso machines are calibrated to produce strong espressos that pair well with milk in a cappuccino. Drinking them as long blacks (espresso + hot water), without milk, is often quite unpleasant (unless the coffee shop is really, really good).

At home, however, I stuck to the Moka pot because of the simplicity of not having to buy a big filter machine or an espresso machine.

For the longest time, that is.

I switched to filter coffee at home about a year ago and feel like I've rediscovered something. I like the setup so much, I thought I'd share it.

How I make coffee at home these days

Being somewhat of a minimalist, I don't like the idea of owning a lot of stuff, especially not the big, bulky stuff. This kept me from buying a simple filter machine like a Moccamaster for years.

popular Moccamaster filter coffee machine

I had heard of the Hario V60 but was intimidated by it and worried that it would take too much time to make coffee with it every day. It sure produces great coffee, but has kind of a steep learning curve.

Harios famous V60 filter brewer

Then I found this hybrid thing, it's a Hario V60, but has a little switch to let coffee through or not. The experts claimed it would be easier and more consistent to brew good coffee with.

Hario V60 + switch to simplify brewing even more

The thing is super small, and I needed almost no other gear, so I was sold.

In the most basic setting, it works like this:

1. Add a filter to the brewer

2. Add ground coffee and hot water, and let it "steep" for some time

3. Open the switch to pour out coffee

This is very similar to a french press, but the coffee gets run through a filter before you drink it, making it just a little cleaner and smoother.

This, however, is just the most basic setting, and there are an endless number of parameters that have the potential to unlock even more flavour.

Scratching the surface

Almost a year after I started to make filter coffee at home and improving my skills, I visit a local cafe and to my surprise find that they offer V60 filter coffee. I hardly ever visit cafes, so I order one.

My expectations were low - I've had crappy filter coffee before, but by this, I was absolutely blown away.

It was a fragrant cup, clear like tea, fruity, complex and delicious, but still coffee.

My first thought was holy shit, that barista must be orders of magnitude better than I am, brewing such a cup, and maybe he was.

On the way out, I take a look at the beans and find one of the likely reasons for this incredibly tasty coffee. A 200g bag of Ethiopian beans that cost NZD $40.

expensive but good coffee

Aside from good beans, however, there are so many other parameters that will influence how a filter coffee tastes: softness of your water, bean freshness, bean roast level, bean grind size, grind particle size distribution, water temperature, water pour height, steep time, and number of pours, just to name a few.

Like with anything, the more time you spend doing something, the more you learn how little you know. Same with filter coffee.

Now that I know what's possible, I'm hooked to learn enough to be able to one day make a batch of that $40 coffee at home. Before I buy a bag, though, I'd better practice not stuffing things up.

If I grind the beans too coarse, it could lead to under-extraction of the coffee, resulting in a sour, weak, or bland cup. Grind too fine, however, and I run the risk of making it all bitter, killing these fruity flavour notes.

Endless ways of screwing up here, and every coffee has it’s own kind of recipe to make.

Blueberry coffee

I'm not quite in the league of $40 coffee bags yet, but in a recent attempt to dial in a new pack of beans, I managed to do quite well.

AI, of course, played a role here, and I found that Gemini is quite good at helping you dial in coffee. I give it an image of the bag of beans I bought, tell it the equipment that I have, the age of the beans, and the directions I want things to go.

In this case, the label said blueberry jam and so I asked for a clean fruity cup to bring out these flavours and with just two iterations, I managed to get it dialled in to near perfect.

The brewed coffee smells like a bowl of blueberries, but has this deep interesting coffee taste.

coffee taste profiles

An experienced barista would have been able to figure it out with just pure experience. Still, as a relative novice, it was pretty cool to tap into this crowd wisdom and dial in a great cup with very little iteration.

For those of you who know even less than I do, here's my recipe:

1. Grind the beans to medium fine (28 clicks on my 1Zpresso J grinder)

2. Boil some filtered water (i don't have a temperature-controlled kettle, but the gooseneck kettle has made it so much better, since it restricts the flow rate when you pour and agitates the coffee less)

3. Add the ground coffee to the Hario Switch (into the filter paper)

4. Open the switch and pour in 60 grams of water in a circular motion (don't agitate the ground coffee too much)

5. At 30s close the switch and pour in the remaining water (240g total, so add 180g). Try to do this slowly so that you're finished at 1m

6. At 1m 45s, open the switch and let the coffee drain

This sounds like a lot of work, but once you've done it a few times, it's actually quite automatic, and the resulting coffee is totally worth it. In todays stressful lives, there is beauty in taking time to craft something good.

honing my skills at home

This got me thinking what it would take to get to that perfect cup even faster, more easily accessible for people.

I was tinkering with a little price comparison app for New Zealand specialty coffee and so I added a feature to suggest how to brew particular beans.

It’s just a little prototype for myself, but maybe there are some coffee-lovers out there who find it useful.

https://coffee.learnedlate.com/