• Beans: “Winter Warmer” medium roast (Indonesia)
  • Roaster: Rise Up Coffee Roasters (Easton, MD)
  • Roast date: 11/23/2023
• Initial:
  • 18g coffee / 250g water (1:13.8) (A little too strong)
  • JX: 20 (60 clicks) (Occasionally bitter)
• Best:
  • 16g coffee / 250g water (1:15.6)
  • Also works well with 20g coffee / 300g water (1:15)
  • JX: 21 (63 clicks)
• Water at 95°C
• Recipe: A Better 1 Cup V60 Technique (see below)

1. Preheat V60, pre-moisten filter, add coffee, and tare scale
2. Make small indentation in center of coffee grounds
3. 0:00: Pour 50g of water to bloom, then return kettle to base
4. 0:10 – 0:15: Gently Swirl
5. 0:45 – 1:00: Pour up to 100g total (40% total weight)
   • Hold kettle for the remainder of the brewing process
6. 1:10 – 1:20: Pour up to 150g total (60% total weight)
7. 1:30 – 1:40: Pour up to 200g total (80% total weight)
8. 1:50 – 2:00: Pour up to 250g total (100% total weight)
9. 2:00 – 2:05: Gently swirl
10. Drawdown should finish somewhere around 2:30-2:40

This was pretty good from the get-go. I used the same recipe that I have been using for Rise Up Organic Maryland Coffee (also a medium roast, but sourced from Central America) but made it a shade stronger, using 18g coffee vs 17g. I think I prefer the flavor at this strength, but definitely wouldn’t want to drink more than 250g at a time, else I’d be bouncing off the walls. 😀

12/4: 17g (1:14.7) had very good flavor without tasting overly strong, but I’m still feeling the caffeine afterward. Might be that this is the ideal strength, but I’m going to try at 16g next time to see how it turns out.

12/11: Tried 17g at grind setting 19 (slightly finer) just as an experiment, and was not crazy about it. It just tasted a little “off”. I wouldn’t expect it to taste much different from setting 20, so maybe the water temperature dropped too much during brewing, or something was off with my technique. I’ll have to decide what I want to do for the next cup. I could continue playing around with grind settings just to see what happens, or I could bump the water temperature a couple degrees higher, or I could just go back to what has been working up to today.

12/13: Went back to grind setting 20 this morning, and brewed 300g water with 20g coffee (1:15), pouring 60g at a time vs 50g. For some reason, 300g seems to taste “better” than 250g in some way I can’t quite put my finger on. I’ve noticed it with other light-to-medium roasts as well, when brewing larger quantities of coffee using the pourover method.

12/18: I seem to be getting cups that are alternately good and alternately bitter/over-extracted. Yesterday was in the former camp, but today was in the latter. Maybe it’s time to try a slightly coarser grind and/or slightly lower water temperature. I’d like to get a little better consistency out of my last few cups from this bag, so I have a starting point for the next time I buy these.

12/19: Tried grind setting 21 today for the first time, and it turned out very nicely, in spite of me having spilled the beans all over the place prior to grinding them. 😮 The cup was smooth with no hints of yesterday’s bitterness. Seems like at setting 20, it was more sensitive to very small variations in water temperature and/or brewing technique. Hoping that 21 will produce consistently good cups. I’ll find out over the next few days. It’s also worth noting that my past several cups (going back a week or so) have all been 300g water with 20g coffee.

12/24: Used up the last of the beans. I brewed several 250g and 300g cups at 1:15.6 and grind setting 21, and they all turned out good. Updated the recipe for posterity.