The Hario V60 is one of our favourite brewers for pourovers. It consistently produces clean cups with crisp acidity and highlights the complex notes well. It also tends to be quite forgiving of grind size variations. How forgiving? We took to the lab to find out, and it turned out to be a lesson in coffee extraction.
We brewed 3 different coffees – Kelagur Heights Geisha at a light-medium roast, Cauvery Peak at a medium roast and Gungegiri at a dark roast.
The grind sizes we tested out were the standard pourover grind (Kosher salt fineness), espresso grind (fine) and Frenchpress grind (coarse).
The pourover grind was the obvious winner. All cups were clean, balanced and sweet. But the surprise was in the other grinds.
The fine grind brews, while over-extracted (too much contact time with water, extracting everything from the particle of coffee) weren’t undrinkable as we had expected. The Geisha fine grind brewed an almost fruit-juicy cup – hard to drink a lot of, but extremely sweet and also packing a punch of bitterness. The Gungegiri fine grind had elevated smokiness and body, but also a great deal of sweetness.
The coarse grind brews were somewhat weak due to under-extraction (too little contact time with water, extracting only the upfront acid and bright notes), but they were still surprisingly nuanced. The Cauvery Peak was the best cup here, with a lot of sweetness.
Our takeaways from this exercise, apart from a lot of caffeine, were to try out more grinds from the finer part of the spectrum with the V60. On days when we need that punch in our cup, this could be the answer. If you’d like to experiment with your V60 grinds as well and play around with your brew, reach out to us and let’s get the conversation started!