The recipe to start from fits in one line: 15 g of coffee ground medium-fine, 250 g of water between 92 and 96 °C (198 to 205 °F), a 30 second bloom pouring twice the weight of the coffee, the rest in slow circles, everything finished between two and a half and three minutes. That is the ratio Hario gives for its own V60, one gram of coffee to every sixteen and a half of water, and it is where you begin with any coffee at all.
The recipe is the easy part. What went wrong in your first week is almost certainly this: on the second brew you changed the grind, on the third you changed the dose as well, on the fourth you poured faster because it was taking too long, and by then there was no way of knowing which of the three had ruined the cup. A V60 returns exactly what you give it, with precision, and the confusion is part of what you gave it.
We sell the V60, so read us with a hand on your wallet. Which is why the part that does not suit us is here too: without a scale and without a decent grinder, twenty euros well spent on a dripper leaves the problem exactly where it was.
The starting recipe
This is the recipe to hold still for at least a week, changing nothing except the grind.
- Coffee: 15 g, medium-fine, like sea sand or coarse cooking salt. On a Comandante C40 a starting point many people use sits around 25 clicks.
- Water: 250 g in total, between 92 and 96 °C (198 to 205 °F). If your tap water tastes of chlorine or runs very hard, use a low mineral bottled water, because coffee is 98 per cent water.
- Bloom: 30 g of water, twice the weight of the coffee, and 30 seconds of waiting.
- Following pours: the rest in two or three goes, slow, in circles.
- Total time: around two and a half minutes for Hario, and under three and a half in any case.
Change one thing at a time, and make it the grind
This is the rule that separates learning from going in circles, and it is the part worth taking away if you take away nothing else. You change one variable per brew, and the first one is always the grind. Dose, water, temperature and time stay where they are until the cup pleases you, and only then do you touch anything else.
The reason is arithmetic rather than dogma. Change two things and the cup gets better, and you have learned nothing: you cannot tell which one did it, or whether one of them made things worse while the other rescued it. Change one thing and the cup gets better, and you own that piece of knowledge for good. A week of brews with a single moving variable teaches more than a month of improvising, and it is the shortest route we know from a bad cup to a repeatable one.
What you actually need, and what can wait
The essential kit is shorter than it looks. You need the dripper, and the ceramic V60 from Hario costs €20 in the one cup size and €24 in the two: ceramic is heavier than plastic and wants warming first, but it holds the heat through the brew instead of stealing it from the coffee. You need cone filters in the right size, and the Kinto cotton and paper filters at €5 are excellent paper: the four cup one fits the V60 in size 02, which is the two cup dripper.
Then there are two things people treat as accessories that are nothing of the sort. A scale with a timer, because by eye the dose is out by two or three grams and on fifteen grams that is twenty per cent: the Rhino at €49 weighs up to three kilos to a tenth of a gram and has the timer built in, while the Timemore Basic 2.0 sits at €70. And a grinder, because supermarket pre-ground is set for a moka pot and in a V60 it lets the water through without extracting anything. The Comandante C40 Nitro Blade starts at €270 and is the choice you never make twice, though any burr grinder, even entry level, beats any blade grinder.
What you can put off without guilt is the gooseneck kettle, which exists to pour thin and controlled and can be replaced at the start by a small jug and some patience, and the thermometer: bring the water to the boil, let it stand off the heat for forty seconds, and you are inside the right window.
The bloom: the thirty seconds that decide the rest
Freshly roasted coffee is full of carbon dioxide, which keeps leaving the beans for days after roasting. When hot water arrives on the grounds, that gas escapes all at once, swells the bed into a dome and opens channels of air: the water that follows travels down the channels instead of through the coffee, and what lands in the cup is a patchy extraction, watery in places and bitter in others.
The bloom defuses the problem before it starts. You pour twice the weight of the coffee, the minimum to wet all of it, give the dripper a small swirl to make sure no dry grounds are left around the edges, and wait thirty seconds while the dome rises and settles again. A coffee that raises no dome at all is telling you it is old, and no technique recovers that. The reasoning behind all of this is set out at length in our guide to coffee extraction, which is the theory behind every line on this page.
How to pour: the centre, the circles, the rim
- Put the filter in the dripper and wet it through with hot water, both to rinse the paper taste away and to warm the ceramic. Throw that water out of the cup before you carry on.
- Add the ground coffee and level it with a tap on the dripper, because a crooked bed extracts crookedly.
- Bloom: 30 g of water starting at the centre and widening in a spiral, then a swirl of the dripper and thirty seconds of waiting.
- First pour: climb to around 150 g in slow concentric circles, starting at the centre and stopping short of the paper rim. Water that touches the paper runs down without meeting any coffee, and that is wasted water diluting the cup.
- Second pour: reach 250 g when the level has dropped by about half, never letting the bed go completely dry between pours.
- Let it drain. At the end the bed should be flat and even: if it has a crater in the middle or a high ring of coffee around the edge, pour closer to the centre next time and with less force.
Watery, bitter, running fast, stalling
Five symptoms, five corrections, one at a time.
- It comes out watery, almost a tea. The water passed through without taking enough coffee with it. Grind finer, and if the total time sits under two minutes, that is the signal confirming the diagnosis.
- It comes out bitter and dry in the throat. The water extracted for too long. Grind coarser, and check the water was not poured straight off the boil.
- It runs through too fast and finishes in a minute and a half. Grind too coarse, or pours violent enough to dig into the bed. Grind finer and pour more gently, one change at a time.
- It stalls and will not come down, past four minutes. Grind too fine, with the fines blocking the paper. Grind coarser, and if the grinder has blades, the problem is the grinder rather than your hand.
- It comes out different every time with the same numbers. Almost always the grinder failing to hold its setting, or the coffee changing from one bag to the next. Run three identical brews back to back before you conclude anything.
Which coffee for your first brews
Filter is the method that shows everything a coffee has to say, and at the start it pays to choose one that has something to say without being extreme. A washed Central American or East African, roasted with filter in mind, gives you a clean cup where you can recognise the changes you make: among our single origins that is the road we point beginners towards. Blends built for espresso work less well in a V60, because their dense sweetness is designed for a pressure that is not there. If you are still unsure what to expect in the cup compared with espresso, the difference is told in filter coffee and espresso.
When the V60 is the wrong tool for you
Here is the part that does not suit us. A V60 on its own solves nothing: it is a ceramic cone with spirals inside, and all the control it promises is exercised by whoever pours. Bought without a scale and without a decent grinder, it leaves you exactly where you were, with the added feeling of having made a bad purchase. If right now you can afford only one of those three things, buy the grinder and carry on making coffee the way you already make it: it will give you more back.
And if the idea of buying three things puts you off entirely, there is a shorter road. The AeroPress Original, €59, forgives a great deal more: you decide the contact time by closing the plunger, the grind can be well off without ruining the cup, and what comes out is clean and full. It gives a different cup from the V60, which stays more transparent and more articulate, but it is a good cup obtained with far fewer chances of getting it wrong.
Questions and answers
How much coffee do you need for one V60?
Fifteen grams of coffee to 250 g of water, the ratio Hario gives, which works out at roughly one gram to every sixteen and a half. From there you scale up or down keeping the ratio: 20 g of coffee to 330 of water, 25 to 415.
What grind size does a V60 need?
Medium-fine, with a texture close to sea sand or coarse cooking salt. It is coarser than espresso and finer than French press, and it stays the first thing to correct when the cup does not convince you.
Why does my V60 coffee come out watery?
Because the water went through too fast without extracting enough, and nine times out of ten the cause is a grind that is too coarse. The total time confirms it: under two minutes and you are almost certainly there.
Do you really need a gooseneck kettle?
No, not at the start. It helps a great deal with pouring thin and staying away from the rim, but with a small jug and a bit of calm you can make honest brews. The scale, on the other hand, is hard to replace.
Filter is the method that showed us how far one coffee can sit from another, and it is still the one we reach for when we want to know what a new lot really has to say. The first brew that comes out right is the one where you finally held every variable still except one, and technique has very little to do with it.
The ceramic V60 in the shop, one cup or two: start there, with fifteen grams and a scale next to you.