How to Brew with a Hario V60
Twenty grams of coffee, 320 grams of water, finished inside three minutes. The V60 gives you more control than any other dripper, which is another way of saying it will punish a careless pour.
At a glance
- Coffee : water
- 1:16
- Active time
- 2 min
- Total time
- 5 min
- Makes
- 1 large cup
- Serve
- Hot, straight away
- Kit
- V60 + gooseneck kettle
Ingredients
Note: If you change the dose, keep the ratio. 15 g needs 240 g of water, 25 g needs 400 g.
Method
-
Rinse the filter
Fold the seam, sit the paper in the cone and pour hot water through it until it is soaked. This washes out the papery taste and warms the dripper and the carafe at the same time.
Tip the rinse water away. Leaving it in dilutes the brew.
-
Add the coffee and make a well
Tip in the 20 g, tap the dripper flat, then press a shallow dip into the middle with a finger. The well helps the bloom wet the whole bed instead of running off the peak.
-
Bloom with 40 g
Pour twice the coffee weight, so 40 g, starting in the middle and spiralling out. Give the dripper a gentle swirl to wet any dry patches.
The bed will rise and bubble as carbon dioxide escapes. Fresh coffee blooms dramatically; coffee over a month old barely moves, which is a useful freshness test.
Bloom 40 seconds -
Pour to 200 g
Pour in slow concentric circles out to about a centimetre from the paper, never onto the paper itself. Water that touches the filter runs straight down without passing through coffee.
Stop at 200 g on the scale and let it draw down a little.
-
Pour to 320 g and swirl
Add the rest in the same way. When the pouring is done, give the whole dripper one gentle swirl to settle the grounds into a flat bed. A bed with coffee stranded up the sides has stopped extracting.
It should finish dripping between 2:30 and 3:00 from the first drop.
Finish by 3:00
Why this works
The V60's hole is large and the ribs are tall, so the dripper itself barely restricts the flow. Almost everything about the brew is set by your grind and your pour, which is exactly why it is both the most controllable cone and the easiest to get wrong.
The bloom is not ceremony. Roasted coffee holds carbon dioxide, and fresh coffee holds a lot of it. That gas physically pushes water away from the grounds, so a bed that has not degassed extracts unevenly and tastes thin and sour. Forty seconds releases most of it.
The spiral pour and the final swirl both exist to keep the bed flat. Water takes the easiest route through a bed of coffee, and a high-sided crater gives it a shortcut down the paper. That is channelling, and it produces sour and bitter in the same cup because some grounds get far more water than others.
Timing is the diagnostic. Under two minutes means the grind is too coarse and you will taste it as sour and thin. Past four means too fine, and it will be bitter and drying. Adjust the grind, not the pour.
Variations
- Bigger batch: 30 g to 480 g in the same shape, with the bloom at 60 g.
- Iced: brew onto 100 g of ice in the carafe and cut the water to 220 g, keeping the coffee at 20 g.
- Softer cup: drop to 1:17 and grind one step coarser.
Made it?
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Questions
My V60 drains in 90 seconds. What is wrong?
The grind is too coarse. Go one step finer and brew again. If it is still fast, check you are not pouring water directly onto the paper, which lets it bypass the coffee entirely.
Why does mine stall and take five minutes?
Too fine a grind, or too many fines from a blade grinder. Go a step coarser. Stirring the bed hard during the pour also compacts it, so swirl rather than stir.
Ceramic, glass or plastic?
Plastic holds heat best in practice, oddly enough, because it has almost no thermal mass to steal from the brew. Ceramic is better once preheated and it is what most people prefer to look at. Both work.
Do I have to rinse the filter?
Yes for Hario papers. Unrinsed they add a distinct papery flavour, and the rinse preheats the brewer at the same time. It costs ten seconds.