Brew Guide

The following guidelines apply to all brewing methods except espresso and cold brew:

• Freshness: Let your freshly roasted coffee rest for at least 3-4 days before brewing. We generally like coffee best between 10-21 days after the roast date. It will taste good up until about a month after roasting. For more on freshness and storage, click here.

• Water: Use filtered or bottled spring water, never distilled or reverse osmosis (unless you are re-mineralizing). To learn (a lot) more about water, click here.

• Water temperature: Use boiling water. We promise it won’t burn your coffee! If a coffee was burned in the roaster, boiling water will make that burned flavor more apparent, but if it wasn't burned in the roaster, it will just give you better flavors faster. For more on brew temperature, click here.

• Grind: Grind your coffee just before brewing.

• Brew ratio: Start with a water to coffee ratio (or 'brew ratio') of about 17 to 1. For example, you could brew a V60 pour over using 374g of water and 22g of coffee (374/22 = 17). We tend to prefer drip methods (V60/Chemex/Kalita) to be closer to 17 to 1 ratio (or even higher, 18 or 19 to 1 are also great), and immersion methods (AeroPress, French Press) to be closer to 15 to 1 ratio, but this will vary depending on your grinder and your water. In non-metric speak, this is about 12 oz. of water to 0.75 oz. of ground coffee.

• If you don't have a scale, a good estimate to go by is 2 tablespoons of ground coffee for every 8 oz. (1 cup) of water. For a normal home automatic brewer, that's about 7 tablespoons ground coffee per 1L of water–don't overfill the brew basket!