What is Pour-Over Coffee?
Pour-over coffee is one of the most basic and classic methods of brewing coffee.
Human only – No machine needed
When making a pour-over coffee you use a kettle to heat water to the optimum temperature (between 195 and 205˚F) which you pour over the ground coffee in a cone (or funnel) containing an add on, or built in, filter. You have full control over the pour and this includes the time and extent of your brew.
You determine the speed and spread of the water over the coffee, the agitation of the coffee grinds by the water, you observe how the coffee blooms, sense the brewing process, and experience the aroma.
You are an integral, and intimate, part of the coffee making process when you brew pour-over coffee.
Would you like Grammar With Your Coffee?
Before we go any further let me sort our whether you should use a hyphen when writing ‘pour over’ or ‘pour-over’. Why bother? Because I can be a bit pedantic at times.
I use the rule described by ProWriting Aid as follows:
“When you use two or more words together as a single thought describing or modifying a noun and you put them before the noun, you should hyphenate them.”
The bold letters in the definition are my modification and I think is the crux of the matter.
Pour-over coffee is a single thought!
Now the only problem as a writer is that I have to search for the hyphen every time I write pour-over and it could be pretty tiresome. That is, unless I use the search and replace function in my word processor! So for this article you will see me use pour-over as a single thought for this manual brewing method. OK?
What is the difference between Pour-Over and Drip Coffee?
Did you know that an expert is a drip under pressure? Sorry, that is an old joke but I couldn’t resist because we are talking about drips (you may be thinking I’m a drip for bringing up an old joke).
When is a drip not a drip? When it becomes a pour! (I’m on a roll) 😏
Drip coffee probably shouldn’t technically be called drip coffee because most of the drip coffee machines I’ve seen pours water, not drips water, over the coffee grounds. Am I being a bit pedantic? Yes, as usual.
In both pour-over and drip-coffee water is poured into coffee grinds but usually drips out into your cup or carafe (well, initially it may be a pour rather than a drip). And there is no pressure involved except for normal atmospheric pressure.
Difference between drip and pour-over includes
- Flavor. Pour-over can produce a better flavor
- Equipment. Drip coffee mainly uses machines.
- Control. You have complete control in pour-over. No machine needed
- Temperature stability. Drip coffee machines may not keep the water at the right temperature
The most significant difference between drip and pour-over coffee is that in pour-over you have full control of the brewing process.
Drip coffee is usually done by a machine that drips/pours water over the ground coffee. You don’t have any manual control of the process, but you can set the parameters of the drip or ‘pour’ depending upon the sophistication of the coffee machine. You don’t get to see the coffee bloom but you do get to experience the aroma.
Gravity and Pour-Over Coffee
Gravity plays a big part in the attraction between apples and the earth and also plays a big part in pour-over and drip coffee. Gravity is part of the equation that determines the rate of flow of water through the coffee. The other parts of the equation include the grind size of the coffee and the rate the water pours into the coffee.
Ever thought how you would prepare coffee where there was no gravity – like in a space station?
Well, astronaut Kjell Lindgren was supposedly the first to brew a `pour-over’ coffee in the space station. Well, he did brew a coffee but it wasn’t really a pour-over. Kjell used syringe pressure to force water through a coffee pod.