Hario V60
This is my firm favourite coffee brewer! There are many different similar pour-over style brewers out there but this is the one I keep coming back to.
Hario V60 come in three different sizes, 01 02 and 03. Personally I’ve never found the need for the bigger or smaller one and I just stick to the 02 size.
The depth of the coffee bed in the brewer plays a huge roll in your coffee brewing. There is an upper and lower limit to the optimal bed depth of your brewer, and these all fit into the 02 size! You want your dose to be between 15g and 30g.
Have a read of some nerdy coffee stuff like The Physics of Coffee by Johnathan Gagne or anything Scott Rao and James Hoffman have to say as they say it better than I can!
Before you start you want to rinse your paper filter with some hot water, this helps remove any papery taste in your final coffee and pre-heats the brewer. Put your ground coffee in the centre of the brewer and make a little well with your finger, this will help saturate all the ground coffee as quickly as you can.
Try to pour in spirals, starting in the centre and moving out and back in at a nice steady/slow speed with the water dropping almost vertically into the slurry without any splashes, not on the wall of the brewer. This helps churn up the slurry and gets you a better extraction.
You will need to agitate the brew to get a better extraction. Sort of similar to if you’ve ever brewed a cup of tea in a glass, if you just put the bag in it slowly spreads out through the mug, but stirring the tea speeds it up.
You can do this by giving it a stir with a spoon, but I find the most affective way to agitate at the beginning of a brew is to pick up the brewer and gently spin the whole thing, this is known in the industry as the Rao Spin.
After you’ve finished pouring, giving a gentle stir on the surface with a tea spoon helps breaks the surface tension of any ground coffee floating on the surface and give a final Rao Spin to help create a nice flat even bed of coffee at the bottom of the brewer.
Also, I prefer the plastic V60 over the ceramic of metal ones. The plastic is cheaper and it also breaks less than the ceramic one and hold a better temperature while brewing so you get a more consistent brew. My favourite is the Hario Drip Decanter which is a great server with a plastic V60 02 built in!
As with all brew methods, Try to repeat this each time and if your coffee tastes weak and thin then you want to grind finer, and if it tastes too bitter or dry/astringent then grind a little coarser.