Bitter Press

Experiments: Re-evaluating the Hario V60

When I first brought home my Virtuoso grinder, I was replacing a KitchenAid ProLine that I’d been upgraded to when I lost a spring on my previous KitchenAid grinder, and the customer service lady misunderstood me and thought it was broken. It was a fine grinder that served me well, but I was ready to step my game up. After months of using one in the store for our Chemex and Cafe Solos, I decided to go for the Baratza Virtuoso grinder.

But I found something out when I got home. I found that I could not get a grind setting that brewed a delicious cup, and reacted the way I was used to in the cone — the coffee bed would rise quickly, or drain slowly. Instead, I found the water would pass through the grounds quite quickly, giving me an overall brew time of less than a minute. And thus began my quest for discovering the perfect brew specs for the V60.



At first I blamed the grinder. I had since adopted brewing on a scale, I had played around with finer grinds and a lower dose, I had tried a variety of coffees. Nothing seemed to work. Sometimes I had better results with my Hario Skerton hand grinder, so I tried finding out what was wrong with the Virtuoso. I found a good amount of information. First? A laser analysis of the particle distribution:

What this shows is a detailed analysis of particle size. The spikes represent a higher occurance, and the fact that the spikes are so high at medium and coarse means that a good deal of the particles are the desired size. This was reassuring.

This was not. Irish cupping savant and scientific researcher David Walsh had some issues when he tested the Baratza lineup. First, he found that the Maestro series could not grind a good espresso size. Next, he found that the Virtuoso could not grind a good filter size. BUT! He found that the Maestro filter grind was superb, and the Virtuoso espresso grind was superb, which meant that I had ended up with the wrong grinder, apparently.

I was heartbroken. The Virtuoso was a birthday present from my wife and sister in law, and working in a coffee bar, big equipment purchases, even with a discount, are still big purchases and are not to be taken lightly. But I decided not to worry. I got on some forums, did some research, and put out some feelers. Maybe someone had a good idea of what to do with my grinder. So I posted something on a forum asking if anyone else was having issues with the water passing through the coffee too quickly when using a Virtuoso, and to my surprise, Kyra from Baratza contacted me shortly.

She said that many people had had better luck using the Maestro Plus for drip brewing, Hario V60 specifically, and that she’d be willing to send one out for me to try. I was ecstatic. A new grinder would solve all my troubles.

When I was first conceiving this post, I thought that it would be a showdown between the two grinders. I had my hypothesis. I had information to back it. What I didn’t expect to get, however, was a humbling experience that forced me to re-evaluate home brewing.

When the Maestro Plus arrived, I found I was having similar problems with it. Too fine and it reacted the way I wanted to in the cone, but it was terribly over-extracted and bitter. Too coarse and it meant that the flavor profile was better, but that it was generally under-extracted and flowing through too quickly. That happy medium was hard to pin down.

Now, at the coffee bar, we’ve been brewing all coffees-of-the-day to order on Hario V60s since October. This means I have literally made thousands of cups on the Hario V60. Thousands. So I was pretty confident that I knew what I was doing when it came to brewing at home. With the Mahlkönig Guatemala grinder at work, the bed rises extremely fast and drains nice and slow, allowing for more of an immersion time in the brew. But I hadn’t thought, until I pit the two grinders against each other, that maybe I had some learning to do.

I ran every variable I could. I cupped all the water I had available at home — refrigerator built in filter, Brita filter, and even Chicago city tap water — against the water in store. I found that the Brita water had the best profile. I brought grind samples into work, and tested their bed raising ability against the Guatemala. And at work, surprisingly they performed much better in this regard. Which was puzzling, but the first part of the solution to this strange problem.



A test brew using the Maestro Plus grind at home. The bed isn’t rising like I was used to, and the coffee passed through a little quicker than I wanted it to. The end result was under-extracted.

Back home, I took a look at my overall specs. I was using 250mL of water, thirty seconds off boil, 16g of coffee, with about a forty second pour and a thirty to forty second drip time. I started looking around for other people’s methods. The problem was that not many people detailed their specs. They showed their methods, but they gave a range of dose, not a specific dose. And that’s when I realized something stupid. I wasn’t checking my water temperature. The water at work sits right at 200F-202F. At home, I was probably brewing at closer to 208F-211F. Maybe the hotter water caused it to travel faster through the coffee.

I also remembered one other thing — when I received coffee from David Walsh’s coffee exchange, I connected with Aaron of Brown Coffee Co on Twitter, and saw that he gave me the specs he was using for the coffee on his V60. So I examined them:

18g; 11 fl oz of water at 204F to yield 10 fl oz over 2:30 using Hario V60 + Buono w/ Barismo gicleur.

I started to do some other math too. I was brewing at 250mL at home, because that’s what my mug could hold. At work, however, the smallest we brew is a 300mL yield, which means we’re using anywhere from 315mL-330mL of water to brew. The 11oz that Aaron suggested was equivalent to about 325mL. Stupid me. I had been brewing in miniature. I started taking the temperature of my water too. Cooler temperature and larger brew size meant that I had more time to let the bed raise while I was pouring, and that it seemed to raise quicker and more steadily, and drain slower like I was used to. I had hit upon something.It wasn’t reacting the same way at work, but then again, I was using different specs, and realizing that there are other ways to make coffee taste great, and the coffee was starting to taste great.



A brew test using the new specs, the Virtuoso, and a water transfer — more on that later. The end result, by the way, was quite tasty.

But that’s not the end. In my studies, I found plenty of other amazing brew methods from people like Nick Cho, Barismo, and other great coffee places across the country. There are so many other methods of brewing on the V60, that it’s hard to say how the device is supposed to perform versus how to best get it to perform. And even though I was pretty confident in my V60 skills, I had been the biggest issue as to why my coffee wasn’t brewing the way I thought it should. It was never the grinder. One serving of humble pie, please.

However, there does seem to be one small aspect in which I’ve been vilified. While I was at my wife’s parents’ lake house last weekend, I was brewing coffee on the V60, and noticed that the bed was rising crazy fast and draining extremely slow. It was strange. I thought I’d gotten over the fact that it wasn’t going to react this way, and that a lower bed in a brew was not the issue I thought it was. I knew for sure, now, that temperature wasn’t really the issue — I hadn’t brought a thermometer, and had poured about thirty seconds off of boiling. So I looked at the cook top I was using: ceramic electric. At home I have a gas range. A little voice echoed in my head, something that Intelligentsia’s Quality Control mastermind Jesse Crouse had mentioned to me when I was experimenting with siphon brewing:

Try to imagine what is happening when you have a burner on as oppose to the beam heater. Where is the point of contact for the heat in each scenario? How does an oven vary from a stovetop?

Radiant heat. Radiant heat travels. Which means at home, on the gas range, the entire Buono kettle was being heated, while at the lake house, I was using a ceramic top with an electric coil underneath, which meant that the water was being heated in the kettle through the bottom of the kettle, and the top part of the kettle wasn’t being heated the same way at all. At work, too, we use a hot water tower into a kettle, meaning that it’s not being heated either.

At home, I ran tests boiling in one kettle, and then transferring it into the Buono before I poured, measuring the temperature in the Buono and letting it sit until it hit 204F. Sure enough, the bed raised quicker, drained nice and slow, and the coffee reacted the way I wanted it to before I stopped caring how the coffee reacted during the pour.

The only problem is, why? Why would a hotter kettle affect this? It’s not an easy to grasp scientific principle, but then again, who cares? I’ve got the tastiest V60s greeting me every morning, and my methodology is finally solid.

Oh yeah, and the Virtuoso against the Maestro Plus? I’ll put my money on the Virtuoso. For some reason, I just couldn’t get as tasty of a cup out of the Maestro Plus, even though it looks like it has a better particle distribution in a drip grind setting.

In the video, you can see that my new specs with the Virtuoso only have about fifteen extra seconds of brew time, and that the bed rising and dripping isn’t really all that different. The Virtuoso is also just a better build, and can handle basic espresso style grinds, suitable for an eventual Mypressi Twist or other pseudo espresso device. The Maestro Plus is still a fantastic machine, and I’m sure that I could eventually make just as tasty a cup on it as I could the Virtuoso, but I realized this whole thing isn’t about letting the equipment carry the brew — in the end, it’s your math versus your methodology. But I guess maybe a flow-restrictor might be nice…

Or a controlled water dispersion system, like the LB-1 or Uber boiler…

Or a…

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