A daily V60 recipe that survives the tropics

Every coffee reviewed on this site goes through the same brewer. Scores only mean something when the method stays fixed, so this is the recipe, written down once.

The standard cup

Dose: 25 g of coffee, medium-fine. Water: 400 g at 92–96 °C, softer than tap if you can manage it. Lighter roasts take the hotter end.

1. Rinse the paper thoroughly and warm the brewer. A papery cup is the most avoidable fault in pour-over.
2. Bloom with 50–60 g of water for 40 seconds. Fresh beans will dome and bubble; beans past their window sit flat, and the cup will tell you the same story later.
3. Pour to 200 g in slow circles, keeping the bed level.
4. Pour the remaining water in two stages, finishing around 400 g. Total brew time lands between 2:30 and 3:15.
5. Swirl gently and let it draw down flat.

If the cup tastes sour and thin, grind finer or raise the temperature. Bitterness and a dry finish mean the opposite correction. Adjust one variable per brew.

The iced variant

Most of the reviews here were tasted black over ice, which is the honest way to drink filter coffee in Southeast Asia. Flavours sharpen as the cup chills, and faults have nowhere to hide: a bitter finish that hides in a warm mug turns loud at 5 °C.

Keep the 25 g dose. Split the water into 250 g for brewing and 150 g of ice in the server. Brew slightly finer than the hot recipe, since the shorter pour extracts less. Stir until the ice has nearly melted before tasting.

Why one recipe

A fixed recipe turns every new bag into a controlled comparison. When an anaerobic Gayo tastes wildly different from last week’s washed Kintamani, the difference belongs to the coffee. That discipline is what makes a 4.5 on this site mean the same thing in July as it did in January.