SLOW COFFEE: HOW TO MAKE A GOOD V60?

Just like at L’Occasion Café !

What is a V60?

The V60 is a dripper. It’s part of what’s known as the slow coffee, which is a slow and meticulous method of coffee extraction.

If you follow our Instagram account, you may have seen that a few weeks ago, our barista Léo explained how to make a V60 on video! Today, we’d like to get back to all that, explaining how to make a good V60 at home (or at your friends’, your parents’, your date’s… It’s up to you!).

You may have already heard of it, but there are several slow coffee methods. There’s the dripper family (or pour over) with the V60, origami, chemex and others. There’s also aeropress and other technologies we’ll talk about later 😉

Slow coffee enhances coffee aromas with a slower extraction process. As the water passes through the coffee grounds, it picks up the coffee’s oils and fragrances. It therefore flows slowly under the effect of gravity, rather than pressure as would a traditional machine.

The origins of the V60 ☕️

Where does the name come from?

The V60 is simply a dripper filter holder invented and marketed by HARIO®, which has a 60-degree inclined cone. The filters used are adapted to this conical shape, so the coffee is extracted at the tip of the filter, creating a narrower, more precise extraction surface.

How tomake a V60 ?

BEFORE MOVING TO EXTRACTION

Once you’ve got your V60, your paper filter, your scale, your stopwatch and your carafe (which will serve as a container for your coffee) you need to know that we’re going to do a bit of mathematics! No need to panic, it’s quite simple and we’re going to do it together 🙂

We’ll need to calculate and check a number of factors to ensure your coffee is properly extracted : the ratio between the weight of the water and that of the coffee, the contact time between the water and the coffee, and the extraction time, which we’ll need to check carefully.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO MAKE A SUCCESS OF YOUR V60 💡

At L’Occasion Café, we use a ratio of 1:16. 15g of ground coffee for 250g of coffee in a cup.

Extraction time is also important. It generally lasts between 2min30 and 3min for 5 pours (meaning the water has been poured in little by little, dividing the pours by 5).

STEPS FOR THE V60

To begin with, we heat our water to 93°C and gently rinse the filter to avoid the smell of the filter altering the taste of your coffee in the cup, and also to preheat our carafe a little. We’d like to avoid a temperature shock when the first drops of coffee are poured.

Once that’s done, let’s get started !

We place everything on our scales so we can weigh our water and measure the weight of our different pours.

We pour 15 g of coffee into our V60 (ideally freshly ground to avoid losing flavour), which we spread evenly to create a fairly flat coffee bed. Then we press TARE to reset the weight to zero, start our stopwatch and off we go.

If we can give you a word of advice before you start, it’s important to pour your water quite close to your V60, so that the water can stir the coffee bed underneath. Doing so also eliminates the risk of the water jet breaking as it falls.

GET YOUR HANDS DIRTY 💪

Everything’s ready, so we’re going to make our first pour-over with 50g of water (still hot, of course) and perform what’s known as the bloom.

In the barista’s garden, bloom means pouring an initial quantity of water over the coffee to degas it and release the gases and oils it retains. Blooming is the most important stage in the extraction process, as it’s the only one that releases the aromas, flavours and acidity of your coffee.

Wait 45 seconds after this first pouring, then proceed with the second. Always pour 50g more water, then 50g more when your stopwatch reaches 1 min 10.

At 1 min 30, we pour another 50 g of water into our V60. It should start to smell really good).

Then, at 1 min 50, it’s time for the last pour (still with 50 g of water) and now all you have to do is wait for everything to be extracted and the coffee to dry out.

We remove our V60 to avoid over-extraction, then take our carafe and blend our coffee. Stirring it before tasting will help distribute the aromas you’ve extracted and oxygenate your coffee.

Happy tasting!

Now you know how we make a great V60 at L’Occasion Café! ✅

If you try it at home, please let us know! Of course, there are many ways to make a V60, and all the greatest baristas have invented their own way of making this Slow Coffee!

And if you’d like to try out our recipe at home, we sell Hario’s V60 filter holder. Come and see us, and we’ll tell you all about it and how to use it!

Or you can come and taste our V60 directly at L’Occasion Café! Our baristas will be there to show you our different coffees and the flavors they contain, so you’ll be sure to find what you’re looking for!

See you soon, coffee lovers ! 🙂

Here you can see our barista Léo performing all these steps on video.