Coffee maker
Pour-over dripper
A cone or flat-bottomed dripper used with a paper filter, where the user pours water by hand to control the brew.
How it works
Water poured by hand percolates through a bed of medium-ground coffee held in a paper filter inside the dripper, with the user's pour technique directly shaping extraction.
Who it suits
- users who enjoy hands-on technique and want a clean, bright cup
- users wanting fine control over their brew
Who it may not suit
- users wanting a hands-off, one-touch brew
- users wanting a full-bodied cup with retained oils
- Starting dose
- 15g
- Starting water
- 240ml
- Coffee-to-water ratio
- 60–70 g per litre (typically 63)
- Grind
- Medium, similar to sea salt.
- Capacity
- 1-4 cups
- Brew time
- 2-4 min
- Skill level
- intermediate
- Noise
- quiet
- Space
- compact
- Cleaning burden
- low
- Convenience
- medium
- Manual control
- high
Descriptive grind labels like this are illustrative starting points, not precise measurements — the same label can mean different particle sizes on different grinders. See the grind size guide for how to dial this in on your own equipment.
Uses the V60 (pour-over) brewing method.
Equipment
Requires a separate grinder.
Advantages
- clean, bright cup
- inexpensive to buy
- rewards developed technique
Disadvantages
- result is more technique-dependent than automatic brewers
- single or small batches only
Steps
- Rinse the paper filter with hot water and discard the rinse water.
- Add ground coffee and bloom with a small amount of water for 30-45 seconds.
- Pour the remaining water in stages until the target weight is reached.
Cleaning & maintenance
Rinse the dripper after use; discard the filter and grounds.
None beyond routine cleaning — no moving parts.
Consumables: paper filters
Common faults
- brew stalls or drains too slowly
- uneven coffee bed after brewing
Cost
Purchase cost band: budgetDrippers themselves are inexpensive; a gooseneck kettle is the main optional added cost.
Low ongoing cost — beans and paper filters.
Suitable roast levels
Skills for this machine
The individual techniques this device asks of you, each with its own adjustments and failure modes.
- Adjusting grind sizeMove the grind in the right direction by a useful amount, and know what to expect from the change.
- Single dosing a grinderGrind exactly the beans you weighed for this brew, with as little left inside the grinder as possible.
- Dialling in filter coffeeFind the grind and ratio that suit a particular coffee in a particular brewer, using brew time as the diagnostic.
- Blooming coffeeWet the whole coffee bed and let it release its carbon dioxide before the main pour begins.
- Pulse pouringControl agitation and contact time by pouring in several stages rather than one continuous stream.
- Rinsing a paper filterRemove papery taste, seat the filter against the brewer, and preheat the equipment in one action.
- Preheating a brewerStop cold equipment taking heat out of the brew before it has finished extracting.
- Comparing two coffees side by sideTrain perception using difference, which is far easier to notice than any absolute quality.
- Resting roasted coffeeLet a fresh roast settle to the point where it brews predictably, without waiting until it has gone flat.
- Measuring extraction yieldTurn a TDS reading into an extraction percentage, and know what that number can and cannot tell you.
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