Brewing Dark Roasts on Pour Over

I generally prefer light to medium roast with a pour over. The whole complex flavour profile of the coffee opens up with the magic of a pour over.

But sometimes, you don't get to choose.

Maybe you ordered the wrong coffee and can't throw it away now. Or maybe it was a gift. Now, you are left with dark roasts.

Mind you, they stale faster.

What do we do now?

Honestly, I would pickup a moka pot and make some nice bold espresso like shots and use them as the base for coffee mocktails. We covered a few in the previous posts.

My next choice, however, would be a pour over. And that is because I get to control things here. Let's go through how I would brew this.

Anatomy of Dark Roasts

Beans are darkly roasted, meaning they are already put through a lot of heat and are roasted till they just give up.

You can expect one or more of nutty, woody, dark chocolate, roasted nuts, popcorn flavours. This depends on the coffee, of course.

Most cafes use this for their espressos. Mainly because when a bean is darkly roasted, the origin flavours (fruity, floral or acidic) are lost. So it doesn't matter where your coffee is from. Also cafes operate on speed. The bitterness that dark roasts tend to give are cut out with milk and sweeteners anyways.

Brewing Dark Roasts

Let's talk pour over terms now.

We don't need much temperature to start brewing with. I typically go below 85C, sometimes even 80C, with the water. We should be careful not to over-extract it. And for the same reason, I keep my coffee ground coarse, like French Press coarse.

I still go with 1:15 for the coffee to water ratio. I find increasing this makes it too weak.

I don't like to make the body heavier as it increases the not so desirable compounds like bitterness.

With those things in mind, let's discuss 2 recipes and see how they fit. For reference, I use 15g of coffee and 225g of water. You can scale this up as needed.

Tetsu's 4:6 method

Actual recipe for reference.

Starting with 85C water, I go the first half in two parts normally. 2 pours of 45g each, totaling to 90g. We don't need much bloom, around 30 seconds is enough, as it's a dark roast anyways.

For the second half, I go all in with one single pour, slowly with agitating the coffee bed much. This is to keep a light body and not over extracting things. We can even go with cooler water, around 70C, for this last pour.

Almost always, I get a good cup with this technique.

Osmotic Flow

This recipe feels like it has been developed specially for dark roasts.

This too uses slightly coarse coffee but a tighter coffee to water ratio, around 1:13, which amounts to 15g of coffee and 195g of water.

We pour the water only in the center, making small circles, and not the a whole big circle like a regular pour over.

The science behind this is osmosis, which in terms of this, means that coffee will move from high concentration areas to low concentration areas. The column which we create with the water flow will be less concentrated as we keep pouring the water.

This recipe changed how I look at dark roasts.

This video explains this well.

These things let me enjoy pour overs with dark roast coffee.

I hope these techniques and changes to recipes help you enjoy your pour overs more.

That’s all I...

Wait, I have an ask today. What is one song (or a playlist) you like to listen while making your coffee? I need some ideas and thanks in advance.

That’s all I have. Have a caffeinated weekend.

See you.

Keep on brewing!