Does this sound familiar? 

You see the tasting notes on the bag: “Tropical fruits, grilled banana, dried fruit and creamy citrus.” You can almost taste it.

You go through the ritual, weigh the beans, dial in the water, and perform a pour-over with care. But when you take that first sip, it’s not tropical or creamy. It’s a puckering, sour disappointment. The next day, you try again, and it’s a harsh, muddy, bitter mess.

It’s a frustrating feeling. You’re left wondering where those beautiful flavours are hiding and why every morning feels like a coffee lottery.

You’re not doing anything wrong. You’ve just stumbled upon the most common puzzle in coffee: a simple concept called extraction. As roasters, our entire job is to solve this puzzle every single day. Let us walk you through it.

What’s Really Happening in Your Brewer

When hot water meets coffee, it starts dissolving hundreds of different flavour compounds. The key is that they don’t all come out at once. They dissolve in a predictable sequence.

Think of it as a flavour journey that always follows the same path: it starts sour, moves through sweet, and if you let it go too long, it ends at bitter.

1. Under-extraction (The Sour Cup): This is a journey cut short. The water didn’t have enough time to grab the deep, sweet flavours. It mostly just rinsed out the first things available – the acids, leaving you with a sharp, one-note sourness that misses all the coffee’s potential.
2. Over-extraction (The Bitter Cup): This is a journey that went on for too long. The water grabbed all the good stuff, and then kept on going, pulling out the heavy, resilient, and unpleasant bitter compounds that hide at the very back. This masks all the delicate notes under a blanket of harshness.

Our goal is always to stop the brew right in that perfect middle window. That’s the sweet spot where the magic happens. That’s a balanced cup.

How to Finally Get It Right

This is the process we use in our roastery and in our own kitchens. It’s about tasting what’s in the cup and knowing which single knob to turn.

Step 1: Taste Your Coffee and Make the Call

Just taste it. Forget the tasting notes on the bag for a second and focus on the dominant feeling in your mouth. Is it unpleasantly sour or unpleasantly bitter? That one piece of information tells you everything you need to know.

Step 2: The Golden Rule of Grind Size

While things like water temperature and pouring technique play a part, the most powerful tool for changing your coffee’s taste is your grind size. Nothing else gives you more control.

The logic is simple, for finer grounds have more surface area, so flavour gets pulled out faster.

Coarser grounds have less surface area, so flavour gets pulled out slower.

So here is the simple rule of thumb we live by:

If your coffee is SOUR, you under-extracted. Grind FINER to pull more flavour out.

If your coffee is BITTER, you over-extracted. Grind COARSER to pull less flavour out.

That’s it. For your next brew, don’t change anything else. Just make that one small adjustment on your grinder and taste the difference.

Putting It Into Practice

What’s a good starting point for this specific coffee? We’ve done the work for you! For Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Gargari Gutity as an example, start with our recommended recipes and tweak from there.

• Pour Over: Use a coarse grind and a 1:15 ratio (20g of coffee to 300g of water). Try a water temperature of 89-92°C.
• Espresso: Aim for a 1:2 ratio. Start with 21g of coffee in to get 42g of liquid out in about 30-34 seconds.

So brew time is a myth? Not a myth, but it’s a symptom of your grind size. If you follow our recipes and your grind is right, your brew time will naturally land where it should. Focus on the grind first, and the time will follow.

What about water temp? It’s for fine-tuning. Our recipe suggests 89-92°C for pour-over, which is slightly cooler than usual. This is to protect the delicate, fragrant notes of this specific coffee. Sticking to this range is a great idea.

How will I know when I’ve really nailed it? Oh, you’ll know. It’s an unmistakable “aha!” moment. Suddenly, those notes on the bag aren’t just words anymore. You can actually taste the incredible notes there.