The brewer everybody apologises for. Nine minutes, no skill, four cups at once. Two steps stop it being muddy.
THE RECIPE
Coffee
60 g
Water
1000 g
Ratio
1:16.7
Temperature
95 °C
Grind
Coarse, like flaky sea salt
Time
9 minutes, mostly waiting
A 1 litre press, four small cups
STEP BY STEP
0:00Warm the jug with hot water and tip it out. A cold glass jug drinks a surprising amount of your brewing temperature.
0:0560 g of coarsely ground coffee in. For a small 350 ml press it is 21 g; the ratio is 60 g per litre and it is more coffee than the box suggests.
0:15Pour all the water straight off the boil, from a height, so the stream turns the bed over. Then leave it. No stirring, no lid, no fiddling.
4:00A crust has formed on the surface. Break it with two gentle stirs; most of it will sink.
4:30Skim the foam and the floaters off with two spoons and bin them. This is the step everybody skips, and it is the one that takes the muddiness out.
9:00Push the plunger down to just below the surface — not to the bottom. You are holding the grounds down, not forcing water through them. Pour gently and stop before the last 50 ml.
Coffee left sitting on its grounds keeps extracting and turns bitter within about ten minutes. If you are not drinking it all at once, decant it into something else.
Full immersion and a metal filter give you body rather than clarity, so this is the sweet, roasty end of the shelf — matched on the roast style each roaster files the bag under and the notes they print themselves.
Why the long wait
Those five quiet minutes are the fine particles sinking. Ramming the plunger to the floor stirs every one of them straight back into your cup — patience is doing the job the filter does in the other two methods.
The one thing it does better than anything else
It scales. A press makes four cups at once and asks nothing of you while it does. That is why it is the brewer of Sunday mornings, of hut kitchens and of offices.
A pour-over makes one cup at a time and wants you standing over it for all three minutes.
The silt question
A metal mesh lets oils and fine particles through. That is where the body comes from, and it is also the sediment in the last mouthful.
The cheap fix is to stop pouring early. The expensive fix is a double-filtered press. There is no fix that keeps the body and loses the silt, because they are the same thing.
When it goes wrong
Bitter: too fine, or you plunged to the bottom. Weak and watery: not enough coffee — weigh it once and you will be surprised. Gritty: do the skim rather than changing the grind.
Two fine mesh filters instead of one coarse one. Clean cup, less body, three times the price.
How we check
Gear picked by hand, and every shop listed is one this site already tracks. Nothing here is sponsored and no link pays us. Prices re-checked against each shop's own catalogue nightly; last check 23 Aug 2026.