---
title: Plunger · Coffee Addict
url: https://coffeeaddict.nz/guides/plunger/
source: Coffee Addict
checked: Prices checked 23 Aug 2026, 15:40 UTC.
generated: 2026-08-23 23:25 UTC
description: The brewer everybody apologises for.
---

# Plunger

The brewer everybody apologises for.

Nine minutes, no skill, four cups at once. Two steps stop it being muddy.

## The recipe

Makes: A 1 litre press, four small cups

| | |
|---|---|
| Coffee | 60 g |
| Water | 1000 g |
| Ratio | 1:16.7 |
| Temperature | 95 °C |
| Grind | Coarse, like flaky sea salt |
| Time | 9 minutes, mostly waiting |

## Method

- **0:00** — Warm the jug with hot water and tip it out. A cold glass jug drinks a surprising amount of your brewing temperature.
- **0:05** — 60 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.
- **0:15** — Pour 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.
- **4:00** — A crust has formed on the surface. Break it with two gentle stirs; most of it will sink.
- **4:30** — Skim 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.
- **9:00** — Push 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.

## 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.

## Bags on the shelf that suit it

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.

| Coffee | Roaster | Bag | Price | Per 100g | In stock |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PRIMO | L'affare | 200 g | $10.50 | $5.25 | yes |
| Papua New Guinea Ulya Washed | C4 Coffee Co. | 250 g | $15.00 | $6.00 | yes |
| Veloce | Atomic Coffee Roasters | 250 g | $18.00 | $7.20 | yes |
| AM:PM Blend | Coffee Supreme | 500 g | $36.00 | $7.20 | yes |
| Hopper, Espresso. | Red Rabbit Coffee Co. | 250 g | $18.00 | $7.20 | yes |

## Gear

| What | Item | Price | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| A good cheap one | Bialetti plunger | $39.00 | Havana Coffee Works |
| The classic | Bodum Chambord, 8 cup | $70.00 | Raglan Roast |
| If the silt bothers you | Espro P3 | $125.01 | C4 Coffee Co. |

Bialetti plunger — $39.00 for 350 ml, $57.00 for the litre. Buy the litre unless you are certain you drink alone.
Bodum Chambord, 8 cup — The one in every second New Zealand kitchen. Replacement glass and mesh are easy to find, which is most of why it survives.
Espro P3 — Two fine mesh filters instead of one coarse one. Clean cup, less body, three times the price.

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.

## About this data

Prices, weights and stock are the roasters' own, read from their public shop pages and re-checked every night. We do not set them, mark them up, or estimate them: a figure we could not read is null. Free to quote with attribution and a link.

One scrape a night at 15:40 UTC (about 03:40 in New Zealand), then the whole site and every endpoint is rebuilt.

Links to shops go through /go/ so we can count how many readers we send each roaster. We earn nothing from them — no affiliate deals, no commission, no paid placement — and if that ever changes this line changes with it.

Cite as: Coffee Addict — every specialty coffee bean on sale in New Zealand, priced per 100g and re-checked every night. https://coffeeaddict.nz

Machine-readable: `https://coffeeaddict.nz/api/beans.json`, `https://coffeeaddict.nz/api/deals.json`, `https://coffeeaddict.nz/api/roasters.json`. Schema and terms: https://coffeeaddict.nz/api/. Everything this site publishes for agents: https://coffeeaddict.nz/llms.txt