Where the coffee has nowhere to hide. A cone, a paper, three minutes of your attention, and the clearest cup you can make at home.
THE RECIPE
Coffee
18 g
Water
300 g
Ratio
1:16.7
Temperature
94 °C
Grind
Medium, like coarse sand
Time
3:00 drawdown
One large cup, about 280 ml
STEP BY STEP
beforeSit the paper in the cone over your carafe and rinse it through with a good slug of hot water. Tip that water out. Papery water is a real taste and this is how you get rid of it — it preheats everything as a bonus.
0:0018 g of coffee in, ground like coarse sand. Tap the cone to flatten the bed. Start the timer and pour 60 g of water — just enough to wet all of it.
0:45That was the bloom. Fresh coffee is full of carbon dioxide and it has to get out before water can get in; you can watch it swell and settle. Now pour in slow circles up to 180 g, keeping off the paper. Water that runs down the side never touches coffee.
1:15Pour up to 300 g the same way.
1:45One gentle swirl of the whole cone to flatten the bed, then leave it alone.
3:00It should finish draining between 2:45 and 3:15, and the bed should be flat and level when it does.
A sloped, crusty bed up the sides of the paper means your pour was hitting the wall. A crater in the middle means you poured too hard.
Matched on what the roaster themselves publishes — the roast style they file it under, and the fruit-and-flower end of their own tasting notes. Bags that tick both come first.
The only number that really matters
Drawdown time. Everything else is a lever for it. Finished before 2:30 and it will taste sour and thin — grind finer. Still dripping past 3:30 and it will taste bitter and drying — grind coarser.
Change the grind, not the recipe. Adding more coffee to a sour cup gets you a stronger sour cup.
Water
Thirty seconds off the boil is close enough to 94 °C. Hotter is fine for a light roast and punishing for a dark one.
If your tap water tastes of chlorine, so will your coffee — a jug filter fixes that for the price of one bag of beans.
Why bother, when the AeroPress is easier
Clarity. A paper filter and a thin bed separate a coffee into its parts: a good Ethiopian through a cone tastes of a specific fruit you could name, and the same coffee through a plunger tastes of very nice coffee.
If you are paying $12 per 100 g, you may as well hear what you paid for.
The last thing to buy, not the first. But a gooseneck is the difference between pouring and dumping.
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.