Login
Reset your password
We will send you an email to reset your password.
Filter coffee looks simple. Grind, pour, drink. But it’s the most unforgiving brew method.
Espresso hides behind milk and pressure. Capsules hide behind engineering. Filter shows everything. If your beans are old, your grind uneven, your ratios sloppy, you’ll taste the failure.
Most people don’t fail because they don’t care. They fail because the advice they follow is useless. Scoops instead of grams. “Strong” instead of fresh. “Italian roast” instead of origin.
We see the same errors over and over. Fix them, and you’ll already brew better than most cafés.
TL;DR:
Filter mistakes come from ignoring ratios, using stale beans, grinding wrong, bad water, and sloppy pouring. Weigh your doses, buy fresh, grind consistently, use filtered water, pour with intent.
Understanding Ratios Before Anything Else
Filter coffee ratios define your cup. Forget spoons, forget scoops. Ratios mean grams of coffee to grams of water. Without them, you’re rolling dice every morning.
Where To Start With Ratios
The Specialty Coffee Association sets the range at 55–65 grams per litre. Sixty is a balanced middle. That means 15 grams for a 250 ml cup, 24 grams for a 400 ml mug, 60 grams for a litre batch.
How Roast And Taste Affect Ratios
Light roasts often need more coffee because they’re dense and harder to extract. Darker roasts often need less because solubles release faster. Ratios aren’t dogma. They’re anchors. Once you know where you stand, you can adjust with intention.
Mistake One: Guessing Instead Of Measuring
A scoop is not a unit. A mug is not a unit. “Two spoons per cup” could mean anything depending on the spoon and the cup. That’s why one day your brew is weak, the next it’s astringent.
How A Scale Changes Everything
Weigh beans. Weigh water. Once the dose is fixed, you create consistency. Now grind adjustments and pour technique start to matter. Without a scale, you’re fighting chaos.
A Baseline You Can Trust
Start simple. Fifteen grams of coffee to 250 grams of water on a V60. Bloom for forty seconds, finish the brew in three minutes. From there, tune finer or coarser to adjust taste. That’s enough to diagnose most problems.
Mistake Two: Using Stale Or Low-Grade Beans
Supermarket bags are roasted months in advance. “Best before” hides roast dates. The bloom disappears, the aroma is gone, and the taste is flat. Staleness is built into the system.
Why Freshness Is Non-Negotiable
Coffee is alive for a short window. Blend No1 shows best around day ten to day twenty-one. Ethiopië Sidamo is expressive in weeks two to four. After eight weeks, both are muted. That’s chemistry, not preference.
How To Store Coffee Properly
Keep beans in their original sealed bag with a valve.
Store at room temperature away from light. If you buy kilos, split them into airtight containers, freeze what you won’t drink in two weeks, and thaw sealed. It’s practical and it works.
Mistake Three: Grinding Without Control
Blade grinders chop, they don’t grind. You get powder and rocks in the same scoop. Powder over-extracts, rocks under-extract, and the cup is hollow.
Why Burr Grinders Fix The Problem
Even an entry-level hand burr grinder beats a cheap electric blade toy. Consistency is the foundation. Once grind size is predictable, ratios and pouring adjustments pay off.
How To Dial The Right Size
Judges grind by time. If a V60 drains in ninety seconds, it’s too coarse. If it crawls for five minutes, it’s too fine. Aim for two and a half to three and a half minutes. Adjust one notch at a time and taste. Grinding is calibration, not guesswork.
Mistake Four: Neglecting The Water
Coffee is 98 percent water, and if the water is wrong, the cup is wrong.
Too much hardness flattens acidity and hides delicate notes, while too little mineral content leaves the brew hollow, like flavoured hot water.
Add chlorine into the mix and you’re left with a chemical edge that ruins everything. Even the best beans and careful ratios can’t rescue bad water.
How Dutch Tap Water Behaves
Tap water in the Netherlands is safe, but far from consistent. In the north, some households can brew straight from the tap and get away with it. In Brabant and parts of Limburg, though, hardness strips coffee of clarity and balance.
The simplest upgrade is a filter jug. It removes chlorine, moderates minerals, and gives the cup sharper, cleaner flavour without complicating your routine.
How Temperature Shapes The Cup
Brewing temperature decides how much flavour you can extract. Staying within 92 to 96°C avoids most problems and keeps the cup balanced.
Lighter roasts generally prefer the higher end of that range, since they’re denser and need more energy. Darker roasts are fragile and do better at cooler temperatures, closer to 92 or 93°C.
If your kettle doesn’t display temperature, boil the water and wait half a minute before pouring. It’s simple, repeatable, and consistent enough for daily brewing.
Why Fresh Water Matters
One overlooked detail is the water sitting in your kettle. Reboiling the same batch again and again lowers oxygen levels and flattens flavour.
Always refill with fresh water before brewing. It’s a small habit that makes a noticeable difference in sweetness and clarity.
Mistake Five: Pouring Without Focus
Blooming isn’t ritual, it’s chemistry. Fresh coffee releases CO₂, and that gas has to escape before proper extraction can happen.
Skip the bloom and water channels through the bed instead of soaking it evenly. The result is a cup that’s sharp in one sip and dull in the next.
Thirty to forty-five seconds at the start is enough to let the bloom settle and prepare the grounds for the rest of the brew.
Why Pouring Technique Matters
Consistent movement equals even extraction, and applying practical pour over tips like steady spirals, controlled bloom, and patient pacing makes the process easier to repeat day after day.
How To Read The Bed For Feedback
Once the drawdown is finished, the coffee bed tells the story. A flat bed means you poured evenly and the coffee extracted as intended.
A crater in the middle shows you poured too hard into one spot. Ragged edges or high sides mean you spiraled unevenly.
Every bed is feedback, and once you start reading it, your pours become self-correcting.
Why These Mistakes Keep Happening
Most people don’t brew badly on purpose. They brew badly because the advice they get is shallow or outdated.
Convenience Culture Normalises Them
Supermarkets push pre-ground coffee because it’s easy to sell and easy to store. Machines advertise themselves as “one-touch” solutions that remove thought from the process.
Social media doesn’t help. Feeds celebrate whipped cream drinks and sugar-loaded hacks, not the basics of proper brewing. With that kind of noise, it’s no surprise that bad coffee feels normal.
Misunderstanding Strength And Smoothness
Bitterness is often mistaken for strength. Weak, watery brews get described as smooth. Both are myths.
Real strength comes from proper ratios and complete extraction. Real smoothness comes from balance, sweetness, acidity, and body working together.
Once you taste a clean, well-brewed filter coffee, those old assumptions collapse immediately.
How To Troubleshoot Your Brew
The cup itself is the best diagnostic tool. You don’t need apps, charts, or endless guesswork. Just pay attention to what you taste, because every flavour points directly to a cause
When The Cup Tastes Sour Or Sharp
Sourness is almost always under-extraction.
The water moved too quickly or didn’t have enough contact time to dissolve flavour.
The fix is simple: grind a notch finer and brew again. If the cup gains sweetness and body, you’re heading in the right direction.
When The Cup Tastes Bitter Or Harsh
Bitterness points to over-extraction.
Either the grind is too fine or the water is too hot. Both push too much out of the grounds and leave a harsh edge.
Coarsen the grind slightly or drop the temperature by a degree or two. Keep some bitterness as balance, but never let it dominate.
When The Cup Tastes Flat And Lifeless
Flatness is usually stale beans, but if you know the roast is fresh, the water is probably to blame. Minerals matter more than most people think.
Test it by brewing once with filtered tap and once with bottled spring water. If bottled gives a cleaner cup, you’ve found the culprit.
When Results Swing Day To Day
If one brew is amazing and the next disappointing, you’re not controlling variables. Guessing ratios or eyeballing water temperature creates chaos.
Fix the ratio first. Fix the grind second. Fix the water temperature third. Brew the same way three times before changing anything else. Consistency always creates clarity.
Brewing In The Dutch Context
Pre-ground filter packs still dominate the Dutch market.
They’re convenient, but they’re also lifeless. Many people grow up thinking bitterness equals tradition, when in reality it’s just staleness. Freshly roasted beans prove the difference instantly.
Tap water is another hidden variable. In Brabant, hardness mutes flavour and flattens acidity. In the north, softer water sometimes works fine straight from the tap.
A simple filter jug is often the cheapest upgrade, and the improvement is obvious after a single brew.
Where Dutch Habits Collide With Freshness
Buying per kilo is common in Dutch households. That habit works if storage is managed well. Split the bag into airtight portions, freeze what you won’t drink in two weeks, and thaw sealed. You keep the savings without sacrificing freshness.
And then there’s the Moccamaster, sitting on countless kitchen counters.
It’s a machine capable of excellent coffee, but most people run it with supermarket grounds and no scale. Brew with fresh beans, proper ratios, and a burr grind, and it feels like an entirely different brewer.
Why Patience Matters
Each cup is information. Ignore it, and you stagnate. Pay attention, and your brewing improves quickly. Coffee doesn’t demand obsession, just awareness.
Why Three Minutes Of Focus Is Enough
Filter isn’t a chore. It’s three minutes of attention in exchange for a drink that makes sense. Skip the ceremony if you like. Just don’t skip the basics.
Why The Effort Pays Off
Good filter coffee shows the farmer’s work and the roaster’s decisions. It’s transparent. Once you’ve had it, stale supermarket bitterness feels like punishment.
Practical Recipes To Put It All Together
A Daily V60 Routine
For a single cup, weigh 15 grams of coffee and 250 grams of water. That ratio is stable and easy to repeat.
Bloom with 40 grams for about thirty seconds. This releases gas and sets the grounds for even extraction.
After the bloom, pour in calm spirals until you reach the final weight. Keep the flow close to the bed and steady.
The total brew time should land around three minutes. That’s the sweet spot where balance shows up in the cup.
If you want a straightforward daily driver, Blend No1 fits perfectly. It’s roasted with filter balance in mind and holds steady across brews.
A Chemex For Two
When brewing 36 grams of coffee to 600 grams of water, keep in mind that Chemex filters are thick and slow down the flow.
Because of that, grind a little finer than you would for a V60. It balances out the slower drawdown from the filter. Pour in steady stages rather than dumping all the water at once.
This helps keep the extraction even across the bed.
Aim for a total brew time of around five minutes. If the drawdown drags longer, go coarser next time to restore balance.
Final Thoughts
Filter coffee is honest. It punishes laziness, but it rewards care. Stop guessing ratios. Stop buying stale beans. Grind with consistency. Fix your water. Pour with intent.
The five fixes aren’t complicated. They just require attention.
Do them, and you’ll turn filter coffee from background noise into a highlight of the day. And if you want beans that actually reward the effort, buy from a roaster who prints roast dates and roasts to order.
That’s the difference between drinking coffee and enjoying it.
