Hi, this idea for a post came about after reading the other post asking people to describe their daily brew method.
I’ve been into coffee ever since I started chasing the ability to get decent coffee at home that’s strong enough so that most of the cup can be hot milk.
Cafetiere was always disappointing, the flavour always seemed to be a bit… “woody” if that makes sense? Almost like you’d expect ground coffee beans to taste like, and not the “actual extracted coffee flavour” that you’d expect.
I never bothered with any of the pourover methods because I couldn’t see how they were any good for “milk drinks”, they just seemed like different ways of making caferiere strength coffee but with more control over the brew.
I was never aware of aeropress really early on, and when I did hear about it it just looked like another way of making filter strength coffee so I steered clear of that.
Then I discovered the Moka pot which I used for years by cramming it with as much coffee as I could get into it which used to get pretty close to espresso strength but obviously not proper espresso.
Eventually we bought a Bambino Plus in lockdown and have been knocking out at least decent 2 lattes per day ever since (usually more if my wife is home)
The confusing thing for me has always been that the guys I have worked with over the years who have been really into their coffee have always used pourover or aeropress, and I’ve always been a little bit puzzled as to why they haven’t upgraded to an espresso machine yet (these people are all well paid and could definitely afford one if they wanted one, looking at the grinders they used to buy)
With all of this context in mind, what is the attraction to pourover or aeropress style coffee vs. espresso? E.g. espresso can = americano if it’s just a case of liking watered down coffee without a lot of milk, just add hot water. Please sell me on the idea of pourover or similar methods 🙂
Pluses of pourover as compared to espresso
However
If what you specifically enjoy is coffee strong enough to cut through a lot of milk, most “pourover” methods are simply not going to produce a high enough concentration for that to make sense.[1] So it sounds like for you there’s no reason to get into pourovers, which is totally fine.
Most hardcore pourover nerds are usually drinking their coffee black and looking for coffees with strong “origin characteristics” / terroir that they want to taste without being masked by milk.
Yes, you can make an americano, which will probably not taste quite the same as a pourover of the same strength due to the extraction dynamics being different. And if what you already have is an espresso machine and no pourover gear, then an americano makes the most sense. (Also faster in a cafe setting than a pourover.)
But re: your buddies, if what they like is black coffee at pourover strength and they have a setup that makes that really well, why would they spend the money and time that espresso takes?
There is a notable exception, which is something like a south indian filter or vietnamese phin. I have an aramse sofi that I got from Kaveri in Berkeley, and it gets somewhere in the vicinity of moka pot strength probably. Metal filtered/self-filtering bed, zero bypass, so functionally quite similar to espresso, except that it’s just brewed with gravity and atmospheric pressure alone. Works great for milk drinks on medium or darker roasts. Lighter roasts, I find I really fight to avoid undrextraction with it. ↩︎
This is just the best “sell” for pour over