Introduction

My general brewing philosophy is to start with the levers that are most granular and have the least variance. In order of most to least changed:

  1. Temperature: mainly affects what is extracted. I default to 92ºC with a general range of 88ºC to 95ºC.
  2. Grind size: affects both EY and TDS. I default to 4.8 on a ZP6 with a general range of 4.3 to 5.2.
  3. Brewer: minorly tweaks overall profile of brew. I default to the Origami dripper.
  4. Ratio: affects both EY and TDS, but more heavily affects TDS. I default to 1:16 with a general range of 1:14 to 1:18.
  5. Pour structure: pour count heavily impacts EY. I default to a 4444 pour structure (50g x 4).
  6. Bloom: mainly impacts EY. I usually only increase bloom for overly fresh beans. I default to 30s.
  7. Water: important, but I have good tap water and am lazy.
  8. Agitation: I don’t stir or swirl since I’ve found this adds too much variance. At most I pour faster. I default to 3.5-5g/s for regular pours, and 7.5-10g/s for high agitation pours.
  9. Dose: I never change from 12.5g beans. Adjusting dose confounds too many variables (mainly bed depth) and makes math hard.

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Recipes are holistic, and individual parameters can’t be taken in a vacuum as they all affect each other. My default of 92ºC only makes sense in the context of me preferring 4 pours with a small dose. It’s more valuable to understand why particular numbers are chosen, rather than just lifting someone’s grind size without considering the other parameters they choose.

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Variables

Temperature

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See: Taste and temperature for more detail.

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To use a photography analogy, temperature is like focal length, controlling what is in focus. It doesn’t significantly change % extraction yield — the greater effect is on WHAT is extracted, which flavors are emphasized, and how intense they are. Compared to grind size, increasing temperature can intensify flavor without losing clarity (more “peaky” flavors).

The majority of my dialing is changing temperature, since IMO it is the most predictable lever to tweak. I tweak temperature to get the flavor I want.

I think about temperature in terms of bean attributes rather than having a linear scale of washed/natural/anaerobic, etc., which is fundamentally flawed because a bean can have multiple relevant attributes (e.g. an anaerobic bean can be either washed or natural).