Blog Home

Bonavita immersion dripper, the simple way:

The manual coffee brewing ritual is wrought with dogma.  I’ve seen some very strange behavior with manual pour overs:  paint brushes to create a perfectly smooth grounds bed, chopsticks to create a dimple, bamboo or glass stirring rods to avoid in-parting off flavors.  It can all be pretty dizzying, especially to the home user or to the café manager who has to figure out how to train a staff for consistency.    We brew our single serve coffee at Black Oak using Bonavita immersion drippers.   We chose this method because of its simplicity and consistency.

At Black Oak we tend to be skeptical of dogma.  We rely on our taste buds for subjective information and our VST coffee refractometer for objective information about coffee brewing.   We recently did an experiment, with Bonavita immersion drippers to look at the effect of the bloom on taste and extraction with a new coffee, Dukorere Ikawa from Burundi.   We wanted to know if you really needed to let the coffee bloom with an immersion brew method.  Did it increase the extraction?  Change the flavor? Or was it just an unnecessary vestige of coffee dogma?

We brewed six test batches three with our current method and three with our lazy method:

Current method:

Coffee dose: 26 grams

Grind: fairly coarse

Bloom:  100 grams (30 seconds with a stir to wet all grounds)

Total water: 380 grams

Instructions:  Wet filter and rinse.  Grind coffee.  Add 100 grams and stir.  At :30 add rest of water to 380 grams.  Release at 2:30

 Lazy method:

Coffee dose: 26 grams

Water: 380 grams

Instructions: Wet filter and rinse.  Grind coffee.  Add water to recipe.  Drain at 2:30

 Results:

The lazy method gave us the exact same extraction profile and was a slight improvement on taste, although both methods yielded a delicious cup.  Our tasters thought that the lazy method had a slight improvement on flavor clarity.  Most remarkably, this brew method involves one step and produces an extraction that is remarkably consistent.  We were really impressed at the consistency of extraction across both brew methods.   This is a very easy recipe to learn and execute day after day, cup after cup.

Across all six brews fell within .05 TDS % and .5% extraction.  Our average brew was 1.3 % TDS and 20.0 % extraction. 

Included is a PDF showing our brew recipe card for both iced and hot pour over drip.