Resting Coffee

We have spoken for some time about the advantages of resting our coffees. Dense, high-grown coffees, especially when roasted lightly, have a very hard and tight inner structure. This means that the degassing process, during which gasses generated during the roasting process move out of the bean, is very slow compared to darker-roasted, or less dense coffees. Therefore, for the coffees we buy and roast, the optimum resting period is often longer than you would expect, meaning that it is possible to taste the effects of these gasses long after roasting. We still recommend resting our coffees for at least 10 days, and maintain that we often find excellent results, especially for particularly dense coffees, beyond 6 weeks.

We are often asked questions, both by home brewers and by professional baristas who brew our coffees across the world, about brewing recommendations for different coffees, and for resting recommendations. Recently, we have been talking within our team about how best to communicate our approach, and we want to present some of our findings here.

Overall, we still recommend taking an active role in your coffee brewing, maintaining a simple approach and changing a single variable, for example grind size, in order to control extraction. You can read more about manipulating brewing variables to control extraction, and the effect this has on cup profile, on our website.

However, in our own brewing, we often have a rather different approach depending on the resting period, especially for fresher coffees roasted less than 3 weeks prior to brewing. Here, we hope to clarify the types of changes we make to our approach, and below you can find example V60 recipes, compiled by two-time Danish Brewer’s Cup champion Victor Kristensen.

Water is still the most important variable, we believe, and we recommend going below 100 ppm. You can do that with either a Peak Water or with minerals as Third Wave Water. Read more about water for coffee by following the link below.

About brewing

Overall, we find that during the resting process, harsh and astringent flavours, which can even be perceived as a ‘roast’ character, soften out, allowing a clearer and brighter expression of the coffee’s character to shine through. This means that a careful approach is required in order to minimise these flavours when brewing fresh coffees.

For example, when brewing coffees less than 2 weeks from roast, we often use a lower brewing water temperature, and reduce contact time. While brewing coffee at this stage will never result in the most transparent view of its potential, this gentler mode of brewing reduces the harsher character that can often result from using fresh coffee. At the other end of the scale, when brewing very well rested coffees, more than 6 weeks from roast, we find that we can push the extraction further than expected, without any trace of these harsh or astringent flavours. We can use a higher water temperature, and split the brew into more pours in order to increase contact time, resulting in a rich and sweet cup, while still holding on to a high level of flavour and aroma clarity.

Brewguides

Recipes

Below are some examples of V60 recipes for fresh, rested, and very rested coffees. For all of these recipes, we recommend the CAFEC filter papers, that you can find here.

Please be aware that the recipes below are a guideline only, and the final result will depend on many variables, including for example the chemical make up of your brewing water, or the type and freshness of your grinder burrs. The effect of resting also depends on many factors, most notably the density of the coffee being used. For example, a dense high-grown washed Kenyan coffee will likely take longer to degas than a lower grown naturally processed Brazil.

Less than two weeks

Fresh coffee

For fresher coffees, less than 2 weeks from roast, we recommend using a recipe with 18 grams of coffee, ground rather finer than a typical V60 brew, to 290 grams of water with a TDS of 40ppm at 90°C.

at 0:00 pour to 80g

at 0:45 pour to 290g

Aiming for a TDS% of 1.25-1.35.

Two to six weeks

Rested coffee

On our brew bars, we use coffees between 2 and 6 weeks from roast, so here we recommend our typical V60 recipe. We use 18 grams of coffee ground slightly finer than for a typical filter brew, to 290 grams of water with a TDS of 40ppm at 94°C.

at 0:00 pour to 80g

at 0:45 pour to 185g

at 1:30 pour to 290g

Aiming for a TDS% 1.4-1.5

More than six weeks

Very rested coffee

For very rested coffees, more than 6 weeks from roast, we can push the extraction further without losing balance, due to the almost complete absence of harsh flavours left behind from the roasting process. Here we suggest 18 grams of coffee, ground slightly coarser than a typical V60 brew, to 290 grams of water with a TDS of 40ppm at 94°C. This is more similar to the brewing approach I have previously used in a competition setting.

at 0:00 pour to 80g

at 0:45 pour to 150g

at 1:30 pour to 220g

at 2:15 pour to 290g

Aiming for a TDS% 1.55-1.65

Learn more

About Brewing

When it comes to brewing coffee there are many different approaches. We have gathered out thoughts on the subject, especially when brewing our coffees, into an overarching approach to water & balance, and more specific guides and recommendations depending on your brew method of choice. You are welcome to continue the conversation with us on our social media or in the chat here on the site.

Brewing

Continue to explore:

Resting Coffee

Recipes

Fresh coffee

Rested coffee

Very rested coffee

About Brewing