How We Brew Coffee on Sunday Mornings (When We Actually Have Time)

If you've been to a specialty roaster in the last three or four years, you've heard some version of the claim that their coffee "is meant to be savored." That's usually marketing. This post is not marketing. This is what we actually do on Sunday mornings when nobody has anywhere to be for at least an hour.

The Sunday brew method is different from the weekday rush, not because we have different equipment or different beans, but because we have time. Time changes which method makes sense, what ratio we use, what temperature we brew at, and what we do while the kettle comes up to temp. The recipe below is what we end up with when we lean into the slower side of the brewing spectrum.

Why Sunday is different

Most brewing advice assumes you're rushing. The standard pour-over recipe is optimized for "I have 4 minutes, I want a good cup, and I need to leave." The standard French press ratio is built around "I want a cup now without thinking about it." Even the standard Aeropress instructions assume you've got maybe 3 minutes start-to-finish.

Sunday changes the constraint. If you have 20 minutes, the question is no longer "how do I brew quickly" but "how do I brew well, slowly, with attention." The cup changes with the attention. The cup changes with the time. The brewing method that makes sense on a Tuesday is not the brewing method that makes sense on a Sunday.

A few things shift when we give ourselves the time:

• We pick a method that opens up. Pour-over rewards attention; French press rewards patience; espresso rewards precision. On Sunday we choose pour-over because the ritual of pouring — three pours, slow and even, watching the bed level, listening to the draw-down — is part of why we like doing it.
• We use a higher coffee-to-water ratio. The standard 1:16 to 1:17 is calibrated for the "drink it and go" cup. On Sunday we go closer to 1:15 or even 1:14.5, which makes a slightly more concentrated brew that holds its character over the 30 minutes it takes us to drink it.
• We grind finer than we'd grind on a Tuesday. The weekday grind is coarser because we want forgiveness — over-extraction is a problem. The Sunday grind is finer because we can control the brew, and finer grinds pull more out of the bean. The cup has more clarity.
• We use hotter water. Standard pour-over advice peaks at 94 to 95 °C. On Sunday, with the longer brew time, we use 95 °C straight from the kettle. The cup is brighter and the body holds together at the slightly higher extraction.
• We don't time the brew as tightly. Tuesday pour-over is a stopwatch. Sunday pour-over is a rhythm — three pours, listened to, watched. The brew takes as long as it takes.

The recipe

This is the recipe we use most Sunday mornings. It's a V60 pour-over with a single-origin light roast, brewed at a slightly narrower ratio than the standard pour-over recipe.

For 350 g of brewed coffee (about 2 cups):

• 22 to 23 g of coffee, ground medium-fine (slightly finer than the Tuesday grind)
• 350 g of water at 95 °C
• A 30-second bloom with 50 g of water
• Three pours of 100 g each, at 30-second intervals
• Total brew time: about 3:15 to 3:45

Steps.

1. Heat the kettle to 95 °C. If your kettle doesn't have a precise temperature setting, bring it to a boil and let it cool for 30 to 45 seconds — that's usually close to 95 °C.
2. Rinse the filter. Pour hot water through the V60 and discard the water. This warms the brewer, removes any paper taste from the filter, and pre-wets the cup or carafe you're brewing into.
3. Grind the coffee. 22 to 23 g, medium-fine. The grind should look like coarse sand or slightly finer — finer than the grinds you'd use for a French press, finer than the grinds you'd use for a Chemex.
4. Add the coffee to the brewer and start your timer. Pour 50 g of water over the coffee bed and gently stir once with a spoon or paddle to wet all the grounds. Wait 30 seconds.
5. First main pour at 0:30. Pour 100 g of water in a slow, even spiral from the center outward, then back inward. Try to keep the water level even across the bed. Aim to finish the pour by 0:50.
6. Second main pour at 1:00. Pour another 100 g the same way. The bed should still be drawing down — the surface should be glossy but no standing water.
7. Third main pour at 1:30. Final 100 g. By this point the bed is mostly spent, and the brew should be flowing evenly.
8. Wait for the draw-down. The water should drain through the bed and into the carafe by about 3:15 to 3:45. If it draws down faster than 2:30, your grind is too coarse; if it draws down slower than 4:30, your grind is too fine.
9. Swirl the carafe gently. This mixes the brew and brings the temperature down slightly. Pour into your cup.

That's it. The whole ritual takes 20 minutes including the kettle coming up to temp and the chat you have while you wait.

What we brew

We use single-origin light roasts on Sunday. The Sunday cup is the cup where we pay the most attention to the brewing, so we want a coffee that rewards attention. Light roasts — with their brighter acidity and more delicate aromatics — work best. A washed Ethiopian, a Kenyan AA, a Costa Rican Tarrazú, a Colombian Pink Bourbon — these are all Sunday-coffee kinds of beans.

We avoid dark roasts on Sunday. Dark roasts are calibrated to be drinkable even when brewed quickly with imprecise parameters. The Sunday ritual is precisely the opposite — we have time to pay attention — so we want a coffee that benefits from that attention. A dark roast doesn't show much in a careful pour-over that a rushed pour-over wouldn't show.

If you only have a dark roast on hand, the recipe still works. The cup will be heavier and less aromatic than a light roast at the same parameters, but the slower pour and the higher ratio will still give you a better cup than a rushed brew.

What we drink it from

This is the unsexy part of the Sunday coffee ritual. We drink the Sunday cup from the cups we never use during the week. We have a few ceramic cups we keep on a high shelf and only bring down for the Sunday brew. The cups have weight to them. They're handmade by a local potter who charges more than we'd pay for normal mugs, and we use them one morning a week.

The reason this matters is that the cup you drink from changes how the coffee tastes. A heavy ceramic cup with a thick rim holds the heat longer and gives you a different mouthfeel than a thin porcelain cup. A wide, shallow cup gives the brew more surface area to cool in, which brings out the aromatics. A narrow, tall cup keeps the heat and the aromatics in. We like a wide, shallow ceramic cup on Sunday — it cools the brew quickly and lets us smell the cup as we drink.

You can substitute here. Whatever cup you have that's a little bit special — the cup you keep for guests, the cup your grandmother gave you, the cup you bought on a trip — use that on Sunday. The point isn't the cup. The point is the small ritual of choosing it.

What we do while it brews

The Sunday brew takes 20 minutes from start to finish. We don't stand at the counter for those 20 minutes. We pour the bloom and walk away for a few minutes. We come back, pour, walk away again. The brew waits for us; we don't wait for the brew.

A few things that work well:

• Stretch. A 20-minute coffee ritual pairs naturally with a 10-minute morning stretch. The kettle comes up while you stretch; the bloom happens while you fold the laundry; the third pour happens while you finish the dishes.
• Read something. Not the news. Something with no urgency. A novel, a cookbook, a magazine, an old letter. Sunday coffee is not for catching up on what's happening in the world.
• Make breakfast. The Sunday brew pairs with a slow breakfast — eggs, toast, whatever you have time for. The brew takes 20 minutes; you can have eggs done by the time the third pour is finishing.
• Talk. If you brew with someone else, Sunday coffee is a perfect 20-minute conversation. We brew with our partner, and most of our best Sunday conversations are three pours and three responses long.

None of these are required. The point is that the Sunday brew doesn't ask you to wait. It asks you to do something else while the cup comes together.

Why the cup is better

Three reasons the Sunday cup tastes better than the weekday cup:

1. The pour is slower. Slower pours extract more evenly and don't channel. Channeling is what happens when the water finds a path through the bed and bypasses most of the grounds — it shows up as a thin, sour, weak cup. Slow pours prevent channeling by keeping the bed level even.
2. The ratio is heavier. The narrower ratio (1:15 instead of 1:16.5) means there's more dissolved coffee in the cup. The cup has more body and more sweetness as a result.
3. The grind is finer. Finer grinds extract more from the bean in the same brew time. With slower pouring and attention, the cup has more clarity and more aromatic lift.

If you're already brewing pour-over on Tuesday with attention, switching to Sunday brewing mostly just gives you more of what you already get. If you're brewing pour-over on Tuesday by the stopwatch, switching to Sunday brewing gives you noticeably more body and aromatics.

When not to do this

If you're in a rush, don't do this. If it's a work day and you have 4 minutes, use the standard recipe. The Sunday recipe is calibrated for time; if you don't have time, it doesn't work.

If you're brewing for more than two people, this recipe doesn't scale easily. The pour-over at 350 g is intimate. If you're feeding a family or a brunch crowd, you're better off with a French press or a Chemex at a larger volume.

If your kettle is unreliable at 95 °C — most cheap electric kettles don't have precise temperature control — invest in a thermometer. The 5 °C difference between 90 °C and 95 °C changes the cup.

Variations we like

A few tweaks we make on different Sundays:

• The Chemex Sunday. Same recipe, but at twice the volume (700 g of water and 44 g of coffee) and a slightly coarser grind. The Chemex makes a slightly cleaner, more filtered cup — useful if your Sunday coffee is a darker roast.
• The Aeropress Sunday. Not the standard Aeropress recipe. We use the inverted method with a 2:30 steep, 17 g of coffee, 240 g of water at 90 °C. Press slowly. The cup is more concentrated than the V60 pour-over but has more body. Good for a single cup rather than sharing.
• The espresso Sunday. If we have the time and the espresso machine is behaving, Sunday is when we pull shots. We pull a 1:2 ratio shot in 27 to 30 seconds. The cup is the canonical way to taste a single-origin, and the Sunday ritual is the right context for it.

These are all variations on the same theme — the same attention and time, applied to a different method.

What to take from this

If you don't have time on Sunday, try one of these:

• Pick one morning a week where you have 20 minutes and brew this recipe.
• Use the recipe even on a rushed morning — 5 minutes is enough to do the bloom and the first pour.
• Buy yourself a cup you want to drink from. A cup you like changes everything.
• Stop drinking the coffee while you check your phone. Drink the coffee and look out the window.

The brewing method matters less than the attention. A 20-minute pour-over with attention and a cup you like beats a 3-minute espresso pulled while you're scrolling. We're not trying to sell you on brewing. We're trying to sell you on the attention.

See our current single-origin catalog.

See our pour-over brewing guide.

P.S. If Sunday mornings are when you brew, you might enjoy our slow Sunday tea wind-down post. It's the tea version of this — a 20-minute ritual for end-of-day decompression.

— Seraphina