Why We Don't Gatekeep Our Brew Recipes
There is a genre of coffee writing where the recipe is the last line of the post, printed in a font you have to squint at, behind a signup form. Get the guide. Join the list. Unlock the secrets.
We do not publish coffee that way. Every recipe on this blog has the grams, the water temperature, and the clock in it, in a format you can read on a phone while the water boils.
I want to explain why, because it is a choice and not a neutral thing.
A recipe is a starting point, not a test
Our recipes will not work for you exactly, and they cannot.
Your water has different minerals than mine. Your grinder makes a slightly different particle size, and it drifts as the burrs wear down. Your mug holds heat differently. Your morning is different — you might be half-awake, running four other things while the kettle heats.
So we publish a recipe as a starting point, and we say so in the post rather than in the fine print. There is no score attached. Nobody is going to ask you what ratio you hit. If you brew 16 g instead of 15 g and it tastes better, then 16 g is your recipe now, and that is a good outcome rather than a failure.
A recipe is a suggestion with numbers in it. We are handing you a floor to start from, not a hill to climb.
Physics and opinion, labeled
Most coffee advice blends two very different kinds of statement together, and readers have no way to tell which is which.
Some of it is physics. Solubility rises with temperature, so hotter water pulls more out of the same coffee in the same time. Finer grounds have more surface area, so extraction happens faster. The first thirty to forty-five seconds of a pour-over is mostly carbon dioxide escaping the grounds, which is why that water gets poured away as a bloom.
Some of it is our opinion. "We like it a touch darker." "We let the cup sit a minute before the first sip because the top notes land first." "We would rather you used 205°F than 195°F if your water tastes flat."
The first kind stays true whether we say it or not. The second kind is true for us and could be wrong for you. Mixing them together is how coffee writing ends up sounding like it issues rules from somewhere we do not live. So we label them: chemistry or preference, every line.
That is the whole trick. Not a secret recipe. An honest label.
The recipe, with all the numbers
Our pour-over baseline for one cup, as brewed in my kitchen.
- 15 g of coffee, medium grind, about the size of table salt.
- 250 g of water at 200°F, or 205°F if your kettle loses heat on the way to the counter.
- 50 g for the bloom, then wait 45 seconds. The bed should swell and settle.
- Top up to 100 g by 1:00, pouring slowly near the middle of the bed.
- Top up to 170 g by 1:45, same place, same slow circle.
- Top up to 250 g by 2:00, then let it draw down with no more water.
- Total brew time: about 3:00, first pour to last drop.
That is 15 g to 250 g, a ratio of about 1:16.7. The full walkthrough, including what to do when the bed chokes, is in our pour-over guide.
If the cup comes out sour and thin, extraction was too low — go finer or hotter, one change at a time. If it comes out dry and bitter, go coarser or cooler.
You do not need a $60 grinder
We do not sell gear, so we have no stake in which brewer you own. But people ask, so here is our honest read.
A careful hand grinder and consistent technique will take you further than an expensive setup used carelessly. Consistency is the whole game — the same grind, the same dose, the same water temperature, morning after morning, so that when something tastes off you know where to look. A $60 hand grinder used the same way every day beats a $400 electric grinder dialed in by guesswork.
That is not a dig at people who buy good equipment. Good equipment is good, and a $400 grinder is not going to get any worse. But gear is not a personality. It is a tool, and the tool is the smallest part of the cup.
The tasting words are yours to use
"Bright." "Tea-like." "Juicy." "Dry." "Silky." "Dried fruit."
We use these on every bag and every post, and we have never thought you needed permission to use them about your own cup. "Bright" means the acidity comes up front and reads as fruit or citrus rather than as sourness. "Tea-like" means light and delicate, closer to black tea in the cup than to coffee. "Dry" means the finish pulls back and leaves a clean, almost tannic note instead of a sticky one.
They are useful because they point at something you can actually taste, and because they let you tell somebody else what you found. When you say a coffee is bright and somebody asks what that means, "it tastes like blackberry, not like lemon" does more work than "it tastes good."
What a coffee tasting note actually means when we write one is the long version, with more words and fewer metaphors.
A tasting note is a description, not a verdict. Nobody has to agree with ours. If a coffee we call bright tastes flat to you, then it tastes flat to you, and that tells you something about your palate or your brew. That tells you something about your palate and your brew, not about the coffee and not about your taste.
The two things we hold back
If we publish everything, what do we keep? Two things, and only two.
Claims we cannot check. We do not print "best in the country" or "judges' pick" on a bag or a post. No competition we have entered would support a claim like that, and if we printed it we would not know how to check it. We would rather be judged on the cup in your kitchen.
The actual money. One percent of our profits is set aside to support our rescue partners. The dollar figures are the founder's to publish, and they do not go up until she can stand behind them, with receipts. The specifics live on our impact page, and they get more precise over time, not less. We have written why we don't publish an impact number we can't verify if you want the longer reasoning.
We change recipes in public, including the ones that failed
Two commitments.
We do not rewrite the old post. When something changes — a ratio, a temperature, a bloom time — the old post keeps saying what we used to do. A recipe that quietly changes under you is exactly how people learn to distrust recipes. We write a new post explaining what moved and why, and the old one stays up with the date on it.
We publish the ones that failed. Not every failed test deserves a post. But when a failed test taught us something, we write it down.
The one I keep thinking about: we were chasing a heavier cup and moved two variables at once — the ratio from 1:16.7 to 1:15, and the water down from 200°F to 195°F. What we got was thinner than before and slightly salty, and we had no idea which change did it, because you cannot learn anything from a two-variable experiment. We went back, moved one variable at a time, and 1:16.7 at 200°F is still what is on this page.
A failed recipe is still information. Most brands delete theirs.
The objection worth taking seriously
The strongest argument against publishing everything is not that it makes us look less special. It is this: we hand out the recipe, your cup comes out badly, you email us, and now some version of us has to answer for your cup.
Here is how we handle it. When someone writes to say the coffee tastes wrong, we ask what they brewed with — brewer, dose, water temperature, and how many days ago it was roasted. If the coffee itself is off, we replace the bag. If it is a brewing thing, we send the numbers they should have used, which is the content of this page. If the coffee is fine and the cup is not what they hoped for, we say so in as many words, because "this is not the coffee for you" is a complete answer.
We do not treat a bad cup as an accusation. Brewing has about eight variables in it and nobody holds all eight at once. Our job is to be useful about the cup, not to defend the bag.
And the frame that usually comes attached to all of this is worth naming, because it is the thing we are arguing against: "if you're serious about coffee."
Coffee is a drink, not a membership. There is no exam, nobody has to pass a test to enjoy their own coffee on a Wednesday morning, and nobody has to prove seriousness to us before we tell them how to brew it. If somebody has told you otherwise — on a forum, in a shop, or in a tone designed to make you feel small — that is gatekeeping, and most of it is marketing.
So here is the reason. If we hand you everything, you can decide for yourself — adjust the numbers, argue with us, or ignore us entirely. And the person who knows their own water, their own grinder, and their own morning is going to drink better coffee than somebody trying to impress a stranger at a tasting table.
That is the whole reason. Everything else is packaging.
If you want to try it: the catalog is about 15 coffees and teas — a 12 oz bag of coffee is $24.99, and 3 oz of loose-leaf tea is $19.99. We roast on Wednesday and ship on Thursday, so a bag usually lands within the week. Pick one, brew it with the numbers above, and change one variable at a time. If the cup comes out wrong, email us and tell us what you brewed with — we read every one.
P.S. A recipe tells you nothing about whether the coffee in the bag is any good. How we decide which coffees make our lineup every quarter is the other half — where we taste the coffee first.
Brew slow.
— Seraphina