Top 5 Reasons Why You Need a Pour-Over

The simple pour-over.  It's one of the easiest methods of coffee brewing.  If you need a single cup of coffee, it's also one the best cups of coffee you can make.  The pour-over was my go-to method of making my morning cup for at least seven years.  I had one of these ceramic pour-overs the whole time.  It never broke and it's still in my cupboard.

These days we're a household of two.  After a couple years of making pour-overs together every morning, we discovered the Bonavita 8 cup brewer.  The Bonavita brewer makes almost as good of a cup of coffee.  But it's way faster and produces less waste.  

Every once in a while when it's just me, I'll take out the pour-over and make a slow, delicious cup of coffee.  The pour-over method, although very similar to drip coffee, has a little more depth of flavor.  With a dark roast, it's easy to over-extract or brew too much coffee for a single cup.  I think a slightly coarser grind, using less coffee makes for a better cup of dark roast brew.

For medium to lighter roasts, the pour-over is great because if the coffee has less body and more floral and fruit notes, the pour-over will not only highlight those flavors, it will also give depth to those flavors.  This makes for a more balanced cup of coffee if that's what you're looking for.  The manual aspect of making a pour-over makes it easier to adjust variables.  

Here are the top 5 reasons why you should brew coffee using the pour-over method:

1. You believe in brewing slow.  You enjoy the ritual and want to savor every moment of it.  There's nothing like a pour-over coffee if you enjoy process.  From heating up your water in a kettle on the stove to hand-grinding you coffee beans, pre-infusing your grounds to methodically pouring your water through, every moment is a build up to a fantastic cup.  This. Is. Living.
2. You enjoy a clean, full-bodied cup of coffee.  The pour-over method of coffee brewing is clean.  The paper filter ensures that no noticeable grounds, no matter how fine, end up in your cup.  The pour-over coffee is great- balanced, bodied, and nuanced.  
3. You need coffee fast.  There's nothing faster than brewing one cup at a time.  You don't have to wait for a full pot of coffee to brew.  Once your water reaches the proper temperature, you can enjoy your cup of coffee in less than a minute.
4. You're Old School.  The pour-over idea and design was invented in 1908 by Melitta Bentz, founder of the Melitta Group.  According to the Melitta Wikipedia page, Ms. Bentz invented the first coffee filter, receiving a patent registration for her "Filter Top Device lined with Filter Paper" from the Patent Office in Berlin on July 8, 1908.
5. You hate clutter.  There's hardly an easier way of brewing a good cup of coffee.  The pour-over is a simple, classy device.  It fits over almost any standard mug.  Once you have it all you need is paper filters, hot water, and fresh ground coffee.    And when you're not using the pour-over it's small enough to put into your dish cupboard.  I have a couple of these in our cupboards and together they don't take up much space at all.  

Pour-overs are classy, simple, and keep your counters clean.  Our pour-over was designed to be similar to the original '102', Melitta's first cone-shaped filter top, developed in 1936.  Check out the Seven Pour-Over here.

There are lots of good reasons why a pour-over would make sense for you.  For me, it made sense because I was single so I didn't need to make a lot of coffee at once.  It was simple and I don't necessarily like to deal with complicated issues right out of bed.  As cool as having a La Marzocco GS3 would be in my kitchen, I'd get pretty irate if my espresso's not pouring right by the second try.  I have no patience in the morning.

In conclusion, pour-overs make great coffee.  If you enjoy simplicity, functionality, and process, you'd enjoy brewing coffee with a pour-over.  And if you don't need to brew a lot of coffee at once, why not try one?  Once you do, you'll always remember those quiet mornings when it was just you and your pour-over coffee.