Physicists have determined that the ideal technique for pour-over coffee can use up to 10 per cent fewer beans to make a cup just as flavoursome
By Matthew Sparkes
8 April 2025
The right technique can make great pour-over coffee with fewer beans
Kemal Yildirim/Getty Images
Physicists have discovered a technique that can produce the perfect cup of coffee with up to 10 per cent fewer beans.
With climate change making coffee production an increasingly tricky proposition, it is becoming more important to brew in the most efficient way possible, says Arnold Mathijssen at the University of Pennsylvania.
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“Coffee is getting harder to grow, and so, because of that, prices for coffee will likely increase in coming years,” he says. “The idea for this research was really to see if we could help do something by reducing the amount of coffee beans that are needed while still keeping the same amount of extraction, so that you get the same strength of coffee.”
Mathijssen and his colleagues focused on pour-over coffee, where hot water is slowly added to grounds in a cone-shaped paper filter. Their advice can be boiled down to some very simple tips. Firstly, pour slowly; the more time the beans are immersed in water inside the cone, the more extraction takes place.
But this only works up to a point. Pour too slowly and the grounds aren’t mixed up enough; they settle to the bottom and actually begin to reduce the amount of extraction. To combat this, the second tip is to pour from a height.