The Hario V60 Coffee Maker is a pour-over brewer and a certified Sprudge favorite that is perfect for brewing at home.
The V60 was invented in 2004 and is manufactured in Japan by Hario. The name stems from its distinct V shape and 60º angle.
The brewer is available in various materials—glass, plastic, metal, and our favorite, ceramic (used in this guide).
Here’s our tried-and-true brew method that yields a delicious cup.
The gear: Hario V60, a scale, coffee, filter, decanter, kettle, and cup.
What you’ll need:
☑️ Hario V60 Coffee Maker
☑️ Hario filters
☑️ ground coffee
☑️ hot water
☑️ decanter
☑️ cup
What you’ll want to have:
☑️ gooseneck kettle
☑️ coffee scale
☑️ thermometer
☑️ stopwatch
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The Sprudge Hario V60 Brew Recipe
40g ground coffee (medium)
640ml hot water (205ºF)
Add 80ml of hot water and let bloom for 30 seconds.
After thirty seconds, slowly add the remaining water until you reach 640ml at ~2:30 minutes.
Allow the water to draw down for thirty seconds or so.
Step one:
Measure out 40g of coffee and get your hot water going. Shoot for 205ºF/96ºC.
Step two:
Once your water is up to temperature, place the V60 filter in the V60. Pre-folding the seam to sit flat against the cone when you open the filter is helpful. Place the cone on top of a server. Pour enough hot water through the filter to rinse the paper filter and preheat the cone. A ceramic filter takes quite a bit of water to preheat—otherwise, that mass will suck the heat out of your brew. Plastic filters, on the other hand, are excellent insulators and don’t need that much preheating.
Step three:
Grind the coffee and place it into the filter. We like making a depression in the bed of the coffee with a spoon or your finger to focus the stream of water to saturate all of the coffee. Place your coffee on the scale and tare it. Get your stopwatch ready!
Step four:
Pour about 80g of hot water on the ground and start the timer. Use a spoon or a chopstick to stir up the bed of coffee, being careful not to tear or disrupt the paper filter.
Step five:
After 00:30 (30 seconds) has passed, pour the water into the center of the bed, then use the directionality of the stream to distribute the coffee outwards evenly in a spiral-motion pour. Be gentle; you want to push it outwards, not punch holes through it.
Spiral back towards the center and maintain a steady pour; the objective is to make a circle with your stream the size of a silver dollar but not pour straight down the center. This circular motion with a steady stream keeps the coffee grounds evenly distributed.
Aim to complete your 640mL total water volume in 02:30. Once you are done pouring, take a spoon and gently stir the coffee in the cone, scraping the sides of the filter. Be gentle, but don’t be afraid to give the liquid some direction. The drip-through should finish at about 00:30.
Hot tips
The V60 is a brew method that benefits greatly from using a pour-over kettle. The V60 is conical like the Chemex but differs because the paper filter is suspended on the ridges. No, the swirly shape of the ridges doesn’t create a vortex within the cone, but they provide paths for the liquid to travel along as it flows out of all points of the filter. Because the flow rate through the V60 is relatively unrestricted, aim to grind the coffee “medium,” like beach sand.
Alternatively, you can make it work with a stovetop kettle if you got the memo that the V60 was cool but had commitment issues and didn’t want to spring for the pour-over kettle. Instead of maintaining a steady stream, try splitting up the main pour (after the initial bloom) into two chunks and stirring a bit to ensure all the grinds stay submerged. Your mileage may vary!
The V60 is adept at handling a range of batch sizes—we have used a V60 01 to make as little as 75mL of coffee and a V60 03 to make as much as 1.2L. Try 640mL/40g with an 02 size cone.
Notes on Sprudge Brew Guides
Sprudge brew guides utilize a brew ratio of 16:1 by weight; that is, for every 16 grams of water used, 1 gram of coffee is used. This is slightly more generous than the 60g/L standard recommended by the SCA, as 1000/16=62.5.
Grind measurements are given in subjective analogs, e.g., “like playground sand.” Communicating particle size effectively is near impossible, as grinder settings don’t translate universally. Ultimately, tasting and experience will illuminate the proper range of grinds for each brew method.
We specify a “bloom” of 30 seconds. Try a little longer if the coffee is fresh.
Troubleshooting
The rate at which coffee extracts are influenced by a set of variables: surface area, water temperature, agitation, flow rate, etc. Once you get consistent and confident, try to juggle the variables a bit: grind finer and use slightly cooler water.
Grind it coarser and let it steep longer. This balancing act ensures that there’s no single right way to do any of this… use your noggin, but more importantly, use your taste to guide you.
Generally, if a coffee is thin, hollow, grassy, sour, or lacks sweetness, it’s not extracted enough.
The most effective way to correct this is to make the grind finer and keep everything else the same.
If a brew is bitter, harsh, astringent, it’s over-extracted: next time, try coarsening up the grind.
