It Started with a Pour Over
Let’s talk about pour-overs — an elite way of brewing coffee. It’s one of the oldest ways of making coffee, uses almost no equipment compared to a traditionally brewed batch or espresso drink, and was the way that coffee was first introduced to what we know today as The Get Down.
A pour-over is essentially black coffee, but it’s brewed in a manner that lets the flavor profile of the coffee bean to come through as best as possible, allowing us to taste notes that we wouldn’t otherwise. This is a great brewing method to use if you want to truly see how the coffee bean tastes.
Aside from being a great way to extract all the flavors, pour-overs are close to home for us here at The Get Down as this was the first way we started brewing coffee here. Our current Head of Production, Khalil, started brewing pour-overs in the back of TGD when it was a barbershop. There was a small bar in the back of the barbershop with only two offerings, the King Kunta Pour-over and the Juicy Pour-Over. These blends are what we all know now as Turntables and Drip Drip. The coffee offerings brought a different energy to the space, one that would inevitably grow to make coffee the main things we did here.
For a pour-over at the cafe, we prep by grinding 20 grams of our single origin bean at an 8 grind; the grind size can change slightly depending on where the single origin is from, but we generally stay around a grind size of 7-9. An 8 grind size is similarly what we would use for a batch of drip coffee.
When we have our 20g of ground beans ready, we set up a mug with a dripper on top, place a pre-rinsed filter inside the dripper, and add the grounds to the filter.
We begin pouring hot water (195-205 degrees Fahrenheit) onto the grounds. How much water we pour onto the grounds and the time in between pours will vary depending on the bean, but generally we pour 350 grams of water over the grounds over the course of about three and a half minutes. This slow, controlled pour is what allows us to extract as much flavor as possible from the bean.
We’re currently serving our Single Origin Guatemala, a washed process coffee that’s one of our favorites we’ve had. It has almond and mellow fresh citrus notes, creating a balanced cup with some acidity and some sweetness.
A lot of folks recently have been experimenting with flavored pour-overs, so we had to give it a try ourselves. With the citrus and orange notes present in a lot of our beans, we decided to add orange zest to a pour-over and see how it turned out. The orange zest definitely brought out the citrus notes as we hoped — the cup was delicious. Flavoring your pour-overs can be a great way to try something new at home for your coffee routine without the hassle of getting any fancy equipment or syrups.
Whether you’re brewing at home or heading to a cafe to sip, a pour-over is a wonderful option for a great cup of coffee. Try one with an added ingredient if you’re feeling fancy, and let us know what you think. Happy sipping!
