Six weeks, one cheap kitchen scale, and a great deal of very sour coffee.
I decided this spring to stop buying coffee on the way to things and learn to make a decent cup at home. I bought a simple pour-over cone, a bag of beans from the roaster down the road, and a scale that weighs to a tenth of a gram, which felt excessive at the time and turned out to be the only thing that mattered.
What went wrong
Almost everything, at first. My early cups were thin and sour, then bitter and muddy, then somehow both. The internet was full of confident and contradictory advice.
What helped
- Weighing everything. Fifteen grams of coffee to two hundred and fifty of water, and then changing only one thing at a time.
- Grinding finer than I thought. Most of my sourness was simply water running through too fast.
- Writing it down. A small notebook by the kettle, one line per cup.
Most hobbies are just learning to notice one variable at a time.
The coffee is now reliably good, occasionally very good, and once — on a Sunday in May I cannot reproduce — genuinely excellent. I am still chasing that cup.