Brewing Guide | Kalita Wave Pour Over Coffee Dripper

Transcript

Hey. Chris here, from Prima Coffee Equipment, and today, we are brewing with the Kalita Wave Dripper. This is the Kalita Wave, and this is what you're going to need to start brewing with this. You have your Wave Dripper. This is the 155, the smaller of the two sizes. Your matching filter inside. I'm using a white filter. Your ground coffee. You can see this is kind of a medium, maybe medium-coarse grind here on a Guatemala Lab grinder. This is actually a 17. Right around there. I've dosed about 23 grams of coffee for this size. We're going to have something to brew into, cup or a server, a scale to measure everything with, and a kettle of water. This is the Kalita Wave Pot. Really nice server that we like a lot.

Kalita Wave Coffee Drippers

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The Kalita is quick (2-4 minutes) and easy to clean up

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You can also use a thermometer to monitor the temperature of the water as you brew. I'm going to go ahead and start my timer, and then begin pre-infusion. I'm going to do about maybe 10% of my total water volume for this pre-infusion stage. My total water volume is going to be right around 350 milliliters. I just poured about 35 milliliters of water on top of that. You can see that is starting to bloom and expand. It's a pretty fresh coffee just roasted a few days ago, actually roasted by our friends of at Zolo Coffee Roasters in Bay Area, California. It's a nice specialty roaster out there. This is actually their French roast, one of the darker ones in the spectrum, but it's nice coffee. Next, I'm going to begin pouring for the regular infusion. For the Kalita Wave, I like to do kind of a quick pulse. This particular grind setting, with the shape of this filter and the configuration of holes in the bottom, means that it drains really quick.

You can see as I pour, actually, it starts to deflate right away, and you can just kind of do a pulse brew to keep that going. The pulse brew, a lot of folks say, also helps not to over-extract in any one particular area. You're not really pouring continuously in any one spot. You're just chaotically going over all of it repeatedly, and that sort of helps to make sure that it's evenly extracted. Let's talk about the brewer itself. The Kalita Wave is unique because it's actually a flat bottom. It's one of the few manual brewing methods that has a flat bottom filter, so that paper filter itself has a flat bottom, and then the bottom of this filter cone is flat with three holes at the bottom arranged in a triangle, and that's where the coffee drains. Flat bottom filters are nice because they really promote even extraction. There's not a point at the bottom of the cone at which it's really clogging up or over-extracting. Flat bottom is good for that reason.

It does require you to pour a little bit differently. Whereas with a cone-shaped filter, you can actually get away with a center pour. For the flat bottom, it works really well to pour all over the place, in a circle or some sort of pattern, so you're really spreading out all over the place. Let's see. Right about 260 grams of water, just 100 grams away from our goal. And one thing that folks praise the Kalita for is it encourages you and allows you to use a really coarser grind setting, a coarser grind setting than, say, a V60 or something like that, and that coarse grind coupled with a longer brew time is going to get more of those sugar browning out of the coffee. It's a kind of complex sweetness instead of like a bright pointed acidity, and I enjoy it for that reason a lot.

All right. We're just right around our target. As that begins to drain, I'm going to take that off. I'll be ready to go. The Kalita is becoming really popular for competitions these days. Actually, the World Brewers Cup Champion, Erin McCarthy used the Kalita Wave for his routine. It's picking up a lot of speed and really popular brewer now, and for good reason. It promotes even extraction, makes a unique cup when compared to other pour-overs, and comes in a range of sizes with a bunch of different accessories, too, like the Wave Pot Kettle, for one. That's the Kalita Wave. I'm Chris of Prima Coffee. Thanks for watching.