You just got your hands on a new bag of coffee. Whether it’s a washed Ethiopian or a funky anaerobic Colombian, it’s exciting but also a bit of a mystery. You have (usually) 250 grams of coffee and you want to get the most out of it.

Here’s how we approach every new bag at Brewity. let’s called it “Educated guesses”.

Start With a Simple Cupping (Yes, Always)

Before jumping into your first pour over, we start with a simple cupping. Why? Because cupping reveals the coffee’s true nature unfiltered by your bias = your brew method and technique.

A quick guide to home cupping:

• Let the coffee rest for a week or two after roasting (play with this – you can always cup the same bag at different rest periods, starting with 1 week, cupping again at 2 weeks…)
• Grind somewhat coarse, similar to French press
• Add 12g of coffee to a cupping bowl (or just your normal cup, we don’t judge)
• Pour 200ml of water at 95°C
• Wait until the 4-minute mark, then break the crust with a spoon
• Scoop off the foam
• Start tasting around 13 minutes, when the cup has cooled and opened up
• Continue tasting as the coffee cools down and reveals more of its flavours.

Want to level up your cupping setup? Check out our cupping spoons and cupping bowls - or just start with a kitchen spoon and mug. The ritual matters more than the gear (at first).

During this first taste, we’re searching for broad notes, is it bright or mellow? Fruity or chocolatey? We’re analyzing with the goal of getting a baseline of what this coffee is capable of.

 

Pour Over Benchmark – Establish a Simple Recipe

Once we know what the coffee brings to the table, we move to our baseline pour over something quick, repeatable, and non-technical.

For a 1-cup recipe, here’s what we typically do, we call it “the busy café style”:

• Dose: 16–17g coffee
• Dripper: Origami Dripper with Origami filters
• Water temp: 95°C
• Pours:
• 50g bloom
• 100g pour after it drains
• 100g pour after that
• Let the dripper drain completely between pours

This method often amplifies sweetness and helps us get a feel for how the coffee behaves in a real cup.

Now we start adjusting:

• If the brew is watery or hollow → grind finer (large steps are okay at this stage)
• If the brew is muddy or dull → grind coarser
• If the brew is flat or lacking clarity → consider raising temp or using a faster-draining brewer

By now, we’ve used up maybe 25g of coffee — about 10% of the bag. We still have a long way to go, the key up to this stage is to get a feel of the potential of this bag of coffee. If we are tasting some faint, let’s say, passion fruit notes – now we can try to take this coffee even more in that direction, how can we amplify it? You can either try to follow the notes on the bag or try to find your own notes. Experience and interest play a huge role here, some people have a hard timing associating the taste of the coffee with the notes on the bag, some find that to be the most interesting part!

Dialing In – Now the Real Fun Starts

Once you're getting cups that are close to what you want, it’s time to get a bit nerdier.

This is where we at Brewity:

• Start tracking drawdown times
• Make smaller grind size adjustments
• Play with water temperature depending on the roast

For light roasts, we stay around 95–98°C, but if the coffee is a bit more developed, we might drop to 92°C.

Somewhere in here, you’ll try a tweak that takes the coffee too far — maybe it goes bitter or loses structure. That’s your signal to pull back a step, you’ve usually hit the best recipe for this bag at this point!

When the Cup Gets Familiar – Change the Game

At some point, you’ll find your cup tastes… fine. Maybe even great. But that spark of discovery is gone. That’s when we switch things up again, not because the coffee is bad, but because we’ve calibrated our taste to it.

This is where brewer variety and recipes shines.

Using different brewers creates completely different cups, even with nearly identical recipes. It’s one of the best ways to get the most out of a single bag and revitalize the experience.

Here are some brewers we rotate between:

• Origami Dripper
• Hario Switch – great for cleaner immersion brews
• Aeropress – versatile and expressive
• Driplite – compact and travel-friendly
• Chemex – clarity and elegance

Final Thoughts: Every Bag is a Journey

Dialing in a bag doesn’t have to be complicated, but its fun to make it somewhat consistent, if not in the sake of saving some money, finding the quickest path to the best experience.

Sometimes, you’ll find the recipe halfway through the bag. Sometimes it’s the final brew that leaves you wanting more. Either way, with each new coffee, you get faster, more intuitive, and more in tune with what you enjoy.

At Brewity, we’re here to help you explore those cups, from cupping spoons to high-quality drippers and brewers, we’ve got everything you need to bring out the best in your coffee.

Not sure where to start? Try cupping your next bag — even if it’s just with a mug and a spoon. You’ll be amazed how much it reveals.

Gear up your home brewing:

• Origami Dripper
• Hario Switch 
• Cupping spoon
• Cupping bowl
• V60-filters