Matt Perger’s Hario V60 Brewing Method

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Matt Perger is an Australian barista and coffee expert known primarily for winning the World Brewers Cup in 2012. He won that title with the Hario V60 method below.

He’s also won 2nd and 3rd place in 2 World Barista Championships (2013 and 2011 respectively).

Perger’s V60 method is simple and produces fantastic results. It brews a cup that is bright, evenly extracted, with clarity and some sweetness.

You will need:

  • 200g water (heated to 97 degrees Celsius)
  • 12g coffee (fine grind)

Method:

  1. Pour 50g for the bloom and stir “like a bandit”.
  2. Wait 30 seconds and pour 50g of water, in an outward spiral – that is, start in the center and spiral out. Perger pours counter-clockwise but notes that if you are in the Northern Hemisphere you should reverse the pouring direction.
  3. Finish the pour around the edges to wash any grinds back down. There should be no dry grounds above the water level.
  4. After another 30 seconds, pour 100g. Use the same outward pouring technique as above. This eliminates the need for the “Rao spin“
  5. For a level bed of grounds and therefore even extraction, tap the brewer by picking it up and setting it down again with a solid tap (more heavily then you may expect), once.
  6. The water should drain through the grounds across the whole bed pretty much at the same time, very evenly.
  7. The coffee should be ready to drink in another 1 minute and 20 seconds.

Total brew time: 2 minutes 20 seconds
TDS (Total Dissolved Solubles): 1.40%
Extraction: 20.8%

You might be surprised by the fine grind but Perger states that it’s to achieve maximum extraction, and very even extraction:

“If you have large grinds, most of the coffee is hidden inside (drastically reduced surface area) and doesn’t even touch the water. Most of your extraction (75% according to total contribution to surface area) comes from grinds smaller than 110 microns. So anything larger is just increasing your unevenness.”

He is renowned for using the EK43 grinder but most of us won’t have access to one of those. So for more common grinders, still use a very fine setting, but you may need to “use a tea strainer to discard the ‘boulders’ and larger grinds. This will make your grind size much more even. Make sure you weight the dose again after sifting!”

We’ve got more brewing techniques and recipes for the Hario V60 here.