Tips & Tricks
Basic Tips
- A level countertop/scale greatly helps with uniform water flow through the dispersion cap.
- Wet/rinse filter before inserting barrel.
- When inserting barrel, make sure it seats firmly/completely down against the filter/filter support!
- A light swirl is a easy way to level the coffee bed before brewing. A uniform level bed is important!
- When pouring, a faster center pour works good with the first/bloom pour. On successive, and/or slower pours, keep kettle spout moving in a circular pattern for even water distribution.
- For easy barrel removal hold onto base, and twist and pull up on the barrel, or gently rock barrel back and forth while pulling up
- When discarding grounds, gently squeeze base to prevent filter support from falling out with the spent coffee.
Advanced Tips
Compared to a conventional cone-dripper, the LVL-10 may be more difficult to conceptualize but easier in execution. Hang with us here for a bit…
- Grinding size, and quality, is an important determinant to how we approach this no bypass brewer and what the resulting coffee is like. We believe that the brewing ratio should be a greater factor in the grind size than overall time. (Lower ratio = Finer grind) But time is still important! And longer is usually better than shorter. Five min plus brews are usually the most balanced.
- We would like to see a more universal language when talking about grind size. Fine, Medium and Course are so abstract and subjective that they’re not very helpful terms. We realize that grind size is only part of the equation, but we feel it’s advantageous to refer to size in microns (1,000 microns = 1mm). This is still somewhat a guestimate but at least it’s referencing a known unit of measurement.
- For some low fines burr sets and/or low RPM “Monolith type” grinders where the water still flows fast at 350 - 400 micron sizes, we’ve found that swirling the dry coffee on the wet filter may help to slow the flow, at least initially.
- For more acidic brew, pulse pour keeping the water column lower in the brewer. This slows the brew down and exposes the coffee to cleaner (More solvent) water.
- Agitation with a glass rod, or chopstick, works good if swirling the slurry slows the flow too much. We believe that swirling the slurry moves more fines down to the filter level. Some grinds/coffees work well, or better, without agitation though.
- Low doses (ie 18g) seem to work better with our low dilute / no dilute recipes, and a finer grind. This can also give the highest Extraction Yield %, if that’s a preference.
- If you have a refractometer and can get TDS measurements, our EY% calculation is: TDS x Beverage / Dose = EY% (Actually weighing the final beverage is the most accurate)
- Even though it may sound like it in some of our sharing, we don’t advocate for pushing EY% to the limit. The brews that balance early extraction / time / dilute generally taste the best and are in the 21 - 23 % range. We’ve gotten really good tasting results with 1:16 finished ratios and EY’s over 25% using a 1:13 brew ratio.
- Experiment broadly! Some very easy to extract coffees (anaerobic/natural/decaf) like a 1:10 brewing ratio with a lot of dilute. Other coffees do well with high brew ratios of 1:20 and long contact times.