V60 Papers: Our Excessive Testing Was Worth It!

0:00 - Today, we're gonna talk about V60 filter papers. Now hang on, that might seem like a lot for one video, a weird topic, but in investigating the answer to some questions, well, it's genuinely changed the way that I think about pour-over brewing, and I want to share what we learned with you. Now, we made this video because five or six years ago, we made a whole video about Hario V60 papers because there was a bunch of confusion about where they were made, what the differences were. That's out of date. We wanted to update it. And in doing so, we thought, well, let's buy a bunch of other filter papers that are out there and see, do they make any difference? So, let me run you through very quickly the nine different filter papers that we have here to compare. And shockingly, this is not exhaustive, but this was a good starting point. So, first up, for those of you who enjoy ASMR.

0:45 (plastic crinkling) Oh... crinkle, crinkle. We've got the Hario filter papers. Now, let's get this out of the way from the beginning. There used to be different manufacturers in different countries for different products. So, if it was in a box or in a bag, they were different papers, they brewed differently. That is no longer the case. One factory in Japan makes everything for Hario. So whatever format you buy them in, you're now buying the same paper. These are I guess the gold standard for the rest of the comparison, or at least the benchmark of some sort. Next up we've got a bunch of papers from Timemore. They make little V60 papers. That's very nice. Here we have a slightly different paper. They have some cotton in the weave. They're heavier, thicker, and they're called Slow Coffee Style from Kinto who make you know nice glassware and stuff and brewers too. Then we've got one of four papers from Cafec,

1:33 the first one being Abaca. I always feel like I'm saying that word wrong. So it's a kind of paper alternative as a material. So that's used in this. That's the little abaca plant on there. So I guess there's a sustainability piece to this one. And then they do three different papers built around three different brew temperatures and therefore three different roast levels. So there is the dark roast paper, should brew at the temperature of 83 degrees Celsius, apparently. They've got the medium dark paper, you should brew at the temperature of 90 degrees Celsius. And then the light roast, T-92. Now I'll say right now, for light roasts, I completely disagree with 92 degrees Celsius. I would say for genuinely light roast of specialty coffee,

2:18 boil the kettle, boil it up hot, hot, hot! For dark roasts, 83 is really pretty low, but I can't really argue with it. You'll have less bitterness in there. 90, I guess, for medium dark, probably fair. But yeah, just as an aside, I disagree with 92. Last two papers, they're both from Sibarist. These are Sibarist's fast papers, which I think they kind of burst onto the scene with a much faster flowing paper than almost anything on the market. But they also make this, which is the B3, which is a more conventional, slightly slower V60 paper. Now we put these through a battery of tests, some of which were sensible, some which probably weren't. And the summary of most of the testing is pretty simple. The slower the paper, the higher the extraction.

3:04 So you keep your grind the same, coffee the same, recipe the same, the slower papers just extracted more. Kind of makes sense. They have much longer contact times, and contact time is a function of extraction. And so at the extreme end, the Sibarist Fast were the fastest papers, and they had the lowest extraction for a fixed grind. And at the other end, the slow style from Kinto, very, very slow. They had much higher extractions. That kind of corresponds roughly with how fast they flow. If you have no coffee in them and just pour water in and see how quickly it drains through, the paper adds some resistance. It could be thickness in some cases. It could be essentially the way the paper is woven together. But that in and of itself is not a shocking thing. Now we have to contextualize this a little bit. This is important. Whenever I have published V60 recipes,

3:50 two cup, one cup, whatever, a lot of the freaking out in the comments happens because people are worried that their brews are much slower than mine, particularly at that last phase. You finish pouring and that draw down where you know it's just sort of going down through and out, that's really slow. People worry that that's gonna make their brew taste bad, and I think they probably expect it to taste bad and then kind of poison their minds with that thought. And they don't like the brew. And there are two reasons you could have a slow brew. One is the paper could be a slower paper or you could have a grinder that produces a lot of fines, and well that can sort of clog the paper up, and you might have a slow brew because you've got so many fines that you get an unpleasant taste from the grind distribution, for want of a better term. Those grinders will also often taste bad

4:36 because in producing a lot of fines, they've also produced a lot of large coarse pieces. Those pieces underextract, the fines can add some bitterness, and you get this kind of weak but strong but sour but bitter brew from a low quality grinder. What was interesting to me was to understand if a paper slows down a brew, does it make it taste better or worse? Before I get to this, there was another aspect of these papers that was quite surprising to me. If you go back and watch the video from five or six years ago where I compared different papers, we did a slightly tongue-in-cheek test where we took the filter papers, bundled 'em up, put them in a glass, poured hot water on top and steeped them. After 5 or 10 minutes of steeping, infusing the paper into the water,

5:21 they were then tasted, and they tasted surprisingly different. I got to flex my descriptors that day. That was a little bit of fun. We did the same test here because actually this is not the first time we shot this video. We shot this video before, and it was boring so we threw it away. And one of the reasons it was boring is that that tasting test comparing the taste of just the papers in hot water, well, they all, they all tasted fine. There was really very little paper taste coming out of any of these papers. The world has changed, and no one told me about it. I'm so convinced at this point that these do not add any quote-unquote paper taste that I'm genuinely not sure I can recommend rinsing a filter paper with water before brewing with it. Should you preheat your brewer? Maybe you should.

6:07 That's not an argument I'm gonna make. If you have a metal, a ceramic, a glass brewer, maybe even a plastic brewer, there may be merit to preheating it. You could use the hat on a kettle method and that would be fine, but you wouldn't need a paper. But I'm not sure I can recommend rinsing papers anymore because I don't think they add any flavor. You're gonna ask me to prove that to you, aren't you? So that's what we're gonna do now just quickly. We're gonna do a little taste test. There's gonna be a three out of five to make things tricky. This is gonna be five bowls of coffee, three of them are the same, two of them are from a different brew. It's gonna be a rinsed versus no rinsed. The brew will be preheated in both cases, but one paper will be rinsed, one will not. Can you tell the difference? Is rinsing, is it over? Here we are.

6:52 Now, usually when we do tastings, we do a separate audio track with sort of no slurps in it. For this one, I think just 'cause it's a quick tasting, we'll do one slurp, I'll do you a little warning counter, goes 3, 2, 1 before I do the slurp so you can mute it, but just the one slurp, and then I'll tell you if I can tell the difference between them. Here we go. (James's slurp) I have no idea, I have no idea which one is which. If I'm just gambling at this point, I've gotta get one out of five followed by one out of four. So that makes it like a one in twenty. I've got a 5% chance of getting this right by a random chance. You'll correct me if my math was wrong on that.

7:39 I know you. If this is right, it's a guess! 'cause I cannot taste more paper in any one of these cups. I cannot. So if we see tape, I've done well. No tape, no tape, and also no tape. Where were the two? Oh, that's got tape, and that's got tape, but this one does not, so okay. Rinsing, nope. Can't justify rinsing from a usage of water perspective. If you can get your brewer hot a different way that's more energy efficient and less wasteful, I endorsed that entirely. But with a bleached, and this should be an important caveat, not an unbleached brown paper filter.

8:25 Those definitely taste weird, and I would rinse those aggressively. But with a modern bleached filter paper, from a taste perspective, I simply cannot recommend rinsing. But that's not the revelation of this video. Now before we get into the final tasting portion of this video, which is the one that kind of blew my mind, two other things first. We bought a video microscope specifically for this video but also just to have and do cool stuff with. And so we filmed up close all of these papers, dry, wet, with coffee on them, and the images are really cool. I'm quite excited to show you them. They're not however meaningful in a way where I can be like, look at this, you know, texture, look at this weave of fiber, and give you useful information from that. They're just really cool things to see. But I don't know if I can give you useful information

9:10 off the back of it. So we'll do a little short section of fun, beautiful coffee filter paper micro-scopy, mi-croscopy? videos Before that, because this is a sponsored video I need to talk about the quick coffee giveaway that we do these days with sponsored videos, so if you need some coffee in your life, and you are in a part of the world where we could potentially ship you coffee, click the link at the description down below, enter, and we will give away I think 50 different bags of coffee to people out there because this video has a sponsor and a short ad for Incogni. Out there on the wilds of the internet, there exist companies called data brokers, and their purpose is to collect as much information about you as possible and to sell it. We know it's happening. No longer do you end a spam phone call thinking, "How did they get my number?"

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11:29 incurring significant cost to acquire or significant pain to acquire. Some of these aren't available in every different country. We had to source them from different places. If you have an option that is cheap and easily available to you, that would be my recommendation. But we can add some nuance to that. What if you don't have a great grinder? I don't mean to pick on the Hario Slim, but it's not a great grinder. And so what we did is we took this grinder, and we took three papers, Sibarist Fast, the medium, the Hario, and the slow, the Kinto Slow Coffee Style. And I was curious if you had the same sort of grind setting if you all dialed them into something tasty, well, does one paper suit these better? And the results were very, very surprising to me. But they shouldn't have been in hindsight.

12:15 By far the best-tasting brew came from the slowest paper. You see, my brain was like, well if you've got a slow grinder that produces lots of fines, do you really wanna slow it down even more? But as we've touched on previously, with kind of infusion brews, where they're just water and coffee hanging out for a while, grind distribution doesn't matter quite as much as percolation brews, where the bed of coffee, water's passing through it. And so the quality of the bed of coffee, the evenness, all of that kinda stuff determines extraction as well. Pour overs are percolation, but if your paper is adding resistance, it's increasing the kind of contact time. And it turns out, increasing contact time through the paper just adds more extraction. We struggled to get this grinder above 20% extraction

13:00 with these two papers without it just tasting awful and extremely just uneven and getting some channeling issues. But the slow paper just performed way better. And so this really mitigated a low-quality grinder, and that genuinely surprised me. The brew was much, much slower. But that bonus extraction, because it came from contact time was beneficial. Now we've talked on and off over the years about contact time. You know, generally speaking, I would say very long contact times don't ever get to the point of quote-unquote over-extracted taste with, you know, light roasted coffees. You can have a French press that steeps for 10, 15 minutes if you want to. You can do Jonathan Gagné's AeroPress recipe. That's a 10 minute steep.

13:46 Nothing bad happens with really long infusion processes. And so maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, but I really was by just how much more I liked the very slow brew. So if you don't have a paper like this available, generally I would say thicker, heavier papers add more resistance. We weighed all of the papers 'cause we're interesting that way. And this is by far the heaviest. It's got the most material in it, almost by I think 50% more than anything else. It's notably heavier. If you can find another thick heavy paper, it may be beneficial. Obviously it's not a V60, but something like the Chemex papers were notoriously thick. Now they may need a rinse 'cause that's a lot of paper per brew, but I would guess you'd get these slow brews that that may not be a bad thing

14:31 with a lower quality or less even grinder. Then I was like, well, hang on a second. Is the same thing true with sort of high-end grinders? And that's the taste test I'm gonna do now. We're gonna take these three papers, all dialed in, and see if, with a much better grinder, in this case the Fellow Ode with SSP burrs in it, (not outrageous, but a very good grinder) well, does it suit any of these papers better than the other? That's the question. Now slightly different to the first test, when we did the Hario, our ability to get a good extraction, that sort of grind level was the deciding factor. Here, these are now calibrated to a similar extraction, 'cause if you've got a fancy grinder, you've got a lot more control over this stuff. So I'll be interested to see, you know, having the paper decide your route to extraction, does that change anything?

15:18 Interesting, this cup is the fullest juiciest cup. So all matching extractions, which is again interesting. I wonder if that's coming from a higher contact time or not. This one feels the lightest of the cups, the leanest of them, if you will. But I still feel like this is probably my preferred brew. Now this is a singular taste test. This is not conclusive. I think with the Hario, this is gonna be a much more informative thing where I would say if you have a really cheap grinder and you do pour overs, hunt out a slower paper. That's I think a good recommendation here. I'm not sure I'd say for the difference in brew, pick one paper over another. Well, let's see, what was the favorite? The favorite was? So the Sibarist, not at all what I expected. So this in the middle is the Kinto, and this the Hario, okay. Because the grind is dialed to the paper, in this case, the Sibarist came out the best

16:06 because it had the finest grind of these. The interesting question would be, if you took this grind level and put it into these papers, would you get a better brews? You know what I mean? Like that's the interesting, these have courser grind settings to get to that same matching number. Again, it sort of makes me feel like slower papers just may have a higher ceiling in terms of their extraction that may taste good. So if you put that finer grind into a slow paper, you'd get a little bit more out of it. It would taste fuller, richer, it'll be stronger. Maybe use less coffee, that's a thought. Whether that's a cost saving, I don't know. You'd have a much slower brew, and that may be an issue for you. The Sibarist are appealing 'cause they're so quick that they can be easily a couple of minutes faster. And so if you have a grinder that can compensate for that, you can get very tasty brews very quickly. But you might want more for your money, and your paper may be a route to do that.

16:52 Don't fear the slow draw down, don't fear the fast draw down if you've compensated for it. I guess that's the learning from this. So a quick final summary. The paper you can get hold of is perfectly fine, but if you wanna optimize your paper, then I think a slower paper will definitely help with a lower quality grinder. You still need very tasty coffee, you still need good water, you still need to brew your coffee properly. None of these are gonna hack your way out of anything like that. But a slower paper may squeeze out a little bit more extraction without having to go finer in your grind and therefore risk channeling and sort of ruining it that way. But if you want a fast brew, there are options available for that as well. And you can use something like the Hario and do whatever you like. It's a sort of nice middle of the road option. It's probably the cheapest. It's probably the easiest to get a hold of and I think actually still a very good choice.

17:37 But know that there are options out there, and I know we didn't test the temperature nature of the light, medium, dark roasts from Cafec. I just don't really enjoy medium-dark and dark-roasted coffee, and I don't really know if I could have done a good job sort of validating those things. But you can see how they impact flow rate, which I think is interesting. So you know, if you have that as a choice, you can understand how to use it or not use it. That has been an interesting little experiment for me. It's certainly changed the way that I think about draw down time, about extraction, about getting the best out of a coffee, getting the most out of a coffee. And I hope it's been useful for you. Have you tried different filter papers? Has your experienced matched mine? Have you had a very different experience? I would love to hear your thoughts and your experiments and your experiences down in the comments below.

18:24 But for now, so thank you so much for watching, and I hope you have a great day.