We Were Wrong to Give Up on Pour-Over Coffee
It’s the perfect meditation for our time
I don’t pray anymore. But some mornings, I still make pour-over coffee. Those seven or eight minutes are as close to sacred meditation as it gets for me. I know that pour-over coffee seems like one of those passé affects of the last decade. Like many others, I now own a push-button coffee machine that uses pods, a more instant form of gratification.
But I limped into the last few months of 2019, unmoored, seeking some sort of practice or ritual to help make sense of what felt like a lost year, or maybe a succession of lost years. I knew things were bad when, in late autumn, I’d unironically downloaded and begun consulting an astrology app. One morning in late December, the astrology app told me: “Pay close attention to everything.” So I decided to skip the Nespresso and go back to pour-over coffee.
I always follow the same steps: I fill the gooseneck Japanese kettle with water — from the Brita and not the tap — and set it on the burner. As the water boils, I decide whether to use my single-cup ceramic Hario v60 coffee dripper, from Japan, or my full-sized Chemex, the classic midcentury glass pot, essentially a tricked-out Erlenmeyer flask that reminds me of high-school chemistry lab (its design is included in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection)…
