Coffee to water
Start at 60 g of coffee per litre — roughly 1:16.7. Stronger is 1:15, lighter is 1:17. Weigh both; scoops and cups drift.
A field guide to home coffee
Good coffee is mostly patience and a kitchen scale.
Slow Bloom collects what actually changes the cup — ratio, grind, water and time — and leaves out the rest. No sponsored gear, no secret techniques. Just recipes you can measure and repeat.
Start here
The guide is organised as six short chapters. Read them in order once, then come back to whichever one your last cup is asking about.
- Brewing methodsSix ways to make coffee, each with a baseline recipe, timings and the mistakes that usually spoil it.
- Choosing beansHow origin, processing and roast show up in the cup, and how to read a bag before you buy it.
- Grind sizeThe single biggest lever you have. A visual scale and a two-line rule for adjusting it.
- WaterCoffee is about 98.5% water. What hardness and alkalinity do, and three cheap ways to fix yours.
- Gear worth owningWhat to buy first, what can wait, and what you can skip entirely without tasting the difference.
- JournalLonger notes from the counter: experiments, tasting exercises and things we got wrong.
The four numbers that matter
Almost every disappointing cup can be traced to one of these. Write them down for a week and your coffee will improve more than any new piece of equipment could manage.
Particle size
Finer extracts more and slows the flow. Coarser extracts less and speeds it up. Change one step at a time.
Water heat
Just off the boil, 93–96 °C, suits light and medium roasts. Drop to 88–91 °C for dark roasts to tame bitterness.
Contact time
How long water and coffee stay together. It is mostly a result of the other three, which makes it a useful diagnostic.
Why “slow bloom”?
Freshly roasted coffee is full of carbon dioxide. When hot water first touches the grounds the gas escapes, the bed swells and bubbles, and for about forty seconds very little brewing happens at all. That pause is called the bloom.
Skipping it is the most common shortcut in home brewing, and the easiest one to taste. We named the site after the half minute where the best thing to do is nothing.
Change one variable, taste, write it down. Everything else in this guide is a footnote to that sentence.