About
A small site about a daily habit
Slow Bloom is a personal project: a reference we wished we had when we started weighing coffee and wondering why it still tasted sour.
What this is
A compact, practical guide to making better coffee at home. Six chapters and a journal, written to be read once in full and then used as a reference.
The guide is deliberately conservative. Recipes use round numbers, widely available equipment and techniques that survive a sleepy weekday morning.
What this is not
It is not a shop, a review site or a brand. Nothing here is sponsored, no product is named, and there are no affiliate links.
The site collects no data, sets no cookies and loads nothing from third parties. Every page is a plain HTML file and one stylesheet.
How recipes are tested
- Every recipe is brewed at least five times with three different coffees: one light, one medium, one dark.
- Doses and water are weighed to a tenth of a gram, and times are taken from the first pour.
- Each recipe is then deliberately brewed badly — too coarse, too fine, too cool — so the troubleshooting advice describes something we have actually tasted.
- If two approaches taste the same in a side-by-side comparison, the simpler one goes in the guide.
Taste is personal, and your grinder, water and beans differ from ours. Treat every number on this site as a sensible first attempt.
A short glossary
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Bloom | The first small pour that wets the grounds and lets trapped carbon dioxide escape before the main brew. |
| Dose | The weight of dry coffee used for a brew. |
| Yield | The weight of liquid coffee in the cup. Used mainly for espresso. |
| Brew ratio | Coffee weight compared with water weight, written as 1:16 or as grams per litre. |
| Extraction | The share of the dry coffee that ends up dissolved in the drink. Most people prefer roughly 18–22%. |
| Strength | How concentrated the drink is, which is separate from extraction. A cup can be strong and under-extracted at once. |
| Immersion | Brewing where grounds sit in the water for the whole time, as in a French press. |
| Percolation | Brewing where water flows through a bed of grounds, as in pour-over and espresso. |
| Channelling | Water finding a fast path through part of the coffee bed, extracting that part too much and the rest too little. |
| Fines | The dust-sized particles every grinder produces. Too many of them clog filters and add bitterness. |
Corrections
Coffee knowledge keeps moving, and some of what is written here will age. When we find an error we fix the page and note the change in the journal. The entry on freezing beans is one such correction.