A recipe is the complete specification of a brew, and keeping one is the difference between improving and guessing.
What it contains
Dose — grams of coffee. Water — grams, and the ratio. Grind setting — on your specific grinder. Temperature. Total time. Pour schedule — bloom volume, number of pours, timing. Agitation — stirs, swirls.
Why write it down
Coffee has too many variables to hold in your head, and the feedback loop is slow — you make one or two brews a day.
A written recipe lets you change one variable and know what you changed.
A worked example
V60, 15 g coffee, 250 g water at 94 °C, grind 22 on a Comandante. Bloom 45 g, wait 40 s. Pour to 150 g by 1:15. Pour to 250 g by 1:50. Swirl. Drawdown ends 2:50. Tastes: sweet, orange, slight sourness at the end.
Next time: grind one step finer, change nothing else.
Keep the tasting note
The parameters are useless without what they produced.
Per coffee, not universal
A recipe belongs to a specific bag. A light Kenyan and a medium Brazilian want different settings, and expecting one recipe to serve both is why people conclude their brewer is inconsistent.
The practical minimum
Dose, water, grind, time, and one line on how it tasted. A note on your phone is enough.
Last reviewed 8 August 2026