Set Up Your Dream Pour Over Station

Turn your morning routine into a ritual

Second to fresh whole beans, a dedicated coffee station is essential to making the short task of your daily pour over pleasant, even meditative. A cup of coffee is what you’re after, but why not enjoy the process, too? The good news is you don’t need all the latest gear to do this. You just need a few choice tools, and the right technique, to make a great pour over, time and again.   

What Tools Do I Need?

We think about our pour-over method as having two tiers—the basic and the barista-level. The basic method gets you to a delicious coffee using the bare essentials, with emphasis on consistent technique. The barista method is just that—the detailed technique our baristas use in our cafes. It takes a few more tools to achieve the precise process; the tradeoff is an elevated coffee, every time. 

So choose your adventure and find what works for you.

Basic Tools

The essentials for a pour over include fresh whole bean coffee, a grinder, a swan neck kettle, a filter, a dripper, and—dare we even state the obvious? A coffee mug. 

Coffee and Grinder

No matter what kind of coffee you like, it needs to be whole bean coffee that’s recently roasted and then ground fresh, just before you brew your pour over.  

Swan Neck Kettle

A pour over succeeds when the water evenly extracts flavor compounds from the coffee grounds. Nothing hampers consistency like a deluge of water. But with a typical wider-spout water kettle, inconsistency is hard to avoid. A swan neck kettle’s spout is narrower. Its gentle and even stream of water is to coffee grounds what a gardener’s watering can is to delicate seeds. 

Filter and Dripper

We’re biased. There are a lot of pour over drippers out there. Many of them are great. But we like ours for its failsafe features. It took years of research and countless prototypes to land on this one. The filters are bamboo-based, and they require no pre-wetting. 

Coffee Mug

Choose something pretty, a vessel that feels as good to hold as it does to drink from.

Barista Tools

You need everything included in the basic toolkit, plus an upgrade on the grinder and a couple of more items. 

Burr Grinder

A burr grinder uses two burrs to cut coffee beans, rather than cruder grinders, which chop beans indiscriminately into different-sized pieces. The more evenly ground the coffee is, the more consistent the flavors are in the pour over extraction. A modest way to try a burr grinder is to invest in a hand grinder. The Porlex Mini II requires a little manual labor, but you’re grateful for your coffee when it’s all said and done. There are also entry-level models, like the Baratza Encore, which takes away the handiwork, and gets the job done. 

Carafe 

Our custom-designed Kinto carafe lets you watch the coffee as it brews, and gives you time to pre-warm your mug. 

Gram Scale & Timer 

Rather than approximating your coffee dose and water, get exact. A gram scale that has a built in timer lets you learn the correct tempo of each pour. You could use a gram scale and a separate timer, but take it from us, you get a little dizzy tracking the scale and the timer all while executing each pour. 

Want to learn more about pour over? Read The Art of the Pour Over or stay tuned for insider tips on our barista method.