Top 5 Tips for Making Kuju Coffee - Single-Serve Pour Over Coffee

Making coffee is easy. Making coffee that tastes delicious every single time? That’s a little more challenging. Luckily, our single-serve pour overs make it simpler to yield a great tasting cup wherever you wander. It takes care of some of the biggest challenges when it comes to brewing coffee: grinding to the right size, weighing the right amount and setting up all your equipment.

And as we’ve further developed our products with different coffees like our Fair Trade, Organic Single Origin coffees or our Decaf Lakeside Roast (yes many of our customers have asked for decaf!), we’ve also developed a few key tips that help ensure a great tasting cup of coffee every time you make one of our single-serve pour overs.

If you’re looking for the general instructions on how to make our single-serve pour overs, click here.

Here are 5 tips for brewing delicious single-serve pour over with Kuju Coffee:

1. Use it like a pour over (not a tea bag)

This seems obvious, but we’ve seen customers use our single-serve pour over as tea bags. The result is a diluted cup of coffee that doesn’t live up to the standard of our products. So make sure to tear open the filter, anchor it to your mug, and pour the water INTO the coffee grounds to drip through, not into the mug.

2. Fold the anchors back for extra stability

Keeping the filter stable on the cup can be a challenge, especially if it is an odd-sized cup or has a very thick lip. To help with this challenge, we recommend folding the anchors back. This will help stabilize the filter and prevent it from slipping off your mug while pouring hot water. Additionally, it makes it so that you can use our filters on larger mugs or mugs with thicker lips.

To fold the anchors back, find the perforations on the sides (see image below), grab both ends of each anchor, and pull back gently to create a bend at the perforations. If done right, it will look like the picture below.

fold the anchors back pour over coffee

Another sub-tip for this tip is to anchor your filter onto your mug with the anchors already folded back instead of opening the anchors by pulling the anchors outward, which weakens the strength of the anchors.

3. Use water that is just below boiling

Have you ever made a good cup of hot coffee with cold water? Neither have we. The temperature of the water is critical for making a good cup of coffee. If water is not hot enough, the coffee flavor will not extract well, and the resulting cup will be diluted. Additionally, it will take extra long for the water to filter through the coffee grounds. So how hot is hot enough?

The ideal water temperature for brewing hot coffee and our single-serve pour overs is between 195°F and 205°F. But let’s be real, who carries a thermometer with them when they’re out in the backcountry? Since we don’t imagine anyone doing this, our recommended method is to boil water and wait about 30 seconds to let the boiling settle. Once the water settles, it will be at a temperature that is perfect for brewing Kuju.

4. Let the filter steep

First off, we should make it clear that it is ok for the filter to touch your brewed liquid coffee. Many people ask us if it’s ok, and if you’re reading this, we want to let you know that the filter is meant to touch the coffee. It’s part of the design and adds an extra benefit for making your coffee stronger.

So what’s the tip? Once you’re done pouring 8-12oz of hot water, let the filter sit in your coffee for 2-5 minutes as your coffee cools. This will make your coffee stronger since the grounds will be immersed in the liquid, and most people will need to wait for their coffee to cool down before drinking anyway.

let the filter steep in the coffee

5. Pull the anchors upward to dispose

Once you’re done brewing your single-serve pour over, the easiest way to remove the filter is to lift the bottoms of the anchors up and in toward each other to form a convenient handle. This helps reduce mess when removing the filter and prevents contact with scalding hot coffee.

pull anchors up to remove pour over filter

Conclusion

Our single-serve pour overs make it easy to brew a great tasting cup of pour over coffee every time. These tips will help make it even simpler and consistent. Let us know if you tried any of these tips and if you thought it was helpful or not in the comments below!