Dialing In Your V60 (or AeroPress) for Light Roasts

Light roasts get blamed for being sour more often than they deserve it. Most of the time the roast isn't the problem — the brew is. A light roast is denser and less soluble than a dark one: less time in the drum means less of the bean's structure has broken down, so it holds onto its sugars and acids harder and needs more coaxing to give them up. Treat it like a medium roast and you'll pull a thin, sharp cup and blame the beans.

The three levers that actually matter

Extraction is a function of grind size, water temperature, and contact time. For a light roast, you generally want to push all three up a notch from wherever you'd land on a medium roast:

• Grind finer — a light roast's cell structure is tougher, so a coarser grind just runs water past it without extracting much. Go one to two clicks finer than your usual V60 setting.
• Brew hotter — 94–96°C, close to a full boil. Darker roasts scorch at that temperature; light roasts need it just to extract at a normal rate.
• Extend contact time — a slightly slower pour, a finer grind, or both, so total brew time lands around 2:30–3:30 for a V60 rather than rushing through in under two minutes.

If you change only one thing, change the grind first. It's the lever with the biggest effect and the easiest to dial back if you overshoot.

V60: the bloom is doing more work than you think

Start with a bloom of roughly twice the coffee's weight in water — 30g of coffee gets about 60g for the bloom — and give it 30–45 seconds before the first real pour. This isn't ceremony. Fresh light-roast coffee holds a lot of CO2, and that gas physically pushes water away from the grounds if you don't let it escape first. Skip the bloom and you'll get inconsistent extraction no matter how well you've dialled everything else in.

After the bloom, pour in three or four gentle pulses rather than one continuous stream, keeping the bed agitated with a slow spiral from the centre out. Each pulse re-saturates the grounds and keeps the extraction even as the water level drops.

AeroPress: go inverted, go longer

The inverted method buys you control the standard method doesn't: a full, timed steep with no drip-through until you're ready to press. For a light roast, grind slightly finer than a drip setting, use water at 94–96°C, and steep for 2–2:30 minutes with one gentle stir at the ten-second mark to break up clumps. Flip, press slowly over 30–45 seconds — a press that finishes in ten seconds means your grind is too coarse and you're under-extracting.

How to tell if you've under- or over-shot it

Sour, thin, or grassy means under-extraction — grind finer or brew hotter before you touch the dose. Bitter, hollow, or drying on the finish means over-extraction, which is rarer with light roasts but does happen if the grind runs too fine for your brew time. Sweetness sitting right behind the acidity, rather than fighting it, is the sign you've landed it.

We keep a rotating single-origin on pour-over at the bar specifically because light roasts show the differences between farms and processing methods more honestly than a dark roast ever will. Ask whoever's behind the counter what's on today — they'll tell you exactly how we're brewing it and why.