Why the Four Second Series Ratio Is What I Use to Try New Coffees

Coffee is The original office biohack and the nation’s most popular productivity tool. As we lose sleep over daylight saving time, the caffeinated WIRED Review team writes about our favorite coffee-making techniques and gadgets that will keep us awake and maybe even happy in the morning. Today, reviewer Matthew Korfhage explains his enduring love for drip coffee—and why the Fourth Proportion never leaves his counter. In the future, we will add more Java.Base Stories about the brewing methods of other WIRED writers.

As with any A bad habit, the morning coffee routine can take on the character of religion. And like most religions, it is often born by accident as a moral belief. My denomination is good old fashioned drip coffee. That’s what I drink first, before I even think about making an espresso shot.

I’m WIRED’s senior coffee writer and I’ve developed a deep love many variations of coffee, from espresso for Aeropress for cold brew. But “coffee” to me, in my deepest self, still means a steaming cup of sterile drip. Fortunately, that is also the field of coffee that has been transformed the most by technology in recent years. Drip coffee from The ratio of making four coffees (now silent on his second generation) I feel like the purest coffee, a liquid solution of what my coffee beans smell like fresh from the grinder.

My love of filter coffee began as a teenager traveling and studying in India—probably my first glimpse of adult freedom. This is where I drank the first full cup of coffee I remember finishing. In Jaipur, filter coffee was a jet-black gravity brew mixed with milk and sugar. I decided that if I was going to drink coffee, I would take it straight and learn to love it on its own terms. A new-found friend, pouring a jug into his own brew, laughed at my insistence that I didn’t want sweetened milk. Then I downed a cup so thick and strong and full of caffeine it made my hair stand on end. If I made a mistake, I refused to admit it.

I carried this bias with me to Oregon, drinking unspoiled, terrible black coffee in late-night diners and dirty office rooms. Black coffee was a moral clause, although it was not a matter of taste.

It wasn’t until years later that I discovered that drip coffee can actually be every bit as refined as a pinkies-up espresso.

Setting the Drip

In part, this was a technology problem. Aside from the classic Moccamaster, it’s only recently that home drip coffee makers have been able to produce the perfect cup. For many years, I did not keep it in my house.

What woke me up to the possibility of drip was a new wave of cafes in Portland, the first pioneer of the third wave of coffee. Stumptown Coffee and then especially Coffee Roasters Heart in Portland. Heart’s Norwegian roaster, Wille Yli-Luoma, explained to me at length the aromatic purity of light-roast coffee—the fruity aroma of a first-crack Ethiopian that could beat peach or nectarine or blueberry. The Scandinavians had long appreciated this, he told me, and had turned light-roasting coffee into a pure craft. In the end, America won.

Still, I could never get the same taste or clarity in a home brewer. Not until recently. To get the best version, I still had to walk down the street to Heart and get my coffee from the guy who roasted it. Or I had to spend a very long time drizzling water over the coffee in a conical filter. I didn’t want to do it a few times when I was still tired from sleep, I was already late for work.