The Recipe Almost Every Roastery Prints
Buy specialty coffee from five different roasteries and you will get five brew guides that read like copies of each other. The CUP-TIMER catalog holds 126 official recipes from 79 roasteries across Korea, Japan, the US, the UK and Scandinavia, and the consensus is striking: of the 105 hot recipes, the median ratio is 1:16, the median water temperature is 94°C, the median dose is 18g, and the median brew time is 3:00. Three quarters of them (96 of 126) use a V60.
Tighten the window and it gets tighter still. Eighty-two of 105 hot recipes — 78% — sit between 1:15 and 1:17, and 71 of the 102 that declare a time finish between 2:30 and 3:30. The most common single ratio, 1:16, appears 30 times; 1:17 appears 21 times and 1:15 eighteen times.
This is not laziness, and it is not everyone copying Hario. It is what happens when a recipe has to work for a stranger.
Why the Convergence Happens
A roastery brew guide has a job that is different from a competition recipe: it has to produce a decent cup for someone whose grinder, water, kettle and skill level are all unknown. That constraint pushes every variable toward the middle.
A 1:16 ratio is strong enough that a slightly under-extracted brew still tastes like coffee, and weak enough that an over-extracted one is not punishing. Around 93–94°C is hot enough for a light roast without scalding a medium one. Three minutes is roughly what a 15–20g dose takes on a cone at a medium grind, which is where most home grinders land when someone reads "medium." And 58 of the 79 roasteries publish exactly one recipe, so that single recipe has to cover their whole range — every origin, every roast level, every bag on the shelf.
The result is a genuinely good default. The Barn's V60 in Berlin brews 16g to 250g at 94°C. La Cabra in Aarhus brews 15g to 250g at 96°C. Gardelli in Italy brews 16g to 250g at 92°C. Three countries, three reputations, one recipe with the decimal points moved.
The Agreement Is Thinner Than It Looks
Here is the part the summary hides. Take only the 30 hot recipes that share the exact same ratio of 1:16 and look at everything else they specify: water temperature runs from 90°C to 100°C, and brew time from 2:15 to 4:15. The grind splits almost evenly — 15 call for medium, nine for medium-fine, three for medium-coarse.
So the ratio is the one number roasteries agree on, and it is also the least discriminating. Two brews at 1:16 can taste nothing alike if one runs 90°C for four minutes and the other 100°C for two and a quarter. When you compare brew guides, the ratio is the part you can skip.
Temperature Is Where the House Style Lives
Of the 87 hot recipes that state a temperature, 61 fall between 93°C and 97°C — but the full range runs from 83°C to 100°C, and the edges are deliberate.
At the hot end, Prolog Coffee in Copenhagen brews 15g to 250g with water at a full 100°C. At the cool end, Glitch Coffee in Tokyo pours 88°C over 16g for 260g — a 1:17 finished in 2:30. Both roast light. Both are respected. They have simply made opposite bets about what a delicate, high-acidity coffee needs: Prolog pushes extraction with heat, Glitch protects aromatics by backing it off.
If you are going to borrow one number from a roastery's guide, borrow the temperature. It is the variable they thought hardest about, and the one most home brewers never adjust.
The Bypass School: Brew Strong, Then Dilute
A subset of Korean roasteries do something the "everyone brews 1:16" summary erases entirely: they brew a concentrate on the V60 and add water afterward.
Blackup Coffee's Mono bypass recipe brews 18g with only 180g of water at 83°C, then dilutes with 60g or more of hot water in the server — a finished 1:13.3 that never passed through the bed as such. Their Nero blend does the same at 85°C. The logic is the same one espresso bars use for an americano: extract only the fraction of the bed you want, then set strength separately with clean water. Low temperature and a short 1:45 contact time keep the bitterness out; the bypass water fixes the concentration afterward.
Momos Coffee in Busan runs the same idea at 1:15 with a bypass step, and their catalog stretches from 1:5 to 1:18 with a coarse grind and four pulse pours. A roastery with nine published recipes is not writing one guide for everyone — it is matching a method to each coffee.
How Roasteries Scale — and What Changes When They Do
Watch what a roastery keeps constant when the dose changes, because that tells you what it actually believes.
Bean Brothers publishes a full ladder at a fixed 1:16 and 93°C: 20g → 320g for one cup, 30g → 480g for two, and 50g → 800g for a batch. The ratio never moves. The grind does — their large-batch guide calls for roughly 35% coarser than the single-serve setting, because a deeper bed drains more slowly at the same setting. Their iced recipe goes the other way: 25% finer than the hot grind.
Counter Culture holds a different constant. Their V60, Kalita Wave and Chemex guides all specify 1:17 at 93°C. What changes across the three is grind — medium-fine on the cone, medium on the flat bed, medium-coarse on the Chemex — and total time, which stretches from 3:45 to 4:30 as the brewer gets larger and slower.
Both approaches say the same thing: ratio travels between setups, grind does not.
Iced Is a Separate Recipe, Not a Weaker One
Twenty-one of the 126 roastery recipes are iced, and they abandon the hot consensus completely. Their median ratio is 1:10, with 12 of the 21 at exactly that number, because part of the water is already sitting in the server as ice. Bean Brothers' iced V60 brews 20g to 200g over 50–60g of ice; Kurasu in Kyoto brews 16g to 150g on a Kalita Wave at 90°C.
If a roastery only prints a hot guide and you want it iced, do not just pour it over ice. Cut the brew water to roughly 60% of the hot recipe, put the difference in the server as ice, and grind about a quarter finer.
How to Read a Roastery Recipe
- Skip the ratio comparison. Nearly every roastery lands between 1:15 and 1:17. It tells you almost nothing about their style.
- Read the temperature first. It is the clearest signal of how they want their roast treated — and the full published range is 17 degrees wide.
- Treat the grind as a description, not an instruction. "Medium" means whatever it meant on their grinder. Use their stated brew time as the target instead: if you are outside it by more than 30 seconds, your grind is the thing that is wrong.
- Use their recipe on their coffee. Roastery guides are tuned to a house roast profile. The reason Tim Wendelboe's 65g-per-litre pour-over works so well is that it was written for Tim Wendelboe's roasting.
Brew These Roastery Recipes
- The Barn V60 — 1:16, 16g → 250g at 94°C
- Counter Culture V60 — 1:17, 30g → 500g at 93°C
- Glitch Hot Drip V60 — 1:17, 16g → 260g at 88°C
- Prolog Coffee V60 — 1:16.7, 15g → 250g at 100°C
- Tim Wendelboe Pour-Over — 65g/L, 32g → 500g at 94°C
- Blackup Mono Bypass V60 — 18g → 180g at 83°C, then bypass
- Bean Brothers V60 HOT — 1:16, 20g → 320g at 93°C
- Momos 1:18 — 1:18, 18g → 324g at 95°C