Hoffmann vs Kasuya vs Rao: Three V60 Methods Compared

Three Answers to the Same Question

Every V60 recipe is an answer to one question: how do you get water through a cone of coffee evenly, when the cone itself does almost nothing to help you? James Hoffmann, Tetsu Kasuya and Scott Rao each answer it differently — and the CUP-TIMER catalog carries all three as complete recipes, so the difference is not a matter of opinion but of numbers you can read off a card. Here they are side by side, with what each one is actually optimising for.

The Three Recipes, Side by Side

Three recipes, three brewers, one dripper — and almost nothing in common except the cone. The pour count runs from one to five. The water temperature spans 5°C. One recipe grinds coarse, two grind medium-fine. Two agitate deliberately, one refuses to agitate at all.

That spread is the interesting part. These are not three attempts at the same recipe with rounding differences. They are three genuinely different theories about what goes wrong in a V60.

Hoffmann: Keep the Bed Flat

The Hoffmann V60 is the biggest brew of the three and the most structured: 30g of coffee, 500g of water at 97°C, finishing at 3:30.

The schedule is three pours. A 60g bloom — twice the coffee weight — for 45 seconds, with a gentle swirl to wet every ground. Then a spiral pour up to 300g, which is 60% of the total water, reached by about 1:15. Then a second spiral to the full 500g, a gentle swirl to level the bed, and a drawdown that lands at 3:30.

Notice what the swirls are for. They are not there to speed up extraction; they are there to knock grounds off the filter wall and leave the bed flat, so water drains through an even depth instead of finding a fast lane at the edge. This is a recipe about geometry. Hit 60% by 1:15, keep the bed flat, and the recipe forgives a great deal else — which is why it travels so well to people with ordinary kettles. If you want the long version, we have a full walkthrough of this method.

Kasuya 4:6: The Pours Are the Dial

The 4:6 Method from 2016 World Brewers Cup champion Tetsu Kasuya is the odd one out on almost every axis: the smallest dose, the strongest ratio, the coolest water, the coarsest grind and the most pours.

The five pours on 20g of coffee and 300g of water at 92°C run like this:

• 0:00 — 50g. The first pour doubles as the bloom.
• 0:45 — 70g, bringing the total to 120g, which is exactly 40% of the water.
• 1:30 — 60g.
• 2:10 — 60g.
• 2:40 — 60g, then lift the dripper off at 3:30.

The split is the whole method. Those first two pours — the 40% — set the flavour axis: more water early pushes acidity, less pushes sweetness. The last three pours — the 60% — set strength, and you can pour them in two larger goes for a lighter cup or four smaller ones for a heavier one. Everything else stays put.

This is why the grind is coarse and the agitation is listed as none. Five pours on a fine grind would stall the bed; five pours with swirling on top would over-extract it. Kasuya spends his control budget on when water arrives, so he deliberately gives up the other levers. The 4:6 deep dive covers the adjustment grid in detail, and there is an iced version at 1:10 that brews the same structure over ice.

Rao: One Pour, Two Agitations

The Scott Rao V60 is the shortest and the simplest to execute: 22g to 352g at 1:16, 96°C, medium-fine, done at 3:00.

There is exactly one pour of brewing water. A 66g bloom — three times the coffee weight, the most generous of the three — sits for 45 seconds and gets a gentle spoon stir to saturate it completely. Then the remaining 286g goes in as one continuous pour over about a minute. At the end comes the Rao Spin: a gentle swirl of the whole dripper that settles the bed flat before drawdown.

The logic is the mirror image of Kasuya's. Rao's premise is that uneven extraction is the central problem in percolation brewing, so he attacks it directly with mechanical agitation at both ends — stir the bloom so no ground stays dry, spin the slurry so no ground ends up stranded high on the wall — and then refuses to disturb anything in between. One continuous pour means one uninterrupted water level and no chance to re-channel a bed you just fixed. Our notes on Rao's principles go further into why he treats the bloom stir as non-negotiable.

What Actually Separates Them

Strip out the personalities and three real disagreements remain.

How to fight channelling. Hoffmann and Rao both agitate, but at different moments and for different reasons — Hoffmann swirls to flatten the bed between pours, Rao stirs the bloom and spins at the end. Kasuya does not agitate at all, and compensates with a coarse grind that resists channelling in the first place.

Where the control lives. Kasuya's control is in the pour schedule: change the split, change the cup. Rao's is in the bloom and the spin: get those right and the single pour takes care of itself. Hoffmann's is in a checkpoint — 60% by 1:15 — that tells you mid-brew whether you are on track.

How much water meets how much coffee. The ratios look close on paper (1:15 to 1:16.6) but they are not doing the same job. Kasuya's 1:15 is stronger partly because a coarse grind extracts less per gram, so the tighter ratio buys back the strength. Hoffmann's 1:16.6 across 30g is the most dilute and the largest dose, which is a deliberately wide margin for error on a big brew.

One number to keep in perspective: two of the three finish at 3:30 and the third at 3:00. For methods this different in structure, the total contact time barely moves. Brew time is not what distinguishes them.

Which One Should You Brew?

• You want the most forgiving first recipe — start with Hoffmann's. The 60%-by-1:15 checkpoint gives you something to correct against, and 30g of coffee smooths over small dosing errors.
• You want to tune a specific coffee — go to Kasuya's 4:6. No other recipe here gives you two independent dials, one for sweetness-versus-acidity and one for strength.
• Your grinder produces a lot of fines, or your pours are shaky — take Rao's. A single continuous pour removes most of the ways technique goes wrong, and the stir and spin do the evening-out for you.
• You are brewing one cup, not three — Hoffmann's 30g dose is large for a single serving. Rao's 22g scales down more comfortably, and Kasuya's 20g is already single-cup sized.

A practical way to actually compare them: brew all three on the same coffee within a few days, and hold the grinder setting constant for the two medium-fine recipes so the only thing changing is pour structure. Kasuya's coarse grind has to move — that is part of the method, not a variable you control.

It is also worth knowing that none of the three is a V60 purist. Hoffmann has recipes for the Clever Dripper at 90°C and the Chemex at 1:16.7; Kasuya built a hybrid method for the Hario Switch at 1:14; Rao has recipes for the Pulsar and the Tricolate, both at 100°C. Their V60 recipes are positions in an argument, not articles of faith.

Everything above sits together on the V60 brewer hub, and each brewer has a page collecting their full catalog: James Hoffmann, Tetsu Kasuya and Scott Rao.

Brew One Tonight

• James Hoffmann V60 — 30g / 500g, 1:16.6, 97°C, 3 pours, 3:30
• Tetsu Kasuya 4:6 Method — 20g / 300g, 1:15, 92°C, 5 pours, 3:30
• Scott Rao V60 — 22g / 352g, 1:16, 96°C, 1 continuous pour, 3:00
• Tetsu Kasuya 4:6 Iced — 20g / 200g, 1:10, 93°C, 3:00