V60, but slower.

"Slower" is doing a lot of work in this title, so let me be precise about what it means — and what it does not. It does not mean cooler water. It does not mean a coarse grind and a lazy stream. For a light roast, those are the two most common ways to make a sour, hollow cup. Slower here means staged: a proper bloom, fewer and more deliberate pours, and a drawdown you let finish on its own clock rather than rushing.

The folk wisdom that light roasts want cooler water is backwards. Extraction is a chemistry problem and temperature is your biggest lever on solubility. Light roasts are dense and less soluble than dark ones; they need the energy. Brew a high-grown washed coffee at 88 °C and you will pull out the bright, sharp acids long before the sugars and the rounder aromatics follow — the cup reads as sour, green, and thin because it is genuinely under-extracted. Keep the water at 94–96 °C and you give the sweetness and the florals a chance to come across. Save the cooler water for dark roasts, which give up bitterness too easily and benefit from a gentler hand.

Start with the bloom: 45 g of water — about three times the coffee weight — poured to wet the whole bed, then a gentle swirl so there are no dry clumps. Give it 45 seconds. This is the CO₂ degassing; if you pour on top of an active bloom the gas pushes water away from grounds and you extract unevenly. After the bloom, pour in three stages, letting the level draw down between each: up to 100 g, then up to 175 g, then up to 250 g. Pour with a steady, central spiral and avoid blasting the filter wall, which channels water past the coffee.

Aim for the whole thing — first drop to last drip — to finish around 2:45 to 3:15. A finish much faster than that usually means the grind is too coarse (coarsen less, or pour more slowly) and the cup will be thin; much slower and you are probably too fine or the bed has clogged, and you will taste it as drying bitterness. At the end, one last gentle swirl settles the grounds flat against the cone so the bed drains evenly instead of leaving a high, ringed tide line. Taste it. Sour and thin says go finer or hotter; harsh and drying says back off.