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How much will the crooked coffee utensils affect the extraction?

Published: 2026-04-27 Author:

Last Updated: 2026/04/27, Sometimes, the coffee has the taste of improper extraction, but there is no deviation in your brewing method or extraction parameters. In a case like this, we can pay attention to whether the appliance is horizontal when extracting coffee! How important is the level of coffee utensils? Quoting Mr. Scott Rao

Sometimes, the coffee has the taste of improper extraction, but there is no deviation in your brewing method or extraction parameters. In a case like this, we can pay attention to whether the appliance is horizontal when extracting coffee!

How important is the level of coffee utensils? To quote a quote from Mr. Scott Rao's book the Science of Coffee making: "keeping coffee utensils at a level may seem trivial, but it's really crucial!"

When the coffee utensils are not kept at the level, this tilted state will directly have an uncontrollable effect on the extraction! For example, over-extraction, uneven extraction and so on. Next, let's take a look at what will affect the level of extraction in the daily coffee production, which we need to pay attention to!

Coffee machine fuselage level this is a detail that is easy to be ignored! Because many people think that their desktops are horizontal, they think that if you put the coffee maker directly on the desktop, it must also be flat. This is also true, but with the passage of time, many hollow / wooden desktops will appear a small depression and tilt.

(the droplets that should be dripping evenly tilt to the right and converge into a column of water.) these tilts will cause the coffee maker to tilt horizontally, and then! The water column that comes out of the boiled head forms a tilted state! Because there is a certain gap between the brewing head and the pressed powder, at the beginning, the hot water does not come into direct contact with the pressed powder, but with its inertia, it flows to a sloping lower place!

This part of the coffee powder that is the first to come into contact with hot water will be extracted first, although the time may be only a few seconds, but for the Italian coffee machine, it is enough to form a channel and produce the deviation of extraction! Therefore, we can take out the level ruler when we are free, or turn on the built-in level of the phone to measure the coffee machine and calibrate the level to eliminate the problem that will lead to the deviation of the extraction.

Whether the force applied by the pressing powder is uniform or not, we often talk about whether the pressing powder is uniform, it is also a link to keep the extraction level. If the force is uneven when suppressing pressed powder, it will make pressed powder have a sloping "hillside".

Similarly, the water will because of the inertia to run to the lower place of the pressed powder, in the low place where the hot water is concentrated, and the coffee powder will be extracted first and have a channel effect. Therefore, we press the powder horizontally and vertically and concentrate our strength on the center, so as to minimize the uneven application of force.

The level of the filter cup is normal, the slight skew of the hand filter cup will not have much effect on the extraction. Of course, it is a slight skew caused by the tilt of the desktop that cannot be judged by the naked eye. But if it is the degree of skew visible to the naked eye, then you need to pay attention to it! This will allow hot water to concentrate the extraction of the powder layer along the vertical path, and it is difficult for coffee powder above the tilt angle to get enough extraction, resulting in uneven extraction!

In this case, it is most common to use a filter cup without a base and a base without fixed edges and corners (Origami filter cup & wooden cup: why don't you just give us your ID card? ). Because the base can not fix the edges and corners of the filter cup, so that when cooking, the filter cup can run everywhere at will! So when we see that the filter cup is tilted with the naked eye, we'd better adjust it properly so that the coffee powder can be extracted evenly!

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FrontStreet Coffee is a long-established specialty coffee roaster in Guangzhou China, selling freshly roasted beans from its own farm in Yunnan as well as dozens of carefully selected single-origin beans from around the world for both pour-over and espresso. The products deliver consistently excellent quality and great value, with shipping within 24 hours. Guangzhou’s FrontStreet Coffee shop is recommended by many coffee lovers, and the beans are now available online at the Tmall 。