Hybrid Flow Coffee Brewing Technique

July 25, 2024 Viacheslav Druzhynin

What is Hybrid Flow Technique and is it better than other pour over coffee recipes?

First of all, it doesn’t require you to memorize the “recipe”. Meaning, you can memorize the technique and use it for brewing any dose of coffee.

So that if you have 17 g of coffee left, you don’t need to think about how to adjust the recipe. Which adds tons of flexibility.

Why not Osmotic Flow?

With slow filters some coffee starts to become “dark” if flavor and “muted” because of these dark notes. Meaning, we need a faster brewing time. But because we were limited with the flow rate, we stuck with this dark cup.

Yes, it’s possible to compensate with higher water temperature and smaller grind size, but I found the easier way.

Hybrid Flow Technique

This coffee brewing technique is based on Osmotic Flow. But it’s an improved, more practical way to brew. Though, the “base” isn’t changed.

We still have the same 3 stages:

Bloom (to wet the coffee and shape the dome)
Pulses (pouring in circles to let the dome breathe) - from 30 seconds to 1:30
Constant pour (making full spiral and then pouring in the center / circles till the end)

You can spot that in the third stage we cover all of the coffee right away. Which adds more body and makes extraction more efficient. But we go further. In all of the stages we don’t need to pour slowly. Especially the last stage, constant pour.

We pour sloppy and fast. Which makes this technique fun to use. You’re not bored because of the action. And then you just add the water to the total amount and wait for it to drain. Let it drain for like 1 minute or more after switching to drops.

Usually it takes around 2 minutes to finish pouring for a 250-320 g dose of water. And total brewing time - around 3 minutes.

Though, for huge doses, you can stretch out the pulses to 2 minutes. If it flows very slowly. That way you will increase the extraction.

Grind size

As usual, that’s the only thing that we change. If coffee is “weak”, “watery” - make the grind size smaller. If it’s too “strong”, “intense” - make it bigger.

Usually it’s the grind size you use for a regular pour over. 2.8 on Kinu m47 (for 15-20 g dose) and around 18-20 clicks on Comandante c40. So it’s smaller than sugar.

Water temperature

Most of the time it is 90°C. For most of the coffee. Only if you perceive “roasty” notes - you can decrease it. Usually there is no need to go higher than 90°C (except maybe for big ceramic brewers or cold weather. You can go like 92-93°C to just compensate for temperature loss).

Who developed Hybrid Flow Technique

Me, Viacheslav Druzhynin. I've practiced Osmotic Flow for more than 2 years and constantly improved it. But it became so different that I decided to assign a different title for this technique.