For the past few months I've been using the James Hoffman 5-pour method, which is essentially 5 pours, which is quite a bit of agitation in itself, but not a lot of additional swirling or stirring, and grinding fine enough for around a 2:30 drawdown for 200-250mL brews. This works well for light roasts, especially when they're fresh, but it can also bring out harshness, especially once the coffee starts to age a bit.
In the last couple of days, I've been experimenting with grinding coarser and increasing agitation and pour rate, and pouring from higher up, and my brews have been better - Juicier, with much less, or even zero astringent, acrid, harsh flavors.
When I say juicy, that's how our brains interpret that perceived sweetness (there's no sugar in a brewed black coffee) combined with the acidity that exists in a quality, light to medium roasted coffee.
There are so many variables you can adjust with a pourover. That's what's so fun to me about it. I'll experiment with each bag of coffee I get, changing up brew temp, grind size, number of pours, amount of agitation, etc.
It's just helpful to change one variable at a time, as with experimentation of any kind, in order to be able to isolate and discover what impact these individual changes have, on the final cup.
Keep in mind that some agitation, whether swirling (what I do) or stirring, will be needed when making the grind size coarser, in order to slow drawdown (agitation causes migration of fine particles into the micropores of the filter, clogging it and slowing the drawdown).
good enough
