French Press vs. Pour Over: What’s the Difference?

The French press and the pour over are two great ways to make coffee at home—let’s get that out of the way first.

The primary reasons you’re curious about the differences between a French press and pour over is that you want a clear winner. As we’ll get into over the course of this article, they’re both usually good, and often very good.

To quickly summarize, the French press is easier to brew and gives a fuller body (more oils and sediments) to your coffee, while a pour over is better if you want to maximally taste the specific traits of your (likely single-origin) beans.

But we can’t just leave it at that. So join me for a little trip through the history, brewing characteristics, and process of both the French press and the pour over coffee makers. As you’ll see, there’s a lot more to learn about French press versus pour over coffee than the simple binary choice.

What is the French Press?

You’ve probably seen a French press coffee maker in your life, whether or not you realized it. It’s (at least in the United States of America of my lifetime) probably the best-known non-coffee-machine brewer.

If you’re not familiar, it’s a cylindrical pitcher of glass, plastic, or stainless steel with a lid and a plunger on top.

Its simple design has barely changed in decades, which is a testament to how well it works.

History of the French press

The French press, also known as a cafetière, is a manual coffee brewing device with a full-immersion steep, and a mesh filter pushed down with a plunger stick to separate the grounds from the brewed coffee.

Early piston-style devices were patented by Frenchmen Mayer and Delforge in 1852. The modern design with an internal seal to further isolate the used grounds was patented in Italy in 1929 by Attilio Calimani. The iconic glass-and-metal version that became globally popular was later refined and patented by Swiss inventor Faliero Bondanini in 1958.

How is French press coffee different?

The French press uses an immersion method, meaning coarse coffee grounds are steeped directly in hot water rather than by water passing through them. Immersion methods maximize extraction of natural oils and heavier solubles from the coffee beans, using of a metal sieve filter lets those carry through to the final cup.

This gives French press coffees a richer, heavier body than almost any other brew method. The plunger is almost always a fine metal mesh rather than a paper filter, which also allows fine micro-grounds (or “silt“) to slip through. This doesn’t have the unpleasant “ground coffee was let through the filter” quality you might fear, but you’ll often see these particles floating in the drink, especially as you near the bottom.

Those little brown flecks floating around is often the easiest way you’re able to tell a French press cup.

How to make French press coffee at home

The basic procedure of French press brewing is as follows:

1. Start your water boiling. While a gooseneck kettle might look cooler, for a French press, there is absolutely no need for one. Honestly if you have both a classic (tea, etc.) wide-mouthed kettle and a coffee-nerd gooseneck, I’d maybe even favor the wide-mouth here.
2. Measure your coffee. I usually use a 15:1 water-to-coffee ratio, and use metric because imperial units are hard to reason about. So if I want (about) 600ml of finished coffee (about 20 fl oz, if you insist), I’ll measure out 40 grams of coffee. You’re free to vary and experiment with ratios (or units of measure ;p), but I like how simple 15-based ratio math is, and I’m rarely disappointed regardless of brew method.
3. Coarsely grind your coffee. As a crude metric, you want “coarse sand,” not the finest beach sand you’ve ever seen (and definitely not flour-like consistency). On my Baratza Encore grinder, which has a 1-40 scale, larger grounds at the higher end, I typically use a 30. (I use a 32 for cold brew, if that helps give you a sense from a different angle.)
4. Pour in your water. Again for 40g of coffee, I’ll add 600g (same mLs, more or less) of water. This is easiest to do on the same coffee scale you use to measure your beans.
5. Mix the grounds and the water. A spoon is most traditional, but I personally usually use my AeroPress stirrer because I always leave it at the ready at my coffee station.
6. Let the coffee steep. I rarely time this, but we’re looking for a 2-5 minute range (though James Hoffman’s method suggests up to 12 minutes). Arbitrarily I’d start with 4. Some people like to put the plunger in and just below the surface of the water to ensure all the grounds are submerged. I’m not sure it matters.
7. Put on the lid and press down the plunger to separate the grounds from the (now brewed) coffee.
8. Pour all the coffee into your mugs. Perhaps let it cool a bit, and enjoy. (I’m a bit of stickler that while 2-5 minutes of brew time is kind of all fine for me, I don’t want to leave half the brewed coffee sitting with the grounds for 20+ minutes. That can definitely lead to a worse tasting, more bitter cup. But you do you.)

It goes without saying, but one of the easiest ways to make great French press coffee at home is to buy great beans for French press coffee.

Recommended French presses

There at literally hundreds of different French presses available. And though I’m sure someone will fault me for saying it, there’s not much difference between brands. I’d shop more for size, materials, and aesthetics (in that order). Here are a few French presses I’ve either used or coveted.

This glass and copper Bodum one Megan just bought us:

This plastic OXO one we’ve been trying, and use for camping:

A smaller Bodum for a single-cup person/household:

A giant Yeti one for a crowd:

Recommended French press accessories

• Your coffee of choice. The more you start to tune into the nuances of coffee flavors and body, the more opinionated you’ll get about which roasters you love. Or maybe you’re hardcore Blue Bottle fans or lifelong supporters of your local roaster. Whatever floats your coffee boat, make sure you have those beans on hand! Try a coffee subscription box if you’re still in *discovery mode* when it comes to fave coffee roasters.
• A coffee scale. Eyeballing measurements only gets you so far. We recommend a coffee scale that can measure to 0.1gr. If you’re interested in other coffee brewing methods, like pour over, you might like a built-in timer too. Here are the best coffee scales we’ve found.
• A kettle. Gooseneck not required.
• A coffee grinder. You can opt for manual or electric, burr or blade, disc or conical. You can read more about our recommendations in this article: Why Fresh Ground Coffee is Worth the Extra Effort. The TL;DR is that we recommend a Baratza Encore, though the OXO coffee grinder (and other OXO coffee gear) is worth a sniff.
• Your favorite coffee mug! Whether it’s a to-go thermos, something vacuum sealed, or the first cup you grab out of your collection, we trust you’ll find the right vessel for you.
• Your coffee add ons. Cream, sugar, butter, coconut oil, stevia, maple syrup, cinnamon, almond milk, peppermint oil, agave—whatever makes your cup of coffee come to life, have it nearby (though we’re stalwarts that folks should figure out how to make black coffee taste good to them).

What is a pour over coffee?

You’ve almost certainly seen a pour over coffee maker too, even if you didn’t know it had a name. If the French press is the classic home brewer, the pour over is probably the poster child of modern specialty coffee. It’s the brewer you’ll spot in a lot of cafes sitting atop a mug or glass carafe while someone slowly pours hot water from a kettle with a slender neck.

Unlike the French press, “pour over” refers less to a single brewer than to an entire family of brewers.

At its simplest, a pour over is basically a cone-shaped brewer that holds a paper filter full of coffee grounds. They can be made with glass, ceramic, plastic, or stainless steel.

History of pour over coffee

Pour over coffee is a manual brewing method where hot water is slowly poured over a bed of coffee grounds in a filter, utilizing gravity to extract the coffee into a vessel below. It is well loved by modern coffee nerds for producing a clean, nuanced cup that highlights specific flavor profiles.

The origins of the pour-over trace back to 1908 in Germany, with a housewife named Melitta Bentz. Frustrated with the bitter taste and gritty residue of traditional percolators, she experimented with placing blotting paper from her son’s school book over a brass pot punctured with a nail. This invention of the paper filter created a smoother, cleaner cup, laying the groundwork for the modern Melitta Pour Over that remains popular today.

Over the decades, the method evolved as specialty coffee culture took off, particularly pour over coffees in Japan where the hand-drip ritual was meticulously refined. Today, the market features a whole bunch of specialized brewing devices engineered to precisely control water flow and extraction. Iconic tools include the Chemex with its thick paper filters, the cone-shaped Hario V60 featuring spiral ribs, and the flat-bottomed Kalita Wave.

What’s so special about pour over coffee?

What defines the pour-over method is the level of control it grants the brewer over extraction.

By manipulating water temperature, grind size, and the speed of the pour, you can finely tune the final taste. The technique typically begins by “blooming” the grounds (wetting them to release trapped carbon dioxide). Then pouring carefully (people obsess over “pour patterns”) for the rest of the water you want in your final brewed coffee.

Does pour over coffee taste better? We think so. Though the resulting pour over coffee is significantly thinner than French press coffee, it highlights the acidity and fruity, floral, or nutty notes of the beans (akin to a wine snob tasting the ‘terroir’ of the grapes).

How to make pour over coffee at home

These step will naturally vary person to person and also pour over brewer to pour over brewer.

Here’s the general shape of what I do with my Hario V60.

1. Start the water boiling.
2. Weigh your coffee. I’ll usually use 20g if brewing for just me, 40 for 2. But sometimes I get wild and measure 42, 44, or even 50 (!!!) grams of coffee for two. We like to party!
3. Set up the brewer. For me this means a carafe on the bottom, the brewer on top, and then an official Hario V60 paper filter inside. (Other nerds also buy specialty papers formulated by other nerds for particular qualities I don’t currently, and may never fully, understand.)
4. Optionally, but I usually do as an addendum to step 3, pour some water through the filter. Then discard the water. I do this because it makes the filter stick in place to the V60. Others say they do this to wash away the paper taste. Still others say you should do it to warm the brewer to keep your coffee warmer through the brewing process. Honestly if you don’t feel any of those justifications make it worth the effort for you I totally get it.
5. Add the coffee to the brewer. Zero out (or tare, if you fancy) your coffee scale.
6. Pour in some amount of water, typically about 80g for me.
7. Then, in a somewhat controversial move, I mix the coffee with my AeroPress stir stick a bit. Then I rinse that off with a bit more water. Overall I add a total of about 150g of water by the end of this “bloom” phase.
8. After the bloom has subsided (no more bubbles coming off, all the water drained down), slowly work in waves to add water. I’m a little loosey-goosey and don’t really have a prescribed pour height, pattern, size of wave, or target flow rate (again, nerds may be horrified). The low-key among you are comforted I hope. But I’ll work in 75-150g waves until I hit my desired amount of water. For a 40g brew with a 15:1 ratio (again my de facto standard) that’ll be 600 grams between steps 5-7.
9. Let the last water drain all the way down. Then pour you coffee from the carafe into mugs (assuming you used one, and did just brew directly into a mug ;p). Enjoy!

If I’m honest, I’m often a little impatient by step 8 and do a weird mug to mug to carafe game with the still-draining end of the brewer. But I don’t really recommend that method.

Recommended pour over coffee makers

We are a bit of house divided about the best pour over brewer. Megan loves the Chemex, which is one of the most traditional pour over brewers, and depending on your taste also the prettiest.

Coffee nerds (including myself) often diss the Chemex because the shape of the integrated cone-carafe combo means more water goes down to the bottom without passing through the coffee. (This is what people mean by “bypass” if you ever encounter marketing about “zero bypass” brewing.) Personally I just think the fused together brew cone and carafe makes it awkward to pour off my “rinse water.”

Anyway, I feel like the de facto standard for coffee nerds today, and my own standard, is the Hario V60. In general, buy a 01 size if you’re going to do single-cup brewing, and a 02 for two-cup brewing.

I’ve also used and enjoyed the Kalita Wave. Honestly the primary reason it’s been demoted is I got sick of the basket-style, flat-bottomed filters. They were more awkward to store than the easily-foldable-in-half-V60 ones.

And finally, the Melitta is the classic. I do find this version rather handsome:

And now for Megan’s edit:

There exist literally dozens more variations on the pour over theme—everything from the pretty Origiami to the ugly (but eco-friendly) CoffeeSock filters.

Recommended pour over accessories

These will look familiar (almost identical, even!) to our suggestions for the French press. However, the keen eye notes two major differences: 1) the kettle and 2) you need filters.

• Your coffee of choice. 
• A coffee scale.
• A kettle. Gooseneck recommended, such as a Bonavita 1L or Fellow Stagg EKG. To keep browsing, here are our fave pour over kettles.
• Filters—get the right ones for your pour over brewer of choice.
• A coffee grinder. 
• Your favorite coffee mug.
• Your coffee add ons.

Bonus: AeroPress vs. French press vs. pour over

We’re big fans of the AeroPress (it’s our go-to travel coffee brewer), and many people get their wires crossed when they’re trying to figure out which manual coffee brewer is right for them.

The AeroPress sits somewhere in the middle of the French press and the pour over.

• Like a French press, it’s an immersion brewer that steeps the coffee before separating the grounds.
• Like a pour over, it uses a paper filter to produce a “cleaner” cup with very little sediment.

The AeroPress is also by far the most portable of the three. It weighs almost nothing, is nearly unbreakable, and is one of our favorite ways to make coffee while traveling or camping.

So, which should you buy?

Like the 2000s El Paso taco commercial, Por qué no los dos? Why not both? 😏

We genuinely think both of these manual brewers deserve a spot in your home coffee set up. But if you simply *had* to choose one:

• Buy a French press if you love rich, full-bodied coffee and want the simplest brewing routine (though, to be fair, we find clean up to be a drag).
• Buy a pour over if you enjoy experimenting with high-quality beans and want maximum flavor clarity.

At the end of the day, neither one is objectively better. They’re just different tools for different moods. Thankfully, they’re both affordable enough that you don’t have to treat this like a lifelong commitment. Pick one, make a lot of coffee, and if the bug bites, you’ll probably end up owning the other one eventually.

Wrapping up our deep dive into pour over coffee vs. French press

As we’ve covered, the French press and pour over are very different experiences. Both in the history, the details of brewing, and in the character of the final cup. The French press is historic and handsome. Pour over brewers are (almost) all much younger, and range in shape and aesthetics much more widely

I think both are great ways to make coffee, but if I’m forced to pick, who is my winner? I’d favor a pour over 6 days our of 7. I just enjoy the ceremony and clarity of the coffee more (it makes testing out new bags of coffee from our Trade Subscription all the more fun). But as we’ve been trying out more French presses lately, I’ve also grown to like the richness they offer. Either way, enjoy your coffee :-)