Batch / Auto-Drip — brewing guide

A batch brewer is percolation with the human variables removed. A good machine does three things relentlessly right: water at a stable 92–96 °C, an even spray over the whole bed, and a contact time matched to the batch. That consistency is the entire craft — the SCA's Gold Cup standard (roughly 18–22% extraction at 1.15–1.45% strength) was written around exactly this kind of brewing, and a well-set machine hits it more repeatably than any human with a kettle.

Your job moves upstream: grind, ratio, and batch size. Grind medium and adjust by taste across brews — the machine's timing is fixed, so grind is your main extraction lever. A ratio around 1:16 to 1:17 suits most coffees. Batch size is the quiet variable people miss: a small dose in a large basket makes a shallow bed that the spray head douses and under-extracts, so respect your machine's minimum and size the basket to the batch.

What happens after the brew matters as much as the brew. A thermal carafe holds a batch beautifully for hours; a glass jug on a hotplate cooks it into cardboard within thirty minutes. Brew a full batch into good insulation and the last cup tastes like the first.