4:6 method
The 4:6 method is a way of brewing filter coffee by hand, invented by the Japanese barista Tetsu Kasuya and made famous by his win at the 2016 World Brewers Cup.123 It is now the most widely copied pour-over recipe in specialty coffee.
The name is the whole idea. You take all the water your recipe calls for and split it into 40% first, 60% after — and each half has exactly one job:
- the first 40% decides whether the cup tastes sweet or sharp;
- the last 60% decides whether it tastes strong or weak.23
That is unusual. Most brewing advice hands you one fixed recipe and tells you to grind finer if you don’t like it. This hands you two separate dials and tells you which one to turn for which problem — which is why it spread the way it did.
The two dials
| Which water | Poured in | What it controls | Turn it this way |
|---|---|---|---|
| First 40% | two pours | balance of sweetness vs acidity | smaller first pour → sweeter; larger first pour → brighter, more acidic |
| Last 60% | two to four pours (three is standard) | strength | fewer pours → lighter cup; more pours → stronger cup |
The sweetness dial works on the size of the first pour relative to the second, not on the total. The strength dial works on how many times you divide the remaining water, not on how much water there is. In both cases the total stays the same — you are changing the shape of the brew, not the recipe.23
Brewing it
The standard teaching version, from Kasuya’s own company Philocoffea, is 20 g of coffee and 300 g of water — a 1-to-15 brew ratio, slightly stronger than the 1-to-16 most pour-over recipes default to.42 Grind coarse.3
Split 300 g into five pours of 60 g. The rule of thumb behind that number: each pour is roughly three times the weight of your dry coffee.2
| Pour | Water | Clock | Phase | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | 60 g | 0:00 | the 40% — sweetness / acidity |
| 2 | 2 | 60 g | 0:45 | the 40% — sweetness / acidity |
| 3 | 3 | 60 g | 1:30 | the 60% — strength |
| 4 | 4 | 60 g | 2:10 | the 60% — strength |
| 5 | 5 | 60 g | 2:40 | the 60% — strength |
| 6 | — | — | 3:30 | lift the dripper off |
Pours 1 and 2 come to 120 g, exactly 40% of 300. Pours 3, 4 and 5 come to 180 g, exactly 60%.4
The part people get wrong
You let the bed drain completely between pours. All the water from one pour must finish dripping through before the next one goes in.23 Every pour is therefore its own miniature brew, and the coffee sits exposed and dry-ish in between.
This runs against the older received wisdom, which was to keep the bed wet and the flow continuous so the coffee never stalls. It also means the clock in the table above is not a target so much as a consequence: if your grind is right, each 60 g pour drains in roughly 45 seconds and the timings fall out on their own. If a pour is still draining when the clock says go, grind coarser — that is the adjustment, not pouring earlier.2
There is no separate bloom step in the ordinary sense. The first pour is both the bloom and the first of the two sweetness-and-acidity pours.
Where it came from
Kasuya arrived at the 40/60 split by brute force, brewing the same coffee repeatedly and catching each portion of water in its own cup to taste what each one was actually contributing. His conclusion was that after the first 40%, the water stops carrying distinct flavour and only carries concentration. That method of arriving at it — and his 2016 competition routine, which used a different pour pattern to reach the same 40/60 arithmetic — are documented on the Tetsu Kasuya note.
He won the 2016 World Brewers Cup in Dublin on a ceramic Hario V60, and then published the recipe rather than keeping it.1 Philocoffea, the roastery he founded in Chiba, now teaches it as the house technique.4
Why it spread
Three reasons, none of them about the coffee.
It is diagnosable. “Too sour” and “too weak” are different complaints with different fixes, and the method tells you which lever answers which. Ordinary recipes collapse both into “adjust your grind.”
It needs nothing new. A V60, a scale and a timer — no equipment purchase, which is not true of most competition techniques.
It was given away. A World Brewers Cup routine is normally a performance you watch. This one was published as a recipe you could run at home that evening, and the coffee YouTube ecosystem carried it from there.
The result is that Kasuya is remembered for a technique rather than for a coffee — genuinely rare among competition champions, and part of why the Japan coffee market sits so centrally in how the rest of the world now brews.
To verify
Whether the name is a registered trademark. The research behind this note found no intellectual-property statements at all and treated the method as openly shared brewing theory. But Philocoffea’s own Japanese site writes the name as “4:6メソッド®” — with a registered-trademark mark — on both its front page and its 4:6 method page, read directly from here.14 Those two things are in tension. A ® on a Japanese page says nothing about which jurisdictions a mark is registered in, under what registration number, or when, and no registry record was consulted. Do not describe the method as either “trademarked” or “freely in the public domain” without checking the Japan Patent Office register.
To verify
The exact pour timings. Sources do not agree past the second pour. Philocoffea’s own page gives 0:00 / 0:45 / 1:30 / 2:10 / 2:40, finishing at 3:30.4 The published 2016 competition recipe recorded on the Tetsu Kasuya note gives 0:45 / 1:30 / 2:15 / 3:00, also finishing at 3:30, with uneven 50 ml and 70 ml opening pours instead of five equal 60 g ones. Both land on the same 40/60 arithmetic and the same 3:30 finish, so the difference is competition-recipe versus teaching-recipe rather than a contradiction — but no single timing profile is canonical, and the drain-completely rule overrides the clock in every version.
To verify
Water temperature. No first-party Philocoffea page read from here states a brewing temperature for the method. A widely shared social-media adaptation gives 93 °C for light roasts, 88 °C for medium and 83 °C for dark,5 but that is an instructional post rather than Kasuya’s own published guidance, and it is presented there as an adaptation. The 2016 competition brew was made at 92 °C — one specific routine, not a rule. Treat any temperature figure attached to the 4:6 method as practitioner advice.
To verify
That the on-stage routine was the 4:6 method. Every instructional source consulted links the method to the 2016 title, and Kasuya’s own company presents it as the technique behind the win.123 But no official World Brewers Cup scoresheet or routine transcript was read here confirming that the exact published recipe is what he poured in Dublin. This is a first-party claim repeated widely, not an independently documented one.
Separately, Philocoffea’s English-language 4:6 page returned HTTP 429 to this machine on repeated attempts,2 so the English wording is taken from the research report rather than read first-hand; the Japanese pages were read directly.14
Related
- Tetsu Kasuya — the champion who invented it, and his published competition recipe
- Pour-over brewing — the family of hand-brewing this belongs to, and the three standard brewers
- World Brewers Cup — the championship that made the method famous
- Philocoffea — Kasuya’s roastery, which teaches the method as its house technique
- Hario — maker of the V60 dripper the method is built around
- Brew ratio — why 20 g to 300 g is written as 1:15
- Extraction yield · Total dissolved solids — what the two dials are actually moving
- Coffee grinding — the adjustment the method asks you to make when a pour drains too slowly
- AeroPress — the brewer Kasuya won his national title on before switching to a cone
- Japan coffee market · Kissaten — the hand-brewing culture this came out of
- Coffee YouTube — how the recipe actually travelled
Official links
Footnotes
-
PHILOCOFFEA — official site — read directly; presents the “4:6メソッド®” and Kasuya’s World Brewers Cup title ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5
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PHILOCOFFEA — How to Make Coffee Using the 4:6 Brewing Method (English) — returned HTTP 429, not readable from here ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9
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Tin Cup Coffee — New “4:6” Method for Brewing Coffee — read directly; independent confirmation of the 20 g / 300 g dose, the coarse grind, the two roles of the 40% and 60%, and the drain-completely rule ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6
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PHILOCOFFEA — 4:6 method page — read directly; 20 g / 300 g, five pours, the 0:00–2:40 timing profile and the 3:30 finish ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6
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The 4:6 pour over method / brew recipe from Tetsu Kasuya — Instagram ↩