A Cheongdam classic ticked off the list: Lusso Barista Lab.

This place has always been a popular destination and their coffee reputation is very decent, too. The menu houses a good amount of hand-drip options incl. this year’s COE from Guatemala and others:

I went for the Ethiopia Koke Honey, which is honey processed. Overall, I was surprised to see that the attention to detail for pour-over was very low. The beans were weighed, but the paper filter in the V60 was not rinsed before the ground came in and also there was no scale for water seen. The whole pouring process was very “intuition only”. The barista basically filled the filter fully with water twice and let it drip out. There may be different techniques, but this is unusual – to say the least.

As a result, the coffee was still surprisingly tasty and had (very) light strawberry notes as promised; but I am quite positive that with slower pouring or potentially a finer grind to get extraction time up from approx. 2 minutes to 3 or 4, a lot more would’ve been possible here.

A nice place, but no pour-over heaven – I will check back in to see if maybe the team just had a bad day.