OREA Baby-O vs V60 — Which Brewer Is Better for Rare Coffee?
If you’ve ever been to one of our stores, you might have noticed that we use two different brewers for our pour overs — the OREA Baby-O and the metal Hario V60. We use the V60 for our Reserve brews, the “everyday” pour overs, and the Baby-O for our Rare and Competition-style brews.
Naturally, the question arises — why the Baby-O and not the V60 for the rarer coffees?
How Big Is the Difference Between Pour Over Brewers?
There are countless different pour over brewers on the market, all with different sizes, shapes, materials, and bed depths. Although you can get a very balanced, well-extracted brew on most brewers out there, there’s no “one size fits all” recipe that works across every brewer.
The trick to succeeding with any brewer is understanding what dose works best for that specific brewer.
You see, brewing a well-extracted cup is all about finding the right balance between dose, brew ratio, and grind size. However, something that’s often overlooked is the depth of the coffee bed.
It’s rarely a problem when the coffee bed is too deep, as we can usually compensate for that by using a coarser grind and a higher number of pours. But when the coffee bed becomes too thin, we start running into serious problems with astringency.
The issue with a thin coffee bed is that the water flows through the coffee too quickly. To compensate, we have to grind significantly finer to slow the drawdown enough to extract sweetness from the coffee. But grinding that fine also introduces a very high amount of fines into the brew, which inevitably results in cups that taste dry and astringent.
So the challenge becomes that the brew goes from sour, watery, and under-extracted to dry and over-extracted very quickly.
This is why you shouldn’t just use any dose for any brewer, but rather find the ideal dose for the specific brewer you’re using. A classic V60 usually requires a dose of around 14g or more to provide a coffee bed that’s deep enough.
Why We Use the OREA Baby-O for Rare Coffees
This leads us to the first major benefit of the OREA Baby-O: the small size and narrow shape of the brewer allow us to use doses as small as 8g of coffee while still creating a coffee bed that’s deep enough to avoid grinding unreasonably fine.
It gives us much more flexibility in recipe design. We can choose whether we want to use fewer pours or more pours with a coarser grind — either way, the flavor balance remains intact.
This is a game-changer for rare and exclusive coffees, as we can finally use smaller doses while still reaching the full potential of the coffee. Otherwise, we’re often forced to choose between:
- using a smaller dose and ending up with an unbalanced brew
- or using a larger dose that brews more coffee than necessary
That becomes especially important considering that many rare coffees come in very limited formats — often just 50–100g per box or bag.
OREA Baby-O vs V60 — Flavor Differences
A secondary benefit of using the OREA Baby-O is the flat-bottom design, which generally produces slightly sweeter and more balanced brews compared to the V60, while the V60 often highlights more complexity and structure.
Most of our rare coffees tend to be Geshas with beautifully structured flavor profiles and delicate sweetness that we want to highlight as clearly as possible.
By pairing the Baby-O with the Sibarist FAST Wave filters, we get brews with:
- higher clarity
- silkier texture
- more intense florals
If you prefer a thicker, more syrupy texture in your brews, we recommend using the B3 filters from Sibarist instead. The thicker filter paper results in a slightly slower drawdown compared to the FAST filters.
Is the OREA Baby-O Worth It?
If you're a fan of brewing rare coffees at home and don’t like using 20g of coffee at a time, then the OREA Baby-O might just be the perfect complement to your coffee corner.
It’s one of the few brewers that allows very small doses while still maintaining proper extraction balance, which makes a huge difference when brewing expensive and limited coffees.
Have you ever tried brewing with the Baby-O?
If you're keen to brew competition-level brews without the hassle of having to invest in an entire brew setup, xBloom Studio might be the solution for you.
