coffee snob PGH: pourover geekout

My dear coffee-geekin' friend james came over to my new apartment the other day for a "mid 19th century french vs. 2010 japanese" pourover contest. He had discovered an incredible french brewer, the likes of which i had never seen in an antique shop in seattle. the guy who sold it to him said that it was most definitely a tea pot. however, we were convinced otherwise.

We didnt know how it worked. we were just going on a whim. we ground the coffee coarse. and thought that it would not slip through the holes in the middle "pourover" chamber into the bottom of the pot.

little did we know that the pot was meant to hold the grounds and be the brewer, while the middle cyclinder, which we thought was the filter was actually a dispersion method for making sure that the hot water went over the coffee grounds evenly.
there was this nifty little doodad in the bottom of the pot, which held back the grounds whilst you poured out your brewed coffee into your cup.

the brew that we made using our hypothesis took 7 minutes to brew and tasted awful. overextracted mess. i really wanted to know where we went wrong, but first i had to school James on my bad-ass hario pourover method, ala Scott Rao.
I have been perfecting my method after reading "everything but espresso" by Scott Rao and also writing the methodology for "manual brewing" for Training and Education @ B&B. Every brew i have made, i have put through the Extract MoJo and it gets a "good score" every time. I'm sure it needs work. there is always room for improvement, But since James just started working at a new job that requires the ability to make Bad-ass pourover coffee, I thought that i owed him a tutorial