Chinese Drip Bag Coffee Brand Recommendations - How to Brew Perfect Drip Coffee

Office workers who love single-origin coffee keep drip bags on hand so they can enjoy a hot, delicious cup anytime, anywhere. In FrontStreet Coffee's experience, though, many beginners who are new to drip bags do not know how to use them properly, and the wrong method produces a cup that tastes nothing like what they drink in a café. This article explains how to brew a drip bag well and recommends suitable coffees to put in one.

How to Brew Drip Coffee Bags?

Brewing a FrontStreet Coffee drip bag is simple. Unlike pour-over, you do not need much equipment: one drip bag, hot water, and a cup.

The process is as follows:

1. Tear open the outer packaging of the drip bag and take out the filter bag inside.

2. Tear along the marked line on the filter bag to open the drip bag. Then hang the two "ears" of the drip bag on the rim of your cup or pot.

3. Each FrontStreet Coffee drip bag holds 10 grams of coffee, with a recommended brewing ratio of 1:15. First pour a small amount of hot water to wet all the grounds, and let it bloom for 10 to 20 seconds. Second, pour until the bag is nearly full and let the coffee drip through. Finally, pour a third portion to fill it completely. Using these three pours, wait for the remaining coffee to filter through and then enjoy.

If you are unsure about the ratio, check your cup's capacity or use a scale to measure it.

That is the drip bag brewing process. FrontStreet Coffee has also learned that many coffee lovers make some improper moves the first time they use a drip bag. Below are the most common mistakes.

Common Mistakes When Brewing Drip Coffee Bags

1. Treating the grounds like instant coffee. FrontStreet Coffee once received feedback that a customer's coffee contained a lot of grounds. It turned out they thought it should be brewed like instant coffee and had mixed the grounds straight into the water. Even if it tasted fine to them, all those grounds still hurt the mouthfeel.

Never pour the grounds out of a drip bag. Drip bags are not tea bags or instant coffee. Instant coffee is made by evaporating water from coffee extract into a dry powder that dissolves quickly in hot water, and it is fundamentally different from real coffee. The powder in a drip bag is ground from freshly roasted beans and contains a great deal of plant fiber and other insoluble material. Drip brewing exists precisely to keep those grounds out of the cup and away from the mouthfeel.

2. Treating the drip bag like a tea bag. FrontStreet Coffee has also heard feedback that the coffee had no taste, and it turned out the person had thrown the drip bag directly into the cup.

Drip bags and tea bags both use non-woven fabric and look somewhat similar, but a drip bag has those large paper ears that cannot be ignored. Unless you want a paper-flavored, tasteless drink, a drip bag has to be hung and poured.

3. Brewing without tearing the bag open. This is the highest-error-rate mistake FrontStreet Coffee encounters. Most brands clearly print "OPEN" where the drip bag is sealed, and FrontStreet Coffee's bags do too. Some people assume a drip bag is just a tea bag that hangs in the cup, so they never realize it needs to be torn open. Without tearing the opening there is no flow through the bed, which inevitably leads to under-extraction. The first step before brewing a drip bag is to tear it open.

4. Repeatedly brewing drip coffee bags

FrontStreet Coffee also often hears new drip bag users say they brew the same bag back and forth several times. Can a drip bag be brewed more than once? The answer is no.

A drip bag is essentially a simplified pour-over. Like pour-over, it can only be brewed once, and you must still control the ratio. A ratio that is too high, meaning too much water, gives a weak cup. Why? Because the extractable material in coffee beans is only about 30% of their weight, so pouring more water will not make the coffee taste better.

At the same time, watch the ratio. As with pour-over, the recommended range is 1:14 to 1:18, and for a drip bag the ratio works out to one bloom plus two full pours, three water portions in total. Another way to think about it is to find a 200ml cup and fill it to 80%.

As for whether a drip bag can be brewed a second time, FrontStreet Coffee firmly advises against it. If you insist on rebrewing a drip bag, you will only end up with a cup that tastes bad.

That covers how to brew a drip bag correctly. The most common drip bags on the Chinese market come from Yunnan small-bean coffee brands. FrontStreet Coffee's own store, for example, offers a Yunnan Huaguoshan drip coffee from the FrontStreet Yunnan Baoshan Coffee Estate. Here is a closer look at that coffee.

FrontStreet Coffee Yunnan Huaguoshan Coffee Beans

Country: China
Region: Baoshan, Yunnan
Altitude: 1450-1550m
Variety: Typica
Processing: Washed
Flavor: Citrus, nuts, plum, melon fragrance, brown sugar, black tea sensation

What sets FrontStreet Coffee's Yunnan Huaguoshan apart from ordinary Yunnan small-bean coffee is the variety: Huaguoshan is Typica, while Yunnan small-bean is Catimor. Both can be called small-bean coffee, but because Typica's floral and fruity acidity is more delicate and complex, we named this lot Huaguoshan to distinguish the two varieties.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

FrontStreet 2013 Yunnan Sun-Dried Typica is a natural fit if you like the idea of a Yunnan drip bag. It has a clean cup with citrus and caramel aromas woven together, and the medium-dark roast adds a touch of nut, chocolate, and brown sugar. Acidity is medium and the layers are well balanced, with plenty of Yunnan character. It works for pour-over, cold brew, and drip machines, which makes it a very good value daily drinker.

FrontStreet Ethiopia Hua Kui is the tropical, fruit-forward choice if you prefer a bright light roast in your drip bag. This natural-processed heirloom is roasted medium-light, and the cup is full of strawberry, passion fruit, jackfruit, and lychee with clear sweetness and very little bitterness, smooth and juicy from start to finish.

FrontStreet PWN Gold Mandheling suits anyone who likes a heavy, low-acid cup. This dark-roasted Indonesian coffee comes from the PWN company, which selects only beans of 18 mesh and above and hand-sorts them three times to remove defects. The result is a clean, full-bodied brew with herbal and dark chocolate aromas and a long caramel sweetness, ideal for drip, pour-over, or a moka pot.