How to Brew Drip Bag Coffee and Comparison with Pour-Over Coffee: Drip-Style Coffee Brewing Process

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What is Drip Bag Coffee?

Pour-over coffee generally requires equipment like a grinder, pour-over kettle, filter cone, filter paper, and coffee server. For coffee enthusiasts who love to study coffee, these tools are essential and easy to identify by their specific purposes. However, for newcomers wanting to get started, this can be quite challenging—even understanding the flow rate requirements for a pour-over kettle spout can stump a beginner. Drip bag coffee, however, solves some of these problems.

Drip bag coffee is actually a form of pour-over coffee. In English, it's called "Drip Bag Coffee," meaning a filter bag for brewing coffee. The brewing method for drip bag coffee is similar to pour-over coffee—the filter bag itself serves as the filter paper. Usually, the selling vendor will grind the coffee beans, fill them into the bags, and then seal them, eliminating the need for a grinder. During brewing, you don't necessarily need to use a pour-over kettle either. All told, this saves several steps. However, if you ask how the taste compares to traditional pour-over coffee, the answer is likely that traditional pour-over will be somewhat more delicious. After all, you can make brewing adjustments according to the characteristics of each type of bean. Drip bag coffee simplifies these adjustments but can still produce coffee of good quality. It's even recommended to use drip bag coffee to test/try the flavor and quality of a coffee shop's beans.

How Did Drip Bag Coffee Emerge?

In 1990, Japan's Yamanaka Industrial Co., Ltd. first applied the tea bag concept to coffee, inventing drip bag coffee and applying for a patent. However, because the hanging ears would lose balance during the brewing process, it wasn't mass-produced. It wasn't until 8 years later, when Taiki Shoji improved upon the original invention, that we have the modern hang-ear coffee bag.

How Does Drip Bag Coffee Work?

Drip bag coffee is made by grinding coffee beans into powder, which is then filled into coffee filter paper. The hanging ears on both sides of the filter paper are designed to easily hang on the edge of a mug. As long as you have a heat-resistant cup and hot water, even non-coffee experts can easily get started.

However, the optimal flavor period for general coffee beans is only one month. After coffee beans are ground into powder, the flavor dissipates very quickly. So how long can drip bag coffee be stored? The answer is three weeks! If stored for too long, it's not that you can't drink it, but what you taste might have lost most of its flavor, leaving only those unpleasant woody flavors.

Moreover, coffee beans continue to interact with air after roasting, constantly releasing carbon dioxide. Therefore, after being stored for a period, most hang-ear bags appear "puffy." This indicates that the hang-ear bags were produced when the coffee beans were fresh!

Brewing drip bags may seem simple, but there are many small details to pay attention to. As the saying goes: "The devil is in the details." If you pay attention to these small details, the brewed coffee won't lose to pour-over coffee!

Drip Bag Coffee Brewing Steps:

1. Take the drip bag out of the packaging, hold the upper edge of the bag, and shake gently to concentrate the coffee powder at the bottom.

2. Tear along the dotted line and pull open the hanging ears on both sides, hanging them on the edge of the coffee cup.

3. First pour 30ml of hot water and let it sit for 30 seconds to bloom and release the coffee aroma.

4. Continue pouring 120-150ml of hot water and wait for 1 minute and 30 seconds.

5. Once the coffee liquid filtered through the paper flows into the coffee cup, the brewing is complete.

Details to Pay Attention to During Brewing:

▲ The hot water temperature for brewing coffee should be about 90 degrees Celsius.

▲ One drip bag can brew about 150ml-180ml of coffee, approximately half a mug.

▲ When pouring hot water, do it in small amounts multiple times to avoid overflowing, which would cause coffee powder to fall into the cup.

▲ Longer brewing doesn't necessarily mean stronger flavor, but brewing too long can easily extract too many unpleasant flavors and also draw out impurities from the coffee beans. It's recommended to stop pouring water once the desired amount is reached and let the coffee powder steep for about 30 seconds!

Of course, like pour-over coffee, drip bag coffee is only recommended for single use. If you're thinking about reusing them, that's not really possible because basically all the extractable substances have already been extracted. So never reuse brewed drip bags, otherwise you'll only get unpleasant-tasting coffee due to over-extraction.

FrontStreet Coffee's Drip Bag Brewing Recommendations:

Choose a shallow coffee cup that allows the drip bag to soak in the cup. Brew with 90°C water, using a coffee-to-water ratio of 1:15, for about 1 minute and 30 seconds.

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473