How to Brew Delicious Cold Brew Coffee? Can Pour-Over Coffee Bags Be Used for Cold Brew?

How to Make Cold Brew Coffee with Drip Coffee Bags

Thanks to their high quality and convenient brewing operation, more and more people are starting to keep several packs of FrontStreet Coffee's drip coffee bags at home and in the office. With the changing seasons, many regions have begun to embrace the rhythm of summer. Besides hot brewing, drip coffee bags can actually be used to make cold brew iced coffee. In this article, FrontStreet Coffee will explain how to use drip coffee bags to make iced black coffee.

Where does the design inspiration for drip coffee bags come from?

The design inspiration for drip coffee bags comes from string tea bags. Pre-ground coffee is placed in non-woven bags with paper cards, and during brewing you simply hook the card onto the cup to brew the coffee. The difference between drip coffee bags and string tea bags is that drip coffee extracts coffee through drip filtration, while string tea bags extract tea through steeping.

What's the difference between drip filtration and steeping extraction?

FrontStreet Coffee uses coffee extraction as an example. Drip filtration works through water injection and filtration, so the water injection speed during drip brewing (water flow rate, injection height, etc.) affects the filtration speed and the coffee flavor. The biggest characteristic of drip brewing is that the extracted coffee has rich layers. Steeping extracts by directly soaking coffee grounds in water and then filtering the grounds out. Its biggest characteristic is that it can more fully extract the flavor substances from coffee, greatly enhancing the coffee's body and richness.

Hot brewed drip coffee bags therefore belong to drip filtration extraction, while cold brew drip coffee bags belong to steeping extraction. The former quickly extracts coffee flavor substances through high temperature, while the latter slowly extracts them through low-temperature steeping.

The difference between high temperature and low temperature extraction

Temperature affects the decomposition rate of oils, acids, and sugars in coffee. Depending on the speed of this process, the aroma, taste, and texture of coffee vary greatly. This is why different extraction methods can produce coffee of different qualities.

The advantage of high temperature extraction is that it can quickly extract coffee flavor substances, causing the tannic acid in coffee to quickly decompose into pyrogallic acid and producing sour, sweet, and bitter tastes, which is what FrontStreet Coffee often refers to as the process of releasing coffee flavor. The disadvantage of high temperature extraction is that it easily leads to a complete release of coffee flavor and then begins to release the taste of woody fiber from the coffee beans, which is what we often call off-flavors, woody tastes, and other unpleasant flavors.

Cold brew uses low-temperature steeping extraction, allowing the flavors in coffee to reduce volatilization under low-temperature conditions and storing coffee aroma in the coffee liquid as much as possible. When drinking, the temperature of the coffee liquid rises and the aroma contained in it suddenly explodes, letting the drinker feel an intense aroma at the back of the tongue. This sudden aroma explosion can create a great sense of happiness. The disadvantage is that the production time is longer: cold brew coffee requires at least 8 hours or more to make.

How to make cold brew coffee with drip coffee bags?

FrontStreet Coffee will use FrontStreet Coffee's Honduras · Sherry coffee bean drip coffee bags for demonstration. Honduras Sherry coffee beans have always been a popular signature coffee bean among FrontStreet Coffee fans. Coffee beans aged in whiskey sherry barrels for a month at low temperature absorb the whiskey aroma from the oak barrels, making this coffee bean taste like whiskey. The drip coffee bags made from these coffee beans have a rich whiskey flavor when brewed, with a vanilla cream-like smooth texture and aroma, leaving an endless aftertaste that is hard to forget.

Preparation materials: Two FrontStreet Coffee drip coffee bags (each with net content 10g), a clean container with a lid, and ice water. FrontStreet Coffee recommends a cold brew coffee ratio of 1:15, which means two drip bags need to be soaked in 300ml of ice water.

Cold brew coffee making method with drip bags: First, open the drip coffee bags and pour the coffee grounds into a clean container with a lid, keeping the drip bags. Next, add ice water in the recommended ratio to the container, cover with the lid and shake to ensure the coffee grounds are fully soaked, then place in the refrigerator for 8-12 hours but no more than 24 hours for low-temperature extraction. After extraction is complete, hang the preserved drip bag over a cup and pour the cold brew coffee into the drip bag for filtration.

How to enjoy the filtered cold brew coffee?

Cold brew coffee made with a 1:15 ratio achieves a balanced flavor concentration, so it can be tasted directly. If you still find it too strong, you can add ice cubes, purified water, or milk to dilute it before tasting.

How long can cold brew coffee be stored?

Even if the container is sterilized, FrontStreet Coffee does not recommend storing cold brew coffee in the refrigerator for more than 72 hours; after all, low temperature only suppresses bacterial growth and cannot completely eliminate bacterial reproduction.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

For cold brew, a bean that keeps its sweetness and fruit at low temperature makes all the difference. The FrontStreet Strawberry Candy Geisha Blend is an excellent choice: it combines the most representative Panama Geisha with a honey-processed coffee from Costa Rica, one contributing delicate rose and orange notes and the other highlighting grape, raisin, and strawberry gummy sweetness, creating rich layers of flavor. Brewed cold, it is sweet, tangy, and lively, and when left to rest and ferment a little it takes on a fruit-wine-like character that suits the slow-steeping method described above.

If you prefer florals leading the cup, FrontStreet Sun-Dried Huakui is worth trying. Grown in Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, it is a natural-process coffee, so the beans absorb abundant sweet aromatic compounds from the fruit pulp and skin. As cold brew, FrontStreet Huakui shows magnolia, cream strawberry, dried mango, guava, and black tea notes. Cold extraction tends to amplify floral and fruity tones and soften woody and roasty notes, so a light-to-medium roast such as this presents its character at its best.

For a cold brew with a full, juicy body, FrontStreet Kenya Cherry Tomato is the pick, its cherry tomato, snow pear, black plum, and smoky plum sweet-sour profile shining through low-temperature extraction, low in bitterness and full in acidity, and especially refreshing over ice with a long-lasting aroma. It comes from Kenya's Sika region, where SL28 and SL34 varieties are grown and given the region's distinctive K72 double washed process, then roasted medium-light to convert precursor aroma compounds into complex, fruit-forward notes. If you want to stretch your beans further, cold brew uses more grounds than pour-over, so blend FrontStreet Colombia Sidra from El Diviso estate, with its passion fruit, grape, apricot, and dried-fruit sweetness, together with FrontStreet Costa Rica Tarrazu at roughly 1:2 to enjoy the floral-fruity notes of the Sidra and the bright citrus acidity of the Tarrazu at a better value, while FrontStreet Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Gedingding, a washed Yirgacheffe with sweet, layered berry and honeyed flavors in cold brew, is an economical and versatile everyday option.