How Should Drip Bag Coffee Be Brewed? Can You Steep It? Drip Bag Coffee

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How Should Drip Coffee Be Brewed?

FrontStreet Coffee has observed that some people choose to hang the drip bag over relatively tall cups for brewing, trying to keep the bag from soaking in the coffee liquid; while others prefer to hang it over shorter cups, brewing while letting it soak. So the question arises: what's the difference between coffee brewed with these two methods?

What is Drip Coffee?

The structure of a drip bag is quite simple: it's a sealed filter bag containing coffee powder with two paper flaps attached to the outside. When the paper flaps are opened, they can hang on the cup, resembling two ears, which is how the name "drip bag" originated.

The first generation of drip bags was invented by Japan's Yamanaka Industrial Co., Ltd. based on the concept of tea bags, and after several improvements, it evolved into its current form.

Today, drip coffee has captured 15% of the market share in its birthplace, Japan, and its growth in the Chinese market is also astonishing: in 2016, only about 3% of Chinese consumers had tried drip coffee, but by 2017, this figure had surged to 20%.

This explosive growth may partly be attributed to clever positioning: many merchants use instant coffee as a reference point in their drip bag product descriptions. This approach is quite ingenious because drip bags are only slightly more troublesome to use than instant coffee, yet the taste is significantly better.

How to Use Drip Coffee

Let's first look at the usage method. The filter bag contains pre-ground coffee powder, so tear open the package, hang the filter bag on the cup, pour hot water to extract, and finally remove the drip bag to enjoy your coffee.

Brewing Methods Comparison

FrontStreet Coffee compared coffee made with these two methods and found that coffee extracted using the "brewing while soaking" method has a richer mouthfeel but higher acidity; while coffee extracted using the "non-soaking" method may taste thinner in texture, it performs better in terms of flavor complexity.

Why Does Soaking Extraction Result in More Acidic Coffee?

At the beginning of brewing, most of the flavor compounds extracted from the coffee powder are fruit acids and floral notes, followed by nutty and chocolate flavors, and finally sweetness, with concentration gradually decreasing.

When we soak the drip bag in the cup for extraction, the liquid soaking the bag already contains a relatively high amount of compounds extracted at the beginning, resulting in a smaller concentration difference. Consequently, fewer of the later-extracted, larger-molecule compounds like nuts will be extracted.

Moreover, with the same coffee-to-water ratio, immersion extraction tastes more intense and full-bodied than non-immersion extraction. FrontStreet Coffee believes this is because immersion extraction provides more complete and uniform extraction overall, resulting in a higher extraction rate than non-immersion extraction. However, due to the higher concentration, other flavors become harder to perceive, making the fruit acids more prominent.

Important Notice :

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FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473