Weak Pour-Over Drip Coffee? Take a Closer Look at Your Cup!

I believe everyone has stocked up on coffee drip bags for the upcoming National Day holiday, just to enjoy a time of relaxation during the long break, free from the constraints of complex brewing equipment and parameters, allowing you to have a moment of emptiness in the year and enjoy black coffee in the simplest way!

This is also the original intention of the drip bag designer - hoping that everyone can enjoy a cup of pour-over drip coffee without spending too much effort. No need for excessive coffee equipment, nor overly precise parameters - just a cup, a pot of hot water, and a drip bag are enough to handle the important task of making drip coffee.

However, many friends, when without an electronic scale, directly place the drip bag on any cup and use high-temperature hot water for prolonged steeping. The result of doing this is rarely ideal drip coffee; instead, it's likely to lead to two negative outcomes: one is that the coffee tastes weak due to too much water, and the other is over-extraction due to prolonged steeping, making it extremely bitter!

Optimizing Your Drip Bag Brewing

So! We can avoid brewing terrible coffee due to errors caused by the lack of electronic scales and temperature control devices by observing the appearance and capacity of our cups. After all, no matter how simple it is, we still need some quality!

Cup Capacity

For cup capacity, we can first understand the capacity of the cup we're using, then combine it with the conventional coffee-to-water ratio to determine where in the cup we need to pour the hot water to reach the target water amount and ultimately extract the appropriate concentration. In general coffee extraction, a 1:15 coffee-to-water ratio is quite commonly used, and the resulting coffee concentration is quite suitable. FrontStreet Coffee's drip bags contain 10g of coffee, which translates to needing 150ml of hot water. If using a 400ml cup, we only need to pour the water to slightly above one-third of the cup's total height to achieve a properly concentrated cup of coffee~ If it's a 300ml cup, pouring to half the cup will control the water amount to around 150ml, and so on for judgment.

Cup Shape

Because cup shapes vary, their capacities and heights are inconsistent. These factors directly lead to different degrees of steeping when brewing drip bags! For example, in some shorter cups, because the cup body isn't tall, the drip bag can directly touch the bottom of the cup. When pouring hot water, this will cause it to be directly soaked by the hot water at the bottom, easily leading to over-extraction of the coffee. In this situation, we need to slightly lower the water temperature used for brewing to weaken the extraction power of the hot water.

FrontStreet Coffee suggests you can boil the water directly, then open the lid and let it sit for 120 seconds, and the water temperature will drop to around 90°C. Using hot water at this temperature for brewing can ensure flavor while reducing the chance of over-extraction.

As for those tall, large-capacity cups, even after pouring an appropriate amount of hot water, the water in the cup won't soak the drip bag because the water level isn't high enough. In this case, we can use slightly higher water temperatures for brewing extraction, with the range of 92-94°C being a good choice.

Additional Brewing Tips

If you have other props around, we can also use them as aids! For example, items like chopsticks, spoons, or toothpicks can be used as stirring rods for friends who don't have a narrow-spout hot water kettle. When pouring hot water, stir in circles at the center of the drip bag, which can effectively enhance the extracted coffee flavors~

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FrontStreet Coffee

No. 10, Bao'an Qianjie, Yandun Road, Dongshankou, Yuexiu District, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473