Heard There's a Formula to Make Coffee Taste Sweeter?

The Pursuit of Sweetness in Coffee

Whether in coffee bean cultivation, roasting, or coffee brewing, everyone wonders how to achieve higher sweetness. Almost no one considers how to make coffee more sour or bitter, indicating that people greatly enjoy the pleasure brought by sweetness. At this point, some friends might ask: Is there any way to make brewed coffee taste sweeter?

Understanding Sweetness in Coffee

The answer is certainly yes, but there's an important point to note: The sugar contained in coffee beans is almost entirely converted and degraded during roasting. The remaining sweet molecules are insufficient to be perceived by our sense of taste because other prominent flavors mask them. When we perceive sweetness in coffee, it indicates that the concentration of other flavors that mask sweetness has been reduced, allowing it to be detected by our taste buds.

Brewing for Enhanced Sweetness

How can we brew coffee with more sweetness? Normally, as long as we avoid extracting too many bitter substances, we can achieve basic sweetness. Therefore, we generally adopt more conservative brewing methods. However, if you want to experience even higher sweetness, you need to take the risk of potential over-extraction! After all, the greater the risks, the greater the rewards! We can understand this better with the help of the following image.

From this image, we can see that sweetness is released in large quantities during the middle to later stages of extraction. Therefore, when you feel that the coffee brewed with your current technique lacks sufficient sweetness, you can try shifting the extraction focus to full-segment extraction. This approach results in more balanced flavors, where acidity and bitterness are not too prominent, allowing sweetness to be amplified.

Fortunately, there happens to be a formula online that meets these brewing requirements! It extracts more aroma in a short time, without being too acidic or over-extracted, ultimately resulting in a cup of coffee with high sweetness. This formula is: High-Fine-Large-Fast. Does that sound strange? Let's use light-medium roast beans as our experimental subject to see how this formula works!

The High-Fine-Large-Fast Formula

Fine: Adjust the grind to be finer. For example, FrontStreet Coffee commonly uses light-medium roast beans ground at EK43-10 setting. If you want to achieve higher sweetness, you can choose to slightly adjust the grind finer, from the original 10 setting to 9.5, increasing the surface area of the coffee grounds, allowing hot water to penetrate more quickly for extraction!

High: Increase the water temperature. After adjusting to a finer grind, increase the water temperature. For example, increase the original 92°C water by 2°C to 94°C to increase the extraction rate during the bloom stage. Enhanced extraction during the bloom stage allows subsequently poured hot water to more quickly access the aromatic substances hidden within the coffee grounds.

Large: Increase water flow. When entering the brewing stage, we choose the conventional three-stage brewing method: 15g of beans, 1:16 coffee-to-water ratio, with water amounts for each stage being 40/120/80ml respectively, and each stage uses large water flow for pouring. Large water flow can raise the coffee bed, increasing its surface area and allowing hot water to extract more acidic and sweet substances in a short time.

Fast: Quick extraction. Because the entire pouring process uses large water flow brewing, combined with a V60 dripper that has ribbing to guide water flow for faster drainage, the entire extraction time will be somewhat faster than the conventional combination of large and small water flows. It ensures sufficient sweetness is extracted while preventing excessive release of bitter substances. After brewing is complete, you'll obtain a coffee with higher sweetness than conventional brewing (if not over-extracted)!

High-Sweetness Brewing for Medium-Dark Roast Coffee Beans

The principle of high-sweetness extraction for medium-dark roast coffee beans is the same as above, but medium-dark roast coffee beans are somewhat delicate (with a loose texture) and cannot use the aggressive extraction method described above to extract sweetness. Therefore, FrontStreet Coffee recommends this brewing approach for dark roast beans: High Concentration, Low Extraction! Increase the brewing concentration while reducing the extraction rate. This effectively reduces the release of bitterness in the later stages, naturally resulting in higher sweetness.

15g of beans, grind size at EK43 10.5 setting (75% passing through #20 sieve), coffee-to-water ratio adjusted from the conventional 1:15 to 1:13, brewing water temperature at 88°C, using a Kono dripper.

The brewing method uses the simplest one-pour technique! After blooming with 30ml of hot water for 30 seconds, pour the remaining 165ml in the center with gentle force and slow speed, continuously drawing small circles, to obtain a highly sweet dark roast coffee!

Conclusion

FrontStreet Coffee has simply explained the principles of high-sweetness extraction in this article. Centered around this extraction principle, there are many other methods that can enhance sweetness, such as unique brewing methods like temperature-variable brewing, which uses different water temperatures to reduce the release of acidity and bitterness. Therefore, nothing is absolute—feel free to explore the different experiences brought by various diverse extraction methods!

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FrontStreet Coffee

10 Bao'an Front Street, 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