Can Coffee Be Extracted with Warm Milk? How to Make Milk-Extracted Coffee Taste Better?
Recently, FrontStreet Coffee demonstrated how using warm water to soak coffee grounds can more efficiently create cold brew with excellent sweetness. This sparked an idea - what about "milk extraction"? If warm water works, warm milk should also be suitable for extraction, right? When curiosity strikes, it's unstoppable. Time to get started immediately!
Experimenting with Different Coffee Varieties
To explore which flavor profiles work best for "warm milk extraction," FrontStreet Coffee selected three different types of beans, using 20 grams each for the experiment: Brazil Queen's Farm (nutty profile), Kenya AA (berry profile), and Mozart (fermented fruit profile).
Unlike regular milk extraction, this process involves preheating the milk and using complete immersion extraction. The release efficiency of various soluble substances from the coffee is higher than the original version, and bitter compounds will also emerge more easily. To avoid over-extraction while preserving aromatic compounds to the greatest extent, we need to pay attention to the following points:
- Fresh milk should not be heated to too high a temperature
- Coffee grounds should not be ground too finely
- Steeping time should be appropriately shortened as temperature increases
Optimizing Parameters for Milk Extraction
Considering that too much milk would overwhelm the coffee flavor, while too little would produce unpleasant bitterness, FrontStreet Coffee maintained the classic 1:10 ratio of coffee to milk - that is, 20 grams of coffee grounds to 200 grams of fresh milk. The milk temperature was uniformly controlled at 40°C. If you don't have a thermometer at home, you can use the "hand test" - heat until the cup or milk pitcher feels comfortably warm to the touch.
For the grind size of the three bean varieties, FrontStreet Coffee directly used parameters for hot pour-over brewing, corresponding to China's No. 20 standard sieve pass rates of: Queen's Farm 75%, Kenya 80%, and Mozart 82%, which translates to grinder settings of 10.5, 10, and 9.5 on the Ek43 grinder respectively.
First Attempt and Results
For the first attempt, FrontStreet Coffee thoroughly mixed the three portions of coffee with the heated warm milk, then placed them in the refrigerator to steep for three hours. When time was up, they were immediately removed, stirred again, and filtered through filter paper to separate the coffee grounds.
Comparison revealed that the Mozart milk extraction had the best mouthfeel, with the sweetness of raisins complementing the silky chocolate milk texture, but it left an unpleasant astringency after drinking. The Queen's Farm milk coffee had higher bitterness with prominent smoky notes and a slight astringency after swallowing. The Kenya Assalia extraction had the palest color, tasting like fermented yellow peach yogurt with poor integration and overly thin aroma.
Refining the Extraction Method
From these results, it appears that when making milk extraction coffee with warm milk, medium-roast coffees with both rich fruit notes and cocoa/chocolate flavors are more suitable than dark-roast beans with nutty profiles or light-roast beans with predominant fruit acidity. Additionally, from the flavor performance of the three coffee extractions, it's clear that with 40°C milk temperature and sugar-sized fine grinding, coffee tends to produce over-extraction flavors during 3-hour steeping.
Therefore, in the second attempt, FrontStreet Coffee shortened the steeping time to 1.5 hours while keeping other parameters unchanged, using the recently popular Ethiopia Santa Vereni coffee. During cupping, it displayed rich fruit notes like pineapple and guava, along with a long red wine aftertaste, showing excellent flavor profiles in both pour-over and cold brew methods.
Perfecting the Warm Milk Extraction
After 1.5 hours of cold steeping, we stirred and filtered the grounds for tasting. FrontStreet Coffee found that compared to the previous three milk coffees, this second attempt with Santa Vereni milk extraction had a more palatable coffee concentration, revealing flavors of honey, pineapple, light floral notes, and cream biscuits with diverse textures reminiscent of liqueur-filled milk chocolate.
If you're as curious as FrontStreet Coffee about how coffee tastes when steeped in warm milk, feel free to reference these experiments and try it with a bean you love - it might bring you a delightful surprise!
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FrontStreet Coffee
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
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