What to Consider When Adding Milk to Pour-Over Coffee? Can Milk Coffee Be Made with Drip Coffee? How to Achieve High Coffee Concentration?

An Introduction to Pour-Over "Latte"

When people think of pour-over coffee with milk, most immediately picture café au lait. But because café au lait uses a lower coffee concentration, it dilutes much of the texture and flavor, making it quite different from an espresso-based latte.

Recently, while browsing online, FrontStreet Coffee came across a video from a well-known Korean coffee blogger featuring a champion barista who built a "latte" with excellent flavor and texture using pour-over coffee. How did they do it? Today, FrontStreet Coffee will share how to make a "latte" that comes infinitely close to the real thing using pour-over. Ready?

How to Make a "Latte" with Pour-Over

Why does this latte need quotation marks? For two reasons. First, today's lattes specifically mean milk coffee made with an espresso base plus a certain proportion of milk. Second, milk coffee made with pour-over can only approximate, never fully replicate, the flavor and texture of a real latte. It is also quite different from traditional café au lait, so throughout this article the pour-over "latte" keeps its quotation marks.

Back to the main point — how can we use pour-over coffee to make a "latte"? It sounds absurd, but it is actually simple to execute (and yes, it is absurd). We just follow the extraction principles of espresso to create a pour-over coffee of extremely high concentration as the base, then add the right proportion of milk to replicate a latte.

So our requirement for this pour-over is high concentration. To get a pour-over with higher concentration, we need to adjust the coffee-to-water ratio. In brewing, the less water used to extract, the more coffee substances that water carries at the same extraction rate — and the higher the concentration.

But the coffee-to-water ratio is tightly interlinked with the other parameters. Increasing the ratio means less water is available to extract from the grounds. With other parameters unchanged, the overall extraction time shortens. So if you only change the ratio and leave everything else the same, you will definitely end up with an under-extracted, under-concentrated pour-over.

Take espresso as an example. Even though espresso runs an extremely high coffee-to-liquid ratio of 1:2, it relies on higher water temperature, finer grinding, and pressure to let a small amount of hot water extract a very high concentration in a short time. So if we want to use a high coffee-to-water ratio to reach an espresso-like concentration in pour-over, we have to follow the same principle: raise the extraction efficiency of all the other parameters at once.

Next, FrontStreet Coffee will share the extraction approach for a pour-over "latte."

The Approach for Making "Latte" with Pour-Over

To create a high-concentration pour-over, the first thing to fix is the coffee-to-liquid ratio. FrontStreet Coffee here adopts the common espresso ratio of 1:2, which converts to a 1:4 coffee-to-water ratio because the grounds absorb twice their weight in water.

Since a milk coffee needs at least 40ml of coffee liquid as a base, calculating at a 1:2 coffee-to-liquid ratio means we will use 20g of grounds this time. But pour-over has no pressure assistance, so besides grinding finer and raising the water temperature, we also need to raise extraction efficiency by extending the extraction time and increasing agitation.

After several rounds of experimentation, FrontStreet Coffee settled on a more suitable plan.

The beans used here are Colombian Big Navel, an anaerobic natural processed bean. The coffee-to-water ratio is 1:4 (that is 80ml of hot water, converting to a 1:2 coffee-to-liquid ratio), the water temperature is 96°C to 98°C, and the grind is set to the finest setting on the pour-over grinder, closest to a flour-like particle size. With a hand grinder, if it is not fine enough, we can grind twice — the finer, the better.

The dripper is a Kono/SwissGold model, which slows the flow rate and extends extraction time. We also need a small stick for stirring, because with such a small amount of water we have to "force" the substances out of the grounds by agitating. Now let's begin. (Image on the left: the finest grind from a pour-over electric grinder; on the right: an espresso grind.)

First, wet the filter paper, then pour the ground coffee into the dripper. Here comes the key part. Pour all 80ml of hot water in one go, then immediately take out the stirring stick and stir vigorously. We can stop stirring when the whole bed is evenly mixed (about 1 minute), then simply wait for the extraction to finish.

Although there are only 80ml of hot water, the combination of extremely fine grinding, stirring, and a slow-flow dripper stretches the extraction time to about 2 minutes. At 2 minutes and 5 seconds, extraction is complete. Remove the dripper, and the liquid weight is 45ml. From the color you can see just how concentrated it is. (Image on the left: espresso; on the right: the high-concentration pour-over.)

FrontStreet Coffee must stress again that because the concentration of this liquid cannot compare to espresso, we cannot use too much milk, or it will be overly diluted. A ratio of 1:3 is enough. Converted, that means 45ml of pour-over coffee to 135ml of milk. (This is the ratio for a "hot latte" — for an "iced latte," replace one-third of the milk with ice cubes for cooling.)

Steam the milk to 65°C, then create a simple latte art. (Regular hot milk is fine too — there are not many requirements.)

The finished drink tastes very close to a regular latte. Because Big Navel is an anaerobically processed bean, it carries a slight fermented note, followed by berry flavors of blueberry and grape. Compared with café au lait, this "latte" has a richer body and a more intense flavor. It may not be as outstanding as a regular latte, but it offers more options since you can use different beans — which is really quite nice.

So now you know how to make a "latte" with pour-over coffee. If you happen to have an espresso grinder at home, even better: you can grind directly with it and then skip the slow-flow dripper, since a V60 will work as well. (Friend: guess why I bought an espresso grinder?)

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FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

When you push a pour-over to be concentrated enough to take milk, a fuller-bodied single origin holds up best. FrontStreet's PWN Golden Mandheling is a strong pick: roasted medium-deep, it has very low acidity and a long, thick body, with herbal and dark chocolate notes and a faint earthy touch — plenty of substance to survive the milk.

If you want something rounder and sweeter, FrontStreet's Brazil Queen's Estate is an easy choice. It has low acidity and a very balanced cup, rich in nut and cocoa aroma with a clear caramel sweetness, smooth and never astringent — and because it also has excellent crema, it works for pour-over, espresso, and the moka pot alike. Either bean gives a milk coffee the backbone to taste like more than a mouthful of warm milk.