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

Published: 2026-01-27 Author: FrontStreet Coffee

Last Updated: 2026/01/27, When it comes to adding milk to pour-over coffee, most people probably think of café au lait first. However, because café au lait uses a lower coffee concentration, it dilutes much of the texture and flavor, making it quite different from espresso-based lattes. But recently, while FrontStreet Coffee was browsing online, we came across an article from a knowledge platform that

Introduction to Pour-Over "Latte"

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

Recently, while browsing online, FrontStreet Coffee came across a video from a renowned Korean coffee blogger featuring a champion barista who created a "latte" with excellent flavor and texture using pour-over coffee. How did they achieve this? Today, FrontStreet Coffee will share how to create a "latte" that comes infinitely close to a real latte using pour-over method. Are you ready?

How to Make a "Latte" with Pour-Over

Why does this latte need quotation marks? There are two reasons. First, today's lattes specifically refer to milk coffee made with espresso as the base combined with a certain proportion of milk. Second, milk coffee made with pour-over can only approximate but cannot completely replicate the true flavor and texture of a real latte. At the same time, it's quite different from traditional café au lait, so the "latte" made with pour-over in this article will always have quotation marks.

Back to the main topic - how can we use pour-over coffee to make a "latte"? It might sound absurd, but it's actually quite simple to execute (though it is indeed absurd!). We just need to follow the extraction principles of espresso to create a pour-over coffee with extremely high concentration as the base, then add the appropriate proportion of milk to replicate a latte!

Therefore, our requirement for this pour-over coffee is: high concentration. To achieve a pour-over coffee with higher concentration, we need to adjust the coffee-to-water ratio in our extraction plan! Because for coffee brewing, the less water used for extraction, the more coffee substances the water will carry at the same extraction rate, resulting in higher concentration.

However, we need to understand that the coffee-to-water ratio is closely interconnected with other extraction parameters in a brewing plan! Increasing the coffee-to-water ratio means less water is available to extract from the coffee grounds. With other parameters unchanged, the overall extraction time will be shortened. Therefore, if only the coffee-to-water ratio is changed while other parameters remain the same, you'll definitely get an under-extracted pour-over coffee with insufficient concentration.

Take espresso extraction as an example - although espresso has an extremely high coffee-to-liquid ratio of 1:2, it uses higher water temperature, finer grinding, and pressure assistance to allow a small amount of hot water to extract sufficiently high coffee concentration in a short time. Therefore, if we need to use a high coffee-to-water ratio to obtain a pour-over coffee with concentration similar to espresso, we also need to follow this principle: simultaneously increase the extraction efficiency of all other parameters.

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

The Approach for Making "Latte" with Pour-Over

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

Since a milk coffee requires at least 40ml of coffee liquid as the base, calculating with a 1:2 coffee-to-liquid ratio means we'll use 20g of coffee grounds this time. However, since pour-over coffee doesn't have pressure assistance, besides grinding finer and increasing water temperature, we also need to increase extraction efficiency by extending extraction time and enhancing agitation!

After several rounds of experimentation, FrontStreet Coffee obtained a more suitable extraction plan:

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

The dripper used is a Kono/SwissGold dripper (which can slow down flow rate and extend extraction time). We also need to prepare a small stick for stirring, because with such a small amount of water, we need to "forcefully extract" substances from the coffee grounds through stirring. Now let's begin our brewing! (Image on left: finest grind from pour-over electric grinder; image on right: espresso grind)

First, we 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 entire coffee bed is evenly mixed (about 1 minute), then just wait for the extraction to complete.

Although we only have 80ml of hot water, with the combination of extremely fine grinding, stirring extraction, and slow-flow dripper, the extraction time also reaches about 2 minutes. At 2 minutes and 5 seconds, extraction is complete. Remove the dripper, and the liquid weight is 45ml! We can see from the color of this coffee liquid that it's very concentrated! (Image on left: espresso; image on right: high-concentration pour-over coffee)

FrontStreet Coffee must emphasize again that since the concentration of this coffee liquid cannot compare to espresso, we cannot use too much milk, otherwise it will be overly diluted. A ratio of 1:3 is sufficient! Converting this means 45ml of pour-over coffee to 135ml of milk! (This is the ratio for a "hot latte" - for an "iced latte," one-third of the milk should be replaced with ice cubes for cooling)

Steam the milk to 65°C, then create a simple latte art! (Regular hot milk is also fine, there aren't many requirements)

The finished product tastes very close to a regular latte. Because Big Navel itself is an anaerobic processed bean, it has a slight fermented taste, followed by berry flavors of blueberry and grape! Compared to café au lait, this "latte" has a richer body and more intense flavor! While it may not be as outstanding as a regular latte, it offers more options since you can use different coffee beans, which is really quite nice!

So now everyone knows how to make a "latte" with pour-over coffee! If you have an espresso grinder at home, that would be even better. We can directly use the espresso grinder for grinding, so we don't need to use a slow-flow dripper to extend the extraction time - a V60 would also work! (Friend: Guess why I bought an espresso grinder?)