What Grind Setting Should Be Used for Pour-Over Coffee Beans? How Many Grams in a Drip Coffee Bag?

As the coffee-drinking community grows, FrontStreet Coffee keeps seeing more white-collar workers, university students — even high school students — taking up pour-over coffee. Compared with one-note instant coffee, today's young drinkers clearly prefer freshly ground specialty coffee. Some love the brisk pace of an Americano, others swear by iced cold brew, and many settle on pour-over, finding that this style of black coffee not only tastes great but offers an enormous range of choices. The trouble is that busy schedules make a daily cup hard to manage. That's where drip coffee bags earn their reputation as the perfect compromise.

Drip bags are easy to buy ready-made — just pick to your taste. FrontStreet Coffee's drip bag lineup, for instance, covers many of the classics: rich, caramel-scented Mandheling; balanced, nutty Brazil; bright and fruity Yirgacheffe; and elegant, floral Geisha, among others.

The Importance of Fresh Coffee

Anyone who brews regularly knows that freshly roasted beans stay at their best for thirty to forty days. Once ground, however, aromatics begin escaping much faster, and that flavor window shrinks.

So if you know that freshly ground coffee is more fragrant, the better move is to buy whole beans and fill your own drip bags at home — keeping more aroma in the cup and sidestepping any worries about the grounds going stale in storage. The equipment list is refreshingly short: a grinder, drip filter bags, a digital scale, a bag sealer, and a small spoon for the grounds.

Step-by-Step Guide to Making Drip Coffee Bags

Step 1: Grinding the Coffee

Pick a bag of beans you like, set the grinder to a pour-over setting, and grind. Grind size directly controls the flow rate during brewing and therefore the strength of the cup, so this step deserves real attention.

As a rule of thumb, light to medium roasts — the ones described with florals, fruit, honey, and tea notes — should be ground to a fine-sugar particle size, with an 80% pass rate on China's #20 standard sieve. That corresponds to setting 10 on the EK43s electric grinder, or setting 20 on the Comandante C40 hand grinder.

Medium-dark roasts — described with nuts, caramel, dark chocolate, cocoa, winey notes — want a medium-coarse grind: a 75% pass rate on the #20 sieve, matching setting 10.5 on the EK43s or setting 24 on the C40.

And if you're grinding an espresso blend, or the beans look visibly oily when you open the bag, that's a deep, bitterness-forward roast — go coarser to avoid over-extraction: a 70% pass rate on the #20 sieve, or setting 11 on the EK43s and setting 28 on the C40.

For this demo, FrontStreet Coffee chose the Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Red Cherry, a long-time customer favorite. Its meticulous natural processing brings rich berry sweetness and acidity; tasted across a range of temperatures it shows soft berry tones, a note of mature fruit fermentation, clear honey sweetness, and a black tea aftertaste over a smooth body. FrontStreet Coffee grinds it to the fine-sugar size — setting 10 on the EK.

Step 2: Filling the Filter Bags

Set the ground coffee on the scale, open a drip bag into its square shape, and spoon in 10g of grounds per bag.

Step 3: Sealing the Bags

Plug in the sealer, clamp the heating bar along the horizontal seal line, and press until the opening is fully sealed — your homemade drip bag is done. (Keep the sealer temperature moderate; too hot and it will burn through the non-woven fabric.)

Storage Recommendations

To keep moisture out, FrontStreet Coffee suggests slipping the finished drip bags into airtight bags and storing them somewhere cool and dark, away from light, to slow the loss of aromatics.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Whichever beans go into your drip bags, match the grind to the roast. For inspiration, here are the FrontStreet Coffee beans that translate beautifully into drip bag form:

FrontStreet Coffee Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Worka Cooperative: The classic light-roast choice — citrus, berries, and florals with a green-tea-like sweet return, soft and approachable even for pour-over newcomers. In drip bag form it brews into a clean, fragrant cup with minimal fuss.

FrontStreet Coffee Ethiopia Hibrix (Hua Kui): Strawberry, passion fruit, jackfruit, and lychee over a distinctly sweet, juice-like body with almost no bitterness — the drip bag for drinkers who "don't like coffee."

FrontStreet Coffee Kenya Cherry Tomato: Vivid cherry tomato and dried plum acidity with snow pear, black plum, yellow sugar, and a green tea finish — grown at 1550–1750 m in Thika, SL28/SL34, K72 double-washed, light roasted.

FrontStreet Coffee PWN Indonesian Golden Mandheling: For medium-dark drip bags: low acidity, mellow and long on the palate, with herbal, dark chocolate, and light earthy notes. The classic bold cup.

FrontStreet Coffee Brazil Fazenda Rainha (Queen Estate): Low acidity, superb balance, nut and cocoa aromas with caramel sweetness — smooth, gentle, and enduring. Whether pour-over, espresso, or moka pot, it's the dependable everyday bean.