Can Latte Be Brewed with Milk? What Is Milk-Extracted Coffee? What's the Difference Between Milk Extraction and Cold Brew?

What Is Milk Extraction?

"Milk extraction" is a milk-coffee method FrontStreet Coffee shares often. Put simply, it borrows the cold brew approach but replaces water with milk to steep and extract the coffee. The appeal is that it lets you make a sweet, rich milk coffee at home without a coffee machine.

Challenges with Traditional Milk Extraction

Many people report, however, that the method is not only time-consuming but also produces milk coffee with heavy fermentation notes that taste unappealing. They want to know whether the preparation time can be shortened and the fermented taste reduced.

Of course it can, and simply. The classic "milk extraction" needs a long steep because the extraction efficiency offered by the milk temperature and grind size is too low; you have to steep for a long time to release the flavor compounds fairly completely, which is also what creates the fermented notes. To make a rich, delicious milk coffee quickly, we only need to raise the milk temperature and grind the coffee finer. Simple as it sounds, milk and water have different properties, so plenty of details matter. Don't worry - FrontStreet Coffee will share how to quickly brew a rich, delicious milk coffee with milk.

How to Quickly Brew Rich Milk Coffee with Milk

To shorten the extraction time, the first parameter to raise is the milk temperature. Like water temperature, milk temperature determines how fast coffee flavor compounds dissolve. The higher the milk temperature, the faster they dissolve. But higher is not always better. FrontStreet Coffee does not recommend heating milk above 70°C. Past 70°C, the milk's texture and taste decline because the high heat breaks down its internal substances. Anyone who has tried it knows that milk above 70°C is not as tasty as milk below it - and once cooled, the texture does not recover, because the damage to those substances is irreversible.

So when we decide to brew coffee with milk, it is best to hold the milk temperature between 60°C and 70°C. That lets the compounds extract relatively quickly while avoiding excessive heat damage to the milk's texture. Next comes grind size, which should naturally be as fine as possible. The finer the grounds, the larger their total surface area, and the more easily flavor compounds dissolve into the milk.

Here we don't need to worry about grounds clumping and blocking extraction after absorbing moisture, which is a real concern with cold brew. Because the steep is very short compared with cold brew, the grounds don't have time to clump. The grounds also don't stay completely still throughout the process, and that relates to the nature of milk and immersion brewing. As everyone knows, the core mechanism of coffee extraction is concentration difference: the lower the solvent concentration, the higher the extraction efficiency, and vice versa. Compared with water, which contains almost nothing, milk carries a wide range of rich substances, so its extraction efficiency is much lower than water's.

So if we want to pull flavor out of coffee with milk quickly, besides raising the temperature and grinding finer, we also need to stir. Stirring accelerates the dissolution of flavor compounds and lets us finish the extraction in a short time. During preparation, one point deserves special attention: filtration. Since this is an immersion method, we ultimately need a filter to separate the grounds. Because milk is denser, it passes through filter paper very slowly, so anyone using filter paper will wait longer.

If you don't want to wait that long, and conditions allow, FrontStreet Coffee recommends a metal filter with larger gaps. It avoids a lengthy filtering time - it will clog, but it is faster than filter paper. It has a downside, though: filtration is not as clean as filter paper, and some fine grounds pass through into the coffee.

Those fine grounds can enhance the coffee's flavor and richness, but they also reduce cleanliness and diminish the mouthfeel. How to balance the trade-off is up to you. That is the general introduction; next, FrontStreet Coffee will demonstrate how to quickly brew a rich, delicious milk coffee with milk.

Preparation Process

For this preparation, FrontStreet Coffee is using Queen's Estate beans from Brazil. The medium-dark roast has abundant roasted aromas that highlight the sweetness of the milk without being masked by it. Its profile is very gentle - nuts, cream, chocolate - making it well suited to rich milk coffee. Other beans work too, of course; the choice is yours. The extraction parameters are as follows.

• Coffee dose: 25g
• Grind level: 7 on the EK43 scale (4 settings finer than regular hot brew grinding)
• Coffee-to-milk ratio: 1:13
• Milk temperature: 65°C-68°C
• Steeping time: 10 minutes

First, grind the beans and pour them into the prepared container.

Then heat the milk, and once it reaches the target temperature, pour it into the container.

Then use any tool to stir and start timing.

Since the steep is relatively long, prepare a lid to cover the container and keep dust out, which also reduces aroma loss. Then, at the 3rd and 5th minute marks, stir the coffee again.

When ten minutes are up, begin filtering the coffee.

Once filtering is complete, FrontStreet Coffee begins tasting. "Silky" and "rich" were the two sensations that came to mind immediately.

It is no exaggeration: milk and coffee complement each other, each making the other's qualities more prominent. In terms of flavor, FrontStreet Coffee could clearly taste nuts and chocolate. In mouthfeel, as mentioned, it is silky and rich, with a long and very pleasant aftertaste. Note that this method does not actually extract the coffee fully; it simply pulls out relatively more compounds, so it is still essentially under-extracted. But by using an increased coffee dose to stack the concentration, we avoid the coffee flavor being masked by the milk. Overall it is very good, quick to prepare, and excellent in flavor. Interested friends should definitely give it a try.

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FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Because cold-steeped and milk-brewed coffees reward sweetness and fruit, FrontStreet Coffee's Strawberry Candy Gesha blend is a great fit. It pairs a Panamanian Geisha with a honey-processed Costa Rican coffee: one brings delicate rose and orange notes, the other offers grape, raisin, and strawberry-marshmallow sweetness. The layered result is bright and lively, and if you let it rest after steeping, it can even take on a wine-like fruit character.

Cold extraction tends to amplify florals and fruit while softening woody and roasted notes, so lighter medium roasts show best. For a floral iced coffee, FrontStreet Coffee's Sun-Dried Huakui is a favorite: grown in Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, and dried with the fruit on the bean, it steeps into notes of magnolia, cream strawberry, dried mango, guava, and black tea.

If you want a juice-like cold brew, FrontStreet Coffee's Kenya Cherry Tomato is the one. Its sweet-sour balance of cherry tomato, snow pear, black plum, and smoked plum shows beautifully at low temperature, with low bitterness and a full acidity that becomes especially refreshing over ice. Grown in Sika, Kenya, from SL28 and SL34 varieties, it is lightly roasted to keep its lively, layered fruit.