What's the Difference Between Drip Bag Coffee and Pour-Over Coffee? What is Drip Extraction?

As is well known, both pour-over coffee and drip bag coffee use drip extraction methods. The so-called drip extraction is a method where hot water quickly flows through the coffee grounds layer by gravity, carrying out substances from the coffee grounds. Simply put, it means pouring water into a filter while coffee seeps out simultaneously.

Due to the same extraction method, they are inevitably compared. But did you know that drip bags and pour-over coffee actually don't have much to compare, because their main purposes are different, each with its own advantages. No worries! Today FrontStreet Coffee will briefly share what the differences really are between pour-over coffee and drip bag coffee! First, let's briefly understand what pour-over coffee is and what drip bag coffee is.

What is Pour-Over Coffee?

Pour-over coffee refers to a method of brewing coffee by manually controlling water flow, during which various equipment such as drip cones, filter paper, and digital scales are used as aids. Since the concept of specialty coffee became popular, pour-over coffee has quickly gained popularity. Because compared to other coffee extraction methods, it can better and more perfectly showcase the natural flavor of coffee itself.

Moreover, pour-over coffee has an extremely high degree of freedom. We can adjust or replace any parameter and any piece of equipment, thereby creating completely different extraction schemes to brew coffee. The resulting coffee will have slightly different characteristics, making it highly enjoyable to experiment with! This is why pour-over has become the preferred extraction method for everyone to explore coffee aromas.

In addition, pour-over coffee has another advantage: the series of actions from weighing coffee beans, grinding, folding filter paper, wetting the filter cone, adding grounds, to boiling water and brewing usually need to be completed by oneself. The existence of these steps fills the making of this cup of coffee with a sense of ritual.

Since the price of equipment is relatively affordable, many friends will equip themselves with a set of professional equipment at home. Whenever they have free time, they will select a favorite coffee bean to grind and brew fresh.

What is Drip Bag Coffee?

Drip bags, on the other hand, can be said to be a convenient derivative of pour-over coffee! In the late 20th century, Japan's Ueshima Coffee Co. (UCC) first introduced drip bags and applied for a patent in 2001. The drip bag contains pre-ground coffee powder and a filter bag made of non-woven fabric. Like pour-over coffee, it uses drip extraction. After tearing open the packaging, you can take out the drip bag, hang it, and start brewing directly - very convenient.

It's called "drip bag" because the filter bag made of non-woven fabric has two paper clips on both sides. As demonstrated in the picture above, after opening, they can be hung on a narrow-mouthed cup to serve as a filter cone for brewing coffee. So the name "drip bag coffee" comes from these two pieces of paper hanging on the cup rim like "ears". Compared to pour-over coffee, drip bag coffee is extremely convenient because it doesn't require grinding coffee beans or preparing various equipment such as filter cones and filter paper. All you need is a container and a water kettle to complete making drip bag coffee. Plus, being small and compact, drip bags are very convenient to carry, making them an essential item for people when traveling or in daily office life.

What are the Differences Between Drip Bag Coffee and Pour-Over Coffee?

From the brief introduction above, we can learn that the biggest difference between drip bags and pour-over actually lies in the state of the coffee grounds used. Pour-over coffee mainly uses freshly ground coffee, which means grinding coffee beans into powder just before brewing; while drip bags use pre-ground coffee, which is ground well in advance and then sealed into drip bags. (Here FrontStreet Coffee needs to add that although pour-over coffee may sometimes use pre-ground coffee powder, the vast majority of the time, it uses freshly ground coffee powder.) And it is this difference that makes the two fundamentally different. Why? Because the taste of the brewed coffee will change as a result.

As is well known, coffee flavor mainly comes from aromatic substances in coffee, and most of these aromatic substances are volatile. After coffee beans are roasted, the coffee aroma will continuously evaporate and escape from inside to outside, just like carbon dioxide. The speed of loss mainly depends on storage methods, environment, and whether the coffee's own structure is intact. When coffee beans are stored in appropriate environments and ways, and the coffee bean structure remains relatively intact, the volatilization speed of aromatic substances will be slowed down.

Generally, under the condition that all the above requirements are met, the aromatic substances in coffee beans can be preserved for up to 2 months (from the roasting date); while when the storage environment and methods of coffee beans are relatively poor, or when coffee beans are ground into powder, the aromatic substances will accelerate their loss rate, and the optimal tasting period will shrink from the original two months to one month or even less than a month.

This leads to the fact that even with the same beans and the same roasting date, the taste brewed from drip bags will not be as rich as that from pour-over coffee. Because it uses pre-ground coffee powder, the volatilization speed of coffee flavor is faster than that of freshly ground coffee, and this gap will increase as grinding time increases. At the same time, because the coffee powder is pre-ground, its grind size is already fixed, and the brewing framework cannot be adjusted too much. This makes drip bag coffee less flexible than pour-over coffee, with lower enjoyment potential.

However, we need to know that the advantage of drip bag coffee has never been primarily about flavor, but about simplicity and convenience. Precisely because of the need for greater convenience, drip bags use pre-ground coffee powder. If not, we could also use drip bags to brew freshly ground coffee powder, which would also obtain excellent coffee flavor (indeed, some friends do this).

Therefore, we can learn that although pour-over coffee and drip bag coffee both use drip brewing methods, their pursued purposes are completely different. Pour-over coffee seeks a more complete and higher-quality coffee experience, so its main brewing object is freshly ground coffee powder; while drip bag coffee pursues convenience, for which it sacrifices some coffee flavor in exchange for convenience. Each has its own advantages, with their own applicable scenarios, so there's really no need for comparison~

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