How to Make a Rich Latte with Drip-Style Coffee Bags? Can Boiling Milk Extract Coffee?

Brewing Drip Coffee with Milk: Is It Possible?

A reader recently shared that they had bought several drip coffee bags during a promotion and wanted to try different brewing methods. They came across a rather unconventional approach, brewing with milk, but since they had never tried it, they worried about failing and asked FrontStreet Coffee whether it was feasible. FrontStreet Coffee is always glad to help coffee lovers with questions like this, so without further ado, let's brew.

Using Milk for Drip Coffee: Is It Feasible?

This is not the first time milk has appeared as the main extraction medium in FrontStreet Coffee's experiments. We published an article last year titled "Can You Brew Pour-Over Coffee with Milk?" which noted that because milk contains so many extra components, its extraction ability cannot compete with plain hot water. Heated to scalding, milk also loses a significant amount of protein and lactose, leaving a poorer texture. Applying conventional parameters and technique directly to brew drip coffee with milk clearly will not work.

To make up for milk's weaker extraction, FrontStreet Coffee first blooms the coffee with hot water, letting the particles absorb water so they release flavour compounds better later on, then heats the milk to 75°C and injects it in two stages.

To keep the resulting milk coffee from tasting overly acidic or thin, FrontStreet Coffee still recommends prioritising medium and dark roast categories, such as FrontStreet Coffee's Bird of Paradise, Queen's Manor, Golden Mandheling and FrontStreet Coffee's Huilan. These have distinct caramelised aromas that harmonise better with hot milk.

If you are more sensitive to bitterness, however, we recommend fermented fruit-acid drip coffees such as FrontStreet Coffee's Sidra, Ombligon, Strawberry Candy and Sunflower Warm Blend. These combine candied fruit notes, fruitiness, fermented wine character and a certain caramelised quality, which makes them suitable for drinking with milk.

How to Brew Drip Coffee with Milk

First, prepare a tall glass and a fresh bag of FrontStreet Coffee's Strawberry Candy drip coffee. After opening it, hang it on the rim of the glass. For your reference, FrontStreet Coffee will keep track of time and weight during this brew.

For the first stage, pour 90-93°C hot water into the drip bag until it is half full. To get water at that temperature, boil it, turn off the heat, leave the lid open and let it sit at room temperature for 1 minute. Use roughly 25 g of water, keep the flow small, and if you are using a gooseneck kettle you can add some circular motion.

Wait for the coffee liquid to finish dripping, then begin the second stage. Pour 75°C hot milk, hot enough that you cannot touch it with your bare hands, into the grounds until the filter bag is nine-tenths full. When the coffee liquid is about to run dry, pour again until it is nine-tenths full a second time. The total amount of water and milk should be 150 g.

Visually, the whole cup takes on a rich milk-tea colour. On flavour alone, FrontStreet Coffee thinks both richness and aroma pass muster. Tasted directly, it reveals strawberry jam, raisins and cream, and whether drunk straight or over ice it offers a pleasant texture.

Because fine coffee particles expand quickly on contact with milk, though, they can block the pores of the filter bag. During the second extraction stage you can see the flow rate drop noticeably, and the total drip time reaches 11 minutes.

Adding in the time needed to prepare the various ingredients, FrontStreet Coffee's Ombligon drip bag took a full 20 minutes to produce a barely satisfactory milk coffee. Cleaning the milk-heating tools afterwards also makes this method somewhat contrary to the whole point of drip coffee, convenience. So for anyone who wants to make milk coffee with a drip bag quickly, FrontStreet Coffee does not recommend pouring this way.

Drip Coffee + Milk: What Other Methods Work?

Since drip coffee has been developed in China for many years, people have explored plenty of creative ways to combine it with milk in daily life. FrontStreet Coffee happens to have two such methods. The first is to extract a strong black coffee with hot water first, then add fresh milk in an appropriate ratio. For the details, see our article "How to Make Latte Coffee with Drip Bags?", which FrontStreet Coffee will not repeat at length here.

The second method is not only better suited to those who love iced milk coffee but is also extremely simple. As long as you have drip coffee bags, a bottle of milk, fresh milk tastes better, and a refrigerator, you can achieve "latte freedom" after a good night's sleep.

The operation is very simple: take the drip bag out without opening it, remove the paper shell from the packaging, and drop the "naked" bag straight into the milk. After tightening the bottle cap, shake hard up and down so the milk soaks the grounds inside. Because this is cold extraction, FrontStreet Coffee believes the coffee-to-milk ratio does not need to be too precise, as long as it falls roughly between 1:12 and 1:15. For example, FrontStreet Coffee's 10 g drip bag would be combined with 150 ml of fresh milk.

Next, put the milk with the drip bag inside into the refrigerator to steep overnight. The next morning, after about 8 to 12 hours, take it out, shake it hard a few more times, remove the drip bag, and your milk coffee is ready.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

For milk coffee, FrontStreet Coffee's darkest, fullest beans usually work best. FrontStreet Coffee Lindong Mandheling comes from Sumatra and is wet-hulled, a process born of necessity in Indonesia, where humidity runs 70-90% and annual rainfall exceeds 2,000 mm, making long sun-drying impossible. In wet-hulling the parchment is removed while the bean is still half-dry, exposing the seed to the air to speed drying and lending it the wild herbal, spice and mint character Mandheling is known for. Medium-dark roasted, it pours dark chocolate, caramel and a low acidity that holds up beautifully against milk.

For the highest grade, FrontStreet Coffee PWN Golden Mandheling is selected at 18 mesh and larger, with fewer than 3 defects per 300 g green sample to meet the top G1 standard, then hand-sorted three times to remove remaining defects, which sharpens its cleanliness and sweetness. FrontStreet Coffee brews it at 87-88°C with 15 g of coffee, a 1:15 ratio and a coarse grind, in three pours: 30 ml to bloom, 100 ml to lift the golden foam and the bed, then a gentle 95 ml down the centre to raise the sweetness, giving a full body with caramel sweetness and chocolate and nut notes.

If the goal is a latte or a dirty, FrontStreet Coffee Classic Blend is the long-standing favourite, adding butter, roasted chestnut and caramel to the creamy nutty base of Brazilian coffee while a small amount of Robusta lifts the golden crema. It makes latte art and layered dirty drinks easy, with the kind of body and caramel aroma that milk brings out most.