Perfect Pour-Over Coffee: The Ideal Coffee-to-Water Ratio - How Much Water for 10g of Coffee?

If instant coffee has stopped satisfying your taste buds, it may be time to brew your own pour-over. The market now offers plenty of easy-to-use brewing options, and the freshly roasted drip coffee bags sold at FrontStreet Coffee are among the most popular with customers.

Instant coffee is made by concentrating and drying already-extracted coffee liquid, which costs it most of its flavour and aroma and leaves little behind beyond the taste of non-dairy creamer, sugar and bitterness. The coffee in a drip bag is different: FrontStreet Coffee grinds freshly roasted beans every day to a suitable particle size and seals them, 10 grams at a time, inside non-woven filter bags, which preserves far more of the aroma and flavour the beans developed during roasting.

Just tear open the individual packaging and the dotted line on the filter bag, open the paper tabs on both sides and hang the bag over the rim of your cup. Then add hot water at around 90°C in three or four pours and you have a fragrant cup of pure black coffee. FrontStreet Coffee recommends 150ml of water for 10 grams of coffee powder, a 1:15 ratio, for the most aromatic and mellow result.

Drip Coffee Bag Brewing Method

Step 1: Tear open the individual outer packaging and take out the non-woven filter bag containing the coffee powder.

Step 2: There is a dotted line at the seal of the filter bag. Tear along this line to open it.

Step 3: Do not pour the coffee powder straight into the cup after tearing the bag open. These are coffee particles and they will not dissolve in hot water. Simply unfold the cardboard tabs on both sides of the filter bag, find a straight-sided, heat-resistant cup and hook the bag over the rim.

Step 4: Prepare hot water at around 90°C and pour it into the bag in small amounts, several times, for a total of about 150ml.

Step 5: Once all the water has dripped through, lift out the bag and discard it. There is nothing left for a second brew.

When choosing drip coffee, pick a roast level that suits your taste. FrontStreet Coffee currently sells a wide range of drip bags, and the light, medium and dark roast options in its Seasonal Drip Bag line are the most popular. Each box holds 10 individual drip bags.

The light roast drip bags use washed Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, with bright citrus acidity, honey-like sweetness and a green-tea aftertaste.

The medium roast drip bags use natural Brazil Cerrado, with a rich roasted-nut aroma, dark chocolate depth and brown-sugar sweetness.

The dark roast drip bags use wet-hulled Indonesian Sumatra, with deep herbal spice, intense dark chocolate and caramel sweetness.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Drip bags are the convenient face of pour-over, and the beans that reward the pour-over method most are the same ones that shine in a drip bag. FrontStreet Coffee's washed Yirgacheffe Gedeb is the clearest example: citrus, berry and floral notes with a green-tea sweetness, and its acidity is soft and bright rather than sharp, much closer to the natural sweet-tartness of fruit than to the biting acidity people often dread. It is an easy yes for anyone new to pour-over.

If you like tropical fruit, FrontStreet Coffee's Ethiopia Huakui is one of the standouts of recent years, with strawberry, passion fruit, jackfruit and even lychee on the nose, obvious sweetness and almost no bitterness, juicy and smooth enough that drinkers describe it as the coffee that does not taste like coffee. For something cleaner and more delicate, the Panama Boquete washed Geisha from FrontStreet Coffee brings jasmine, green tea, honey and citrus at a far gentler price than the famous estate lots.

For pour-over, a V60 cone is the classic pairing. Hario, the Japanese glassmaker founded in Tokyo in 1921, reshaped the V60 in 2004 and launched the familiar form, named for its 60-degree cone and V shape, in 2005. Its large single hole lets the flow run freely, so the brew speed depends on how steadily you pour. Use 15 grams of coffee at a 1:15 ratio with water at 90-91°C, bloom with 30 grams for 30 seconds, then pour in stages to 225 grams and finish in around 2 minutes.