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Scorching summer days, summer days scorching. For coffee lovers, the ritual of midsummer often begins with a refreshing glass of iced coffee, so lately Front Street has been sharing various ways to make iced coffee, and today's share is no exception.
So today Front Street is going to share how to use drip bags to make two different types of iced coffee, because not all friends will go to the trouble of preparing professional coffee equipment to make coffee. So, we'll use the most convenient and simplest drip bags to make two types of iced coffee that would normally require professional equipment! One is hand-brewed iced coffee, and the other is cold brew coffee~You know, a delicious cup of coffee first and foremost depends on good beans. Here Front Street briefly lists a few coffee types suitable for the vast majority of people, for everyone to choose from: for those who like floral flavors, we recommend Front Street Panama Geisha Drip Bag Coffee, which is one of the most expensive coffees in the world; for those who like fresh coffee with a touch of acidity, we recommend Front Street Huakui Drip Bag Coffee, which tastes like black tea and berries;
For those who like balanced flavors, that is, coffee that is neither sour nor bitter, we recommend Front Street Brazil Drip Bag Coffee; lastly, for those who love a solid, full-bodied taste, we suggest buying the highest-grade Front Street Golden Mandheling Drip Bag Coffee. These beans have undergone multiple rounds of hand sorting, which minimizes the defect rate of the coffee beans, thereby making the coffee aroma clearer and the sweet aftertaste better. All of the above drip bag coffees can be purchased at Front Street stores and the Front Street Tmall flagship store.How to use drip bags to make hand-brewed iced coffee?As everyone knows, iced pour-over is a brewing method derived from the framework of hot pour-over. The conventional approach is to add ice cubes on top of a hot pour-over, thereby quickly obtaining a cup of iced pour-over coffee. But because the melting ice cubes will dilute the coffee's concentration, we adjust the relevant parameters to offset the impact of the melting ice on the coffee's concentration.Traditional drip bag coffee and pour-over coffee are made in much the same way, so we can also apply the iced pour-over model to making iced drip bag coffee.Reducing the amount of water and grinding finer—these are the parameter adjustments Front Street makes when brewing iced pour-over. Reducing the water amount is to increase the coffee's concentration, thereby offsetting the impact of the melting ice on concentration; and grinding finer is to correct the drop in extraction efficiency caused by the reduced water amount, so that the coffee has a high concentration while still achieving a sufficient extraction yield.
We can reduce the amount of water used to brew the drip bag, but since drip bag coffee uses pre-ground coffee powder, we cannot adjust the grind size of the coffee powder. For this reason, the object we adjust during brewing needs to change to: water temperature.
Raising the water temperature can increase the dissolution speed of the hot water; the higher the water temperature, the faster the flavor substances in the coffee dissolve. So next, let's choose a pack of Front Street Strawberry Candy Drip Bag Coffee to demonstrate how to make hand-brewed iced coffee at home.
Front Street's single drip bag contains 10g of powder, and the extraction parameters are as follows: water temperature 93°C, coffee-to-water-to-ice ratio 1:10:6, which converts to 10g of coffee powder requiring 100ml of hot water and 60g of ice. But since the ice won't all melt quickly, as long as you don't take too long to drink your coffee, having a bit more ice is actually fine too~ The method is as follows:
Step one: Prepare a tall glass (a shorter cup with a larger capacity also works), and first put the ice cubes into the cup.Step two: Hang the drip bag on the cup.Step three: Once the water temperature is reached, begin brewing. First do the bloom, using 20ml of hot water for a bloom lasting 25~30 seconds.Step four: Once the time is up, divide the remaining 80ml of hot water into four portions and pour them in, 20ml each, all poured in a small stream in a circular motion. Be sure to wait until the hot water from the previous pour has finished flowing through before pouring the next portion of hot water.Step five: As the last portion of hot water poured in fully permeates, we can remove the drip bag and end the extraction.
Step six: Use any tool to stir the coffee to ensure the coffee's concentration and temperature are even. After stirring, you can start drinking~
How to use drip bags to make cold brew coffee?Cold brew coffee is relatively much simpler, because its preparation has neither too many parameters to watch out for, nor does it require us to deliberately control the water flow, making it very easy to operate. However, we need to prepare an extra sealed bottle for it, and the amount of powder used will be a bit more.As for the parameters, we can adjust them based on whether or not you want to add ice when drinking. If you plan to add ice when drinking the cold brew to keep it cold, then when making it we can use a 1:10 coffee-to-water ratio, for the same reason as with iced pour-over, so we won't elaborate further here; if we don't plan to add ice when drinking the cold brew, then we can use a 1:12 coffee-to-water ratio.Then, since Front Street's single drip bag contains 10g of powder, if we use a 1:10 coffee-to-water ratio to make it, the final cold brew coffee liquid obtained will be around 80ml. For most people, this is not an amount that can satisfy the appetite.
So, we'd best use 3~5 packs of drip bags at once to make cold brew coffee, otherwise after such a long wait you'd only make half a cup, which is still a bit uneconomical. Anyway, everyone can decide according to their own needs. Here we use four packs of Front Street Strawberry Candy Drip Bags for the demonstration, which can make 2~3 cups of cold brew coffee.
Step one: First, take out the drip bags, tear open the sealing strips, then pour the coffee powder into the sealed bottle. Be sure to remember to keep the drip bag packets.
Step two: Pour in an appropriate amount of room-temperature water. Since Front Street uses 4 drip bags with 40g of coffee powder, following a 1:10 ratio, we need to pour in 400ml here.Step three: Use any tool to stir the coffee powder and water until all the coffee powder is submerged in the water.Step four: Tighten the bottle cap to seal it, then put the whole bottle into the refrigerator and refrigerate for 8~12 hours. (The longer, the stronger)Step five: Once the time is up, take out the coffee, then prop up the drip bag packets you kept from yesterday on some cup.Step six: Pour the coffee into the drip bag packet to filter out the coffee grounds. And with that, the cold brew coffee is done.Once the coffee liquid has been filtered out, we can add ice cubes and enjoy the deliciousness of cold brew coffee! It should be noted that any cold brew that has been filtered out but that you don't plan to drink right away needs to be poured into a sealed bottle, then put back into the refrigerator for cold storage to prevent spoilage. The shelf life is about five days; as long as the coffee is finished within five days, the chance of spoilage is very small~ The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.
