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As more and more people join the coffee-drinking ranks, around Front Street there are quite a few white-collar workers and university students, and even high school students have started drinking pour-over coffee. Compared with instant coffee that has a single taste, today's young people clearly favor freshly ground specialty coffee, especially aromatic black coffee, and there is a great variety of it. But with their busy daily lives, it is hard for them to have a cup every day, so drip bag coffee is widely regarded as the best choice.

As for drip bag coffee, you can directly buy ready-made products on the market. The drip bag varieties offered by Front Street include many classic flavors, such as the rich and caramel-scented Front Street Mandheling drip bag coffee, the intense and balanced Front Street Brazil drip bag coffee, the refreshing fruity-acidic Front Street Yirgacheffe drip bag coffee, the elegantly floral Front Street Geisha drip bag coffee, and so on.

Of course, compared with buying ready-made products, some friends pursue coffee freshness and choose to make their own drip bags at home using roasted coffee beans. This not only preserves more aroma, but the tools needed are also very simple: just prepare a grinder, drip bag filter pouches, an electronic scale, a sealer, and a small spoon.

How do you make drip bags at home?

Step one: first choose a bag of coffee beans you like, then adjust the grinder to the setting corresponding to pour-over extraction and grind them into powder.

Here at Front Street, we chose a Front Street Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Red Cherry coffee bean that many friends like. The refined natural process gives Front Street Yirgacheffe Red Cherry a full-bodied berry sweetness and acidity; when slurped at different temperatures, it shows soft berry sweetness and acidity, a fermented ripe-fruit note, obvious honey sweetness, and a black tea finish, with a smooth mouthfeel. The grind size Front Street usually uses for brewing is fine granulated sugar texture, and the passing rate using a Chinese No. 20 standard sieve is 80%, so the corresponding setting on an electric grinder EK43s is 10, while on a hand grinder C40 it is 24.

Step two: place the ground coffee powder on the electronic scale prepared in advance, then take out the drip bag and open its mouth, and carefully scoop the coffee in with a spoon at 10g of powder per bag.

Step three: plug in the sealer, clamp the heater onto the horizontal sealing line, and make sure the opening is completely sealed. The homemade drip bag is then complete. To prevent moisture, Front Street recommends placing the finished drip bags in airtight sealed bags and keeping them in a cool, dark place to avoid the loss of aromatic compounds.

How do you brew the finished drip bags so they taste good?

Many customers report that after buying drip bags, no matter how they brew them at home, they just cannot get the flavors described above, so they ask Front Street what is going on. Everyone knows that whether a cup of coffee tastes good is largely related to factors such as the freshness of the coffee beans, the parameters, and the brewing technique. If we confirm that there is no problem with the beans and the grind size has already been fixed, then when a drip bag does not brew well, the problem is usually the water temperature and technique.

Before brewing, Front Street first boils water and prepares a pouring kettle, a coffee cup, and a bag of Front Street Yirgacheffe drip bag coffee. Front Street's drip bag coffee packs are made at 10 grams per bag. Apart from the water absorbed by the coffee grounds themselves, each bag can brew about 120–130 ml of coffee liquid.

First, boil the water in the kettle and find a taller coffee cup, such as the mug that Front Street likes very much.

Next, tear open the sealed outer packaging, take out the coffee drip bag, tear open the non-woven pouch along the dotted line on top, pull open the two ears, and gently shake so that the coffee powder inside the drip bag gathers at the bottom, then hang them on the edge of the cup.

For the first pour, we first pour in a small amount of hot water to wet all the coffee grounds, and wait about 10–20 seconds to let it bloom for a while, helping release the gases in the coffee grounds so that the later extraction is more stable.

For the second pour, pour steadily in a small stream until the drip bag is almost full, then wait for the coffee liquid to drop. After all the coffee liquid has flowed through, we pour the final stage of water, again filling the filter bag. Front Street has measured that the total amount of water poured in at this point is about 150g, so an electronic scale is not needed throughout the process. Once all the coffee liquid has finished dripping, extraction is complete.

Before drinking, Front Street gently swirls the coffee liquid to even it out, then drinks it directly to taste the pure flavor of black coffee.

Finally, there is one more point: quite a few friends, with the mindset of saving whatever they can, will pour water again over a drip bag that has already been brewed once, and then find that the resulting coffee not only has no aroma at all but is also very light in color. In fact, no matter which extraction method is used, once the aromatic compounds in coffee meet water, they come out all at once, and what remains are the more bitter components. So when water is poured a second time, the "coffee liquid" that comes out most likely has no aroma left. Therefore, Front Street does not recommend brewing a drip bag a second time.

The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.