Although hanging ears cannot replace freshly brewed Pour over(V60) coffee, many people still can't do without it because coffee is precious and they need to be refreshed when they get up early.
The taste of hanging coffee depends on the taste of the coffee beans themselves, so if you like sour coffee, you can buy Front Street Yirgacheffe seasonal hanging coffee, which is medium-light roasted with a fresh floral aroma and bright fruity acid flavor; if you like coffee that is not sour and not too bitter, It is recommended to try the Front Street. The seasonal hanging ear from the Brazilian production area, medium roasted, with the flavor of mixed nuts and cream. If you are looking for a rich and mellow taste, we recommend the Front Street. The seasonal hanging ear from the Indonesian production area Mandheling, medium-dark roasted, with prominent flavors of spices, dark chocolate and caramel.
As the "instant noodles" in the coffee world, black coffee can be obtained by pre-grinding coffee beans into powder, putting them into a filter bag with "ears" according to a fixed weight, and then pouring hot water and separating the grounds. Whether you are in the office, in the park, on a train or on a plane, as long as you are equipped with a cup and hot water, you can enjoy coffee freedom anytime and anywhere. Without a doubt, this is the easiest type of drip coffee.
However, because of the prefabricated process, the aroma of the hanging ear will be compromised first of all. Secondly, its entire structure is a portable filter bag, which makes it difficult to control the extraction like hand brewing. If you pour water all at once, it is likely to overturn. Therefore, if you want the coffee to taste good, you still need certain skills. Here, Front Street summarizes 5 small details based on daily feedback from friends, hoping to help us find the key to making good-tasting earphones.
1. The water must be hot enough
Many office workers sitting in the office habitually use water heated by the water dispenser to drink water. However, in fact, the water dispenser on the market can only reach about 80 degrees at most after "boiling", and the brewed coffee is easy to be weak and sour.
In hand brewing, the water temperature directly affects the extraction efficiency of coffee. The higher the temperature, the faster the flavor substances are released and the richer the taste. Judging from Front Street’s brewing experience, light-medium roasted coffee with floral and fruity acidity is suitable for 90-93°C, while medium-dark roasted beans with flavors such as caramel, nuts, dark chocolate, cream, spices, etc. will be extracted with water at 86-89°C.
In the hanging ears, we don’t need to be too strict with the water temperature. Even if there is no special equipment such as a thermometer or temperature-controlled pot around us, we can achieve good coffee extraction results as long as it falls within a rough range through life experience. After testing, Front Street found that if you boil a large pot of water, turn off the heat and leave the lid open at room temperature of 25 to 30°C, the water temperature will drop to 92 to 95°C (suitable for brewing floral and fruity sour coffee) in 2 to 3 minutes. After leaving it for 5 to 6 minutes, the hot water temperature will drop to 87 to 90°C (suitable for nutty, bitter coffee).
2. Control the amount of water injection
Brewing ear-mounted coffee does not require an electronic scale like manual brewing. Instead, it focuses on convenience and convenience. Therefore, many people randomly find a cup that is pleasing to the eye, hang the ear-mounted bag, and directly fill the cup. The coffee is sometimes tasteless and sometimes miserable. This kind of situation is most likely caused by not finding the right powder-to-water ratio.
The content of coffee powder in a bag of ear-hanging bags is usually about 10g. After many measurements, if half of the hot water is filled into the ear-hanging bag, it will be about 30-40g, and if it is filled to nine points full at one time, it will be 60-80g. In this way, we can roughly estimate the total water volume based on the number of segments.
If you follow the powder to water ratio of 1:15 to 1:18 for hand brewing, then you need to inject 150-180ml of hot water. If you usually like rich coffee, you can inject it in three stages. First pour in half of the moist powder layer, pause for 20 seconds, and then inject it twice in a row until it is 9 minutes full. This time will take about 1 and a half minutes, and the total water volume will basically fall between 140 and 160g.
If you are pursuing a refreshing taste of coffee, you can add another section of hot water, that is, a total of 4 sections. Also wait for the water to dry up and directly fill it to 9 minutes full, so that the total water volume is basically around 200g.
3. The cup should be deep enough and the diameter should not be too wide.
When making coffee with ear cups, there are certain requirements for the cup. It is generally recommended to use a tall glass or a slightly deeper mug, so that the coffee liquid can directly penetrate the powder layer and fall to the bottom of the cup. If the cup is too shallow, the filtered coffee liquid may return to re-soak the powder layer, making the entire cup of coffee taste heavy, burnt and bitter, and the flavor will naturally not be very good.
Since the ears on both sides need to borrow force from the edge of the cup, if you use a cup with a too wide diameter, the filter bag will easily fall down due to gravity when filling water. Therefore, Front Street recommends that you give priority to a container with a cup mouth less than 9cm and a cup height greater than 12cm to brew ear-hanging bags.
4. Small water flow, injected in multiple stages
Because there is no need to go around in a circle to fill the water, there are basically no limitations on the equipment for flushing the ear plugs. As long as it is a clean container for pouring water, it can meet our needs, such as an ordinary kettle, a thermos cup from a dusty home, an ancestral hot water kettle, and even a water heater on a high-speed rail.
However, precisely because these types of appliances are not easy to control the size of the water flow, it is easy to gush out water when pouring, which greatly shortens the contact time between hot water and coffee powder. As a result, the entire cup of coffee is under-extracted, and the cup of coffee will naturally taste light and tasteless. In the absence of a fine-mouth hand-pour pot, if we want to improve the extraction efficiency of coffee, we can extend the extraction time by controlling the flow of hot water and increasing the number of segments. The purpose is to release more flavor substances into the coffee.
Combined with the water injection amount mentioned above, we can divide the injection into 5 times. Each time, only half of the hot water in the ear bag is poured. The water injection point can be slightly raised. In this way, the time for the coffee liquid to be dripped is about 1 minute 50 seconds to 2 minutes. The overall taste will be much richer than filling with a large flow rate.
5. Avoid shaking the ear-hanging bag frequently
When talking about the details of hand brewing, Front Street once analyzed that if the filter cup is tapped more widely or more times, the fine powder will more easily fall from the gaps to the bottom, causing the water to become clogged during brewing. In fact, the same is true for ear-hanging coffee. Some friends are used to shaking the filter bag vigorously before opening the package. The higher the frequency of shaking the filter bag, the greater the probability of fine powder settling to the bottom, and the easier it is to cause water accumulation in the tail section, which will make the coffee bitter and astringent.
After we open the outer package, we only need to flick the dotted line of the hanging ears, then tear off the seal, pull the two ears apart and hang them directly on the cup, and the coffee powder will fall flatly to the bottom.
You can now buy the above coffee beans online at the Taobao store “FrontStreet Coffee” (前街咖啡). FrontStreet Coffee is a long-established specialty coffee roaster in Guangzhou, China, and its Guangzhou retail shop sells coffee beans only. The shop carries dozens of coffee beans from different origins around the world, including carefully selected single-origin beans for V60 pour-over and espresso. Guangzhou’s FrontStreet Coffee shop is recommended by many coffee lovers.
The FrontStreet 2013 Yunnan coffee beans sold in the store come from the Typica variety grown at FrontStreet Coffee’s own plantation in Yunnan. The name comes from the year the brand and the plantation were founded. You can buy these beans from China’s Yunnan origin at the Guangzhou shop and at FrontStreet’s Taobao store.
FrontStreet coffee beans are freshly roasted within 5 days and deliver consistently excellent quality and great value. Orders placed before 17:00 are shipped the same day, and most areas within Guangdong Province receive them the next day.
FrontStreet Coffee Taobao store: https://qianjiecoffee.taobao.com
Or search for “前街咖啡” (FrontStreet Coffee) on Taobao
Important Notice: FrontStreet Coffee has moved to a new address: 315, Donghua East Road, Guangzhou (coffee beans only)
Tel: 020 38364473
