Can Lily drip really make hand-brewed coffee better? How to use Lilizhu, an auxiliary tool for making coffee by hand? Can you also use cake filter paper for V60 filter cups?

Because the brewing process of hand-brewed coffee has a certain degree of appreciation, it can often attract many friends to stop and watch. Among them is Lilly, a young girl who likes to watch her father make coffee. Until one day, she had a whim and put a glass marble into a conical filter cup. It was this unintentional move that led her father to invent a small toy that could change the tapered filter cup-Lily drip (Lili beads).

If you are an old fan of Qianjie, you should often be able to see Qianjie's sharing of it. Because it is the same as the resin version of V60, not only the price is close to the people, but also the function is very comprehensive. In the coffee circle, we can often see people say this about it-- "cheating artifact." How do you cheat? After frantically posting on the front street, we summed up the reason for giving it the definition of "cheating": as long as we add it before using a tapered filter cup to make coffee, we can make better coffee.

But in fact, it is not to make the coffee taste better, but to help us make it easier to make good coffee. Because the main function of Lili beads is to change the structure of the powder bed in the conical filter cup, which reduces the occurrence of improper extraction. We can look at the structure of the tapered filter cup: the top is wide and the bottom is narrow, and the coffee powder poured in will be in an inverted cone state. Compared with the flat-bottomed filter cup, the same amount of coffee powder poured into the tapered filter cup will have a thicker powder bed. Although this distribution of coffee powder will make the extracted coffee more layered, a thicker powder bed means higher resistance and a decrease in the penetration rate of hot water. When the coffee powder is too fine or too much fine powder, it is easy to cause blockage, which greatly increases the risk of over-extraction.

The intervention of Lili Zhu can reduce the trigger of blockage, as long as it is placed in the middle of the filter cup, the bottom structure of the filter cup will be changed, which will affect the distribution of coffee powder, and the thickness of the powder bed can be reduced. The reduction of the thickness of the powder bed will increase the speed of hot water infiltration, which will naturally avoid the risk of extraction.

But it is not too much to say that it is a "cheating artifact", because its intervention does make it easier for many novice friends to make good coffee when the extraction theory is not solid enough. especially when brewing shallow baked beans is not so easy to turn over. What the above Qianjie is talking about is only the classic style with faster launching speed. In addition to the classic Lili beads, there are six other different versions of Lili beads, that is to say, there are altogether seven kinds of Lili beads. Of these seven kinds of Lili beads, six designs have a raised small sharp corner (including classics). When using them, we need to use the complimentary paper table to change the shape of the filter paper.

They have the same function and are suitable for all tapered filter cups, with the difference between fast and slow flow rates. We can choose different Lili beads according to our different needs, not just to avoid over-extraction. For example, when your grinding is rough, too fast launching speed will easily lead to insufficient extraction, then you can choose a style with a slow flow rate, or you want to grind it more finely to make the extraction more efficient while avoiding blockage. Then you can choose a style with a fast flow rate. The remaining one is a little special, because it does not have small sharp corners, but uses a flat design, which is the Lili bead on the left side of the picture below!

After putting it into the tapered filter cup, we do not need to fold / change the filter paper, because it changes the filter cup itself! After putting it into a tapered filter cup, it directly becomes a flat-bottomed filter cup! Therefore, what we need is not tapered filter paper, but cake filter paper.

In addition to the thickness of the powder bed, it also increases the surface area of the powder bed, but because there is no diversion assistance, the launching will be relatively slow. Because it is really interesting, so then Qianjie will try it shallowly to see what effect it will have if you add it to the tapered filter cup.

In the cooking experiment, the front street selected a high-density shallow baked bean that takes a long time to extract to bring out the delicacy, so that there is no need to deliberately adjust the parameters. The parameters are as follows:

Poached beans: Yega Xuefei Guoding Ding

Amount of powder used: 15g

Ratio of powder to water: 1:15

Degree of grinding: 10 scale of ek43, 80% overscreening rate of No. 20 screen, fine sugar grinding

Boiling water temperature: 92 °C

Cooking method: three-stage style

Use filter cup: V60

Use props: Lily drip (forget worry grass)

So first of all, we still use twice as much water as flour for steaming for 30 seconds.

After the steaming is over, because the coffee powder is evenly distributed and all parts of the powder bed are of equal thickness, we do not need to deliberately plan the circle. Circle outward from the center, then circle inward from the outer ring, repeating until the second section of hot water 120ml is filled.

When the hot water is almost permeated, we inject the last section of hot water 75ml in the same way, and then wait for the coffee liquid to finish the drip filtration, then remove the filter cup and end the extraction. The brewing time is 2 minutes and 31 seconds, which is much longer than the average time of brewing coffee in front of the street, but because the bean is very extractable and the coffee powder has been soaked for a long time in the process, so it doesn't have any negative taste. The fresh aroma of lemon, the sweet and sour of berries, the elegant aroma of white flowers, and the clean green tea of Wei Yun are very classic Yega Chevrolet.

It can be seen that after adding this Lili bead, the tapered V60 filter cup can indeed be used as a flat-bottomed filter cup with cake filter paper. But it is not very friendly to people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, that is, when we use a tapered filter cup for a single person, if we add this Lili bead and put it into the cake filter paper, the cake filter paper will be much higher than the filter cup. Although this does not affect cooking, it always makes people want to cut off the extra filter paper from the upper layer.

Finally, Qianjie has to repeat that the role of Lili Zhu is not to make coffee tastier, it is just an auxiliary prop to help us make a cup of coffee. But there is also a certain premise, that is, people themselves still need to understand a certain principle of extraction. In addition to the successful cases of Lili Zhu's use on the Internet, there are no longer a few cases of rollover. The most common is the coarse ground coffee powder with fast-flowing Lili beads, resulting in further lack of extraction, making the coffee more difficult to swallow. Therefore, only when we have a certain principle of extraction can we know how a good cup of coffee is made and how to make good use of auxiliary props.

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