What is the water temperature used to make ear coffee? Why can't I soak ear bags?

Although hanging ears cannot replace freshly ground hand-brewed coffee, many people still cannot do without it, because coffee is very valuable and needs to be refreshed early.

As the "instant noodles" in the coffee industry, hanging ears are black coffee obtained by grinding coffee beans into powder in advance, loading them into a filter bag with "ears" at a fixed weight, and then injecting hot water and separating the dregs. Whether you are in the office, in a park, on a train or on a plane, as long as you have a cup and hot water, you can have coffee freedom anytime, anywhere. There is no doubt that this is the easiest drip coffee.

However, precisely because of the prefabrication process, the hanging ear will first have a discount in its fragrance. Secondly, its entire structure is a portable filter bag, which makes it difficult to control the extraction like a hand-flushing. If you inject water in one go, it will likely overturn, so if you want to make coffee good, you still need certain skills. Here, Qianjie summarized 5 small details based on daily feedback from our friends, hoping to help us find the key to getting out of the good drink.

1. The water must be hot enough

Many office workers sitting in the office habitually use heated water from water dispensers to flush their ears. However, in fact, water dispensers on the market can only reach 80 degrees at most after being "boiled", and the coffee that comes out is easy to be slightly light and sour.

In the hand rinse, the water temperature directly affects the extraction efficiency of coffee. The higher the temperature, the faster the flavor substances are released and the stronger the taste. Combined with Qianjie's brewing experience, light-to-medium roasted coffee that expresses floral acidity is suitable for 90 - 93 ° C, while medium-to-deep roasted beans with caramel, nut, black chocolate, cream, spices and other flavors will be extracted with water at 86 - 89 ° C.

In the hanging ear, we don't need to be too harsh on the water temperature. Even if we don't have special equipment such as a thermometer or a temperature-controlled pot around us, we can make coffee reach a general range through life experience. Good extraction effect. After testing on Qianjie, it was found that if you bring a large pot of water to a boil, turn off the heat and open the lid at room temperature of 25 - 30 ℃. In 2 - 3 minutes, the water temperature will drop to 92 - 95 ℃ (suitable for making fruits and fruits). Sour coffee), leave it for 5 - 6 minutes, and the hot water temperature will fall to 87 - 90 ℃ (bitter coffee suitable for nut blending).

2. Control the water injection volume

Brewing ear coffee does not have to be equipped with an electronic scale like hand-brewed coffee, but focuses on convenience and how convenient it is. Therefore, many people randomly find a cup that is pleasing to the eye, hang the ear bag, and directly fill the cup. Coffee is sometimes tasteless, sometimes miserable. In this kind of situation, there is a high probability that it is caused by not finding the right powder to water ratio.

The content of coffee powder in a pack of ear hanging is usually about 10 g. After multiple measurements, if half of the hot water is filled into the ear hanging bag, it will be about 30 - 40 g, and if it is poured into the full place once, it will be 60 - 80 g., so that we can roughly estimate the total water volume based on the number of segments.

If you follow the hand-washed powder to water ratio of 1:15 to 1:18, then 150 - 180 ml of hot water needs to be injected. If you like coffee with a strong taste, you can inject it in three stages. First, pour in half the moist powder layer, pause for 20 seconds, and then inject it twice in a row until 9 minutes full. This time will take about 1 and a half minutes, and the total water volume will basically fall at 140~160 g.

If you want a refreshing taste of coffee, you can add another section of hot water, that is, a total of 4 sections. You can also wait for the water to dry up and inject it directly until 9 minutes full, so that the total water volume is basically about 200 g.

3. The cup should be deep enough and the diameter should not be too wide

When making ear coffee, the cup is very particular. It is generally recommended to use a tall glass or a slightly deeper mug, so that the coffee liquid can directly penetrate through the powder layer and land at the bottom of the cup. If the cup is too shallow, the filtered coffee liquor may be returned to soak the powder layer again, making the taste of the whole cup of coffee heavy and bitter, and the flavor naturally not very good.

Since the ears on both sides need to borrow force from the edge of the cup, if a cup with a diameter that is too wide is used, the filter bag will easily fall down due to gravity when injecting water. Therefore, Qianjie recommends that the cup mouth is less than 9 cm and the cup body is higher than 12 cm. container to brew the ear bag.

4. Small water flow, injected in multiple stages

Because there is no need to fill water in circles, there are basically no limitations on the equipment for flushing and hanging ears. As long as it is a clean container for pouring water, it can meet our needs, such as ordinary water kettles, dusty thermos cups at home, ancestral hot water kettles, and even high-speed rail water heaters can also come in handy.

But precisely because these appliances do not control the size of the water flow well, it is easy to spout out when pouring water, which greatly shortens the contact time between the hot water and the coffee powder, resulting in insufficient extraction of the entire cup of coffee, so it will naturally taste light and tasteless. In the absence of a fine-mouthed hand-brewed pot, if we want to improve the extraction efficiency of coffee, we can control the flow of hot water and increase the segmented method to extend the extraction time. The purpose is to release more flavor substances into the coffee.

Combined with the water injection volume mentioned above on Qianjie, we can divide it into 5 injections, each time only pouring in half of the hot water in the ear bag, and we can slightly raise the water injection point, so that the time for all the coffee liquid to be filtered is about 1 minute, 50 seconds to 2 minutes, the overall taste will be much richer than when filled with a large flow rate.

5. Avoid frequently swinging the ear bag

When describing the details of manual flushing, Qian Jie once analyzed that if the larger or more times the filter cup is tapped, the easier the fine powder will fall from the gap to the bottom, causing clogging of the water during brewing. In fact, the same is true for hanging ear coffee. Some friends are used to swinging it hard before opening the packaging. The higher the frequency the filter bag is swung, the greater the probability that the fine powder will sink to the bottom, and the easier it will cause water in the tail section, and then let the coffee become bitter and astringent.

After we open the outer packaging, we just need to gently tap the dotted line of the hanging ears, then tear the seal, pull the two ears apart and hang them directly on the cup, and the coffee powder will fall smoothly into the bottom.

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