Food: Cold Brew Coffee (Making my first)

Summary:

3/4C to 1C coarsely ground coffee
4C room temp water

Pour water over coarsely ground coffee in a wide-mouth jar
Stick the liquid in the fridge between 12-24 hours, whatever works for you.

(Until you find out what you like, do a taste test at 12hr, then 14 hr, then 16 hr, and so on until you find a good stopping place. If it’s bitter, you waited too long.)

Filter through coffee filters or cheese cloth (paper towels will do in a pinch)
Filter again until no coffee grounds remain

Result is cold brew coffee concentrate. Add 1 part concentrate to 1 or 2 part water/ice, milk/cream or liquer. Example, if you’re adding one cup concentrate to ice and milk, your milk and ice should together equal one to two cups.

The amounts and times depend on your own tastes, your beans, and your grind. If you grind too fine, it will extract faster making the coffee bitter. That’s why everybody says “roughly” and recommends testing as you make batches until you know what works for you and your favorite coffee beans.

Cold brew coffee concentrate stores longer — up to two weeks or even one month although the taste is best in the first week. On Sundays, make a big batch and you’ve got grab-and-go coffee in the mornings for the week. Just add water.  Way better than freeze-dried.

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Making my first cold brew:

Okay, I have Carol’s grinder. She did say she last used it to grind jalapenos for salsa.  However a quick sniff test and I don’t smell anything.  hmmm.  Hope I’m not making hot coffee!  laughing.

So first thing is to grind the coffee beans coarsely so it looks like gravel. Remember I am using the Lynx Ethiopian Sidamo light roast. The grinding is not as easy as I expected. With a small grinder, it grinds unevenly. When I’m grinding coffee for a coffeemaker, it’s no problem. You just keep grinding until everything is finely ground.

But here after a few taps, 3/4 is coarsely ground and 1/4 is not. If I kept going, some would be finely ground which I’m trying to avoid. Thinks about it. I flip the grinder so all the grounds are in the cap. Then I pick out the whole beans and put them back in the grinder. The rest I put in the bottle.

Oh yeah, the bottle. Ok, I had gone through my empty Classico jars and every one had a residue scent. Throw them back into the sink to be washed again.  I don’t know if that will make the scents dwindle as they’ve been washed a couple times already. Next I checked my empty glass salsa jars and same problem. Salsa coffee? Yuk! So these jars are useless for making coffee.

Since I have an empty lemonade bottle, I smell that. It was plastic and not glass which I would have preferred but had no scent. So that’s a plus, right? And it will fit 4 cups of water. So good to go. Mouth is narrow though.

(Ok, another quick aside. My camera can do short videos which I’ve made looking through the viewfinder. So I meant to film this, feeding it through my computer so I can see the filming while I made coffee. I have the wrong the cord and might need an app. Not sure. Anyways did not work. So I took pictures. I may also need a lateral tripod arm since obviously you can see the tripod feet. Those are expensive so I need to find a DIY solution. So until I learn how to do perfect food shots or video, these will have to do.)

Instead of using the funnel, I poured the coffee grounds through my curled hand. I was worried that the funnel was too narrow and would jam up. This was a tad messy, littering the counter with escaping coffee grounds. Canning and mason jars have big mouths so they wouldn’t need a funnel.

Alright all the coffee grounds are in. I pour four cups of water into the bottle using my funnel. No mess! Since Tucson tap water tastes awful, I buy drinking water regularly.

I give the bottle a couple swishes because the Lynx coffee guy said to make sure all the grounds are wet. Some coffee grounds float on top but most sink to the bottom. I stick my soon-to-be cold brew coffee into the fridge.

Now we wait. It’s 2:30 am. 16 hours from now will be 6:30 pm.

Cleo Coyle said in Dead Cold Brew, a coffeehouse mystery, to test your brew at 12 hours, then 14 hours, then 16 hours and so forth until 24 hours to find what you like. But you have to filter the results twice before you can taste it and add water since you’re making a concentrate. Let you know the results tomorrow.

Add-on. Wednesday 2:30am 7/26/17 

I take a quick taste at 4:15pm so almost 14 hours.  The coffee is already darn strong and I’m worried that if I leave it there until after the movie, it’ll be bitter. So I do the first filtering through two paper towels over a bowl to get out most of the grounds. Pour it into a clean bottle and back in the refrigerator. I’m late to the movie (missed all the commercials, yay!)

A couple hours later, I do a second filtering using a paper towel with a coffee filter over a bowl again.  It worked pretty well.  I don’t see any grounds left in the cold brew.  I feed the coffee grounds to my grape vines (a year old but no grapes yet).

I think my faster time is due to the grind being uneven.  Most of the grind was coarse like gravel but a bit was finer.

Now I have coffee concentrate.  So the different recipes say 1 part concentrate to 1 to 2 parts water/ice/milk.  I add 3 cups of water to the bottle (that way I don’t have to think about it) to the 4 cups of concentrate.   I like to drink dark roast so this looks thinner than I like.  I sip it.  It’s strong! This should last two weeks in the fridge. Oops, since I added water already, it drops it to 2-3 days according to Bon Apetit.

Pouring myself a cup, being a latte girl, I add fat-free half-and-half.  Crossing my fingers, I drink.  Yum!  The Lynx Ethopian Sidamo cold brew smells and tastes strongly of a rich dark chocolate with a surprisingly strong caffeine kick. Definitely drinking it black in the morning to jazz up my energy levels (and taste buds!)

Farmer's market Fridays 8am-noon 
Trail Dust Town 
6541 E. Tanque Verde 
Tucson, AZ 85715 

Lynx Coffee Roasters

The above Amazon links are Cleo Coyle’s mystery novel Dead Cold Brew, a reference coffee book by Merlin Jobst (64 pgs infographic explaining 25 coffee drinks), and a Bon Appetit magazine subscription.

disclaimer: I signed up as an Amazon associate. I should get a percentage back if anybody buys anything at Amazon through my links. (They don’t decide if they accept you until they look at your site after a first purchase. I haven’t been accepted yet but I hope to be.) Books are 4.5% but other things vary from 0-10%. I am thinking of doing a monthly income report like I saw at a couple of budget blogs but haven’t decided yet. I think Amazon requires the following text but I’m not sure as I’ve looked at different sites and some sites have their disclaimer in their own words. “We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.”