Are any of you fine folks brewing your own cold brew? Post pics, recipes and gear if so as it’s that time of year and I just received a request from Mrs. RW.
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Are any of you fine folks brewing your own cold brew? Post pics, recipes and gear if so as it’s that time of year and I just received a request from Mrs. RW.
Timely post as I have just started working from home and now have access to my coffee setup all day.
We have a few sizes of French press and a ceramic pour over cone. I prefer the latter, so when making my 2nd cup of coffee to bring up to my desk with that, I've been doing an extra-strong 12oz of french press at the same time, then pouring it with milk into a large glass mug and sticking it in the fridge. Add a few ice cubes after lunch and it's been a good way to get my last caffeine jolt of the day.
This works great for me, but cold brewing may be in my future given my newfound flexibility.
The best cold brews I've had have been from an industrial sized Toddy. Looks like they have a home setup now - http://a.co/1TZIvdc I haven't tried the little home one, but this is the brand I'd go with if I were going to. All the baristas I know start with 1lb of coffee for every gallon of water, let it sit for 24 hours, and adjust if needed. Cold brew will keep for a week or so in the fridge so it's easier to do a bigger batch.
If you're feeling a little less ambitious, Grady's sells pre-ground and bagged coffee specifically for cold brew. You just put the bags in a pitcher and steep them like tea. It's got a strong flavor, but it's not bad. https://www.gradyscoldbrew.com/colle...w-bean-bag-can
I'm super cheap so I just use any old 64 oz juice bottle. I pour one cup coarse ground coffee in along with 4 cups water and agitate to make sure all grounds are wet. I then put it in fridge for 18 to 24 houra. I pour it all through a standard coffee filter that ia lining a pour over into another container. I then cut the concentrate to taste with water for my wife or juat pour over a little ice for me.
I have been craving some cold brew lately but will wait till we finish our bottle of juice.
I drink a ton of iced coffee this time of year but coldbrew just doesn't do it for me. Doesn't seem to have the oomph...
The Japanese do iced the best way, creating a hot brew that siphons directly through a chilling coil so the time it spends hot is limited to the time it's actually brewing. After brewing and chilling, they make coffee ice cubes so that the brew maintains its strength. Consult your local Heisenberg for the supplies. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by guido
My usual setup is to drop 100g of coffee (coarsest my grinder can grind) and 700g water into a mason jar. Shake, refrigerate. I'll shake it up whenever I get anything out of the fridge. In 24-48hr, I'll run it through a pour over filter into another container.
Huh - sounds like I'm brewing for waaay too long: Cold Brewing FAQs | Stumptown Coffee Roasters Blog
https://www.wholelattelove.com/blog/...ama-drip-maker
Best cold brew I've ever had was an medium roast African out of one of these.
For bonus points, freeze coffee in a tray and use instead of regular ice cubes... no dilution.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shoogs
I have several ways of making coffee and I use whatever way I want on any particular morning. Anyway for my cold brew moods I use the Takeya Cold Brew maker, it got high reviews on Amazon and other sites and it's very durable and very easy to use and make coffee.
I change my coffee brands and roast all the time so to say one is better than the other for cold brew just isn't true...at least to me. I do lean toward darker end of the brew spectrum, but I use the darker blends no matter which brew system I'm going to use. I am overall happy with Peets Major Dickason's Dark, their French roast deep roast, and their Deep Roast, and LavAzza Gran Selezione dark roast, LavAzza Perfetto Expresso, and Lavazza Caffe Espresso, Westrock Rwanda Select Reserve Dark, and Hawaiian Gold 100% Kona. I do goof around with a few medium roasts but I mostly do the dark stuff. I simply just look at whichever of those have a sale price going on a Kroger. Yeah I know, I can hear some of you saying, gee real gourmet coffee...LOL! but that's fine, I don't want to order coffee over the internet, and the local roaster I think charges way too much for their coffee beans. I do know when I make my coffee for others with either the AeroPress (I figured out how to make the Aeropress work as a pour over), Moka pot, cold brew, or the Flair Espresso maker they all seem to enjoy the stuff I get from Kroger and they've said it tasted like stuff they get a Starbucks, so it can't be all bad.
I just need to look into the possibility of getting a better grinder, not sure if it will make an appreciable difference or not.
Quoting myself here because what the heck.Quote:
Originally Posted by robin3mj
I’ve been drinking iced coffee since college, when I worked for the public works Dept and later on as a maintenance guy at a retirement village. Make a strong pot the night before, ample ice, milk, (and sometimes sugar) in a thermos the next morning. This is how I learned it from my Pop Pop who did the same with a battered green Stanley thermos when he climbed telephone poles for a living.
Been doing the same off and on for a couple decades now.
But recently, having started working from home, I’ve been buying quart jars of Chameleon concentrated cold brew and man is it good. I use a giant cocktail ice cube and two parts coffee to one part 2% milk. And the taste is so rich it’s not even funny. I can go back to my French press stuff cooled off and iced, but I don’t really wanna.
If anyone out there has suggestions as to how to replicate that- brewing eqpt and beans, I’d be all over it. The bottled stuff at $10/jar/week isn’t bad price wise, but if I could cut that down a bit, I’d have more money to save for my backup pit, left handed backup pit bike.
Our oldest kid asked if I could make her a cold brew stand since I made one of her brothers a pour over stand. I’m a bit stumped as to what I would make to contain this beast...the Filtron Cold Brew Coffee Brewer. Any experience with this piece of equipment?
Filtron Cold Brew Coffee Concentrate Brewer
Not sure what you’d make a stand for with the Filtron system. That’s what I use and the only time I wish I had something is during steeping process. Or brewing. Whatever you want to call it. And that’s only because I’m afraid one day I’ll come home and the cork will have leaked. Other than that, I don’t really see a need/ use for a stand.
plus one for filtron. a good home set up option.
I tend to make iced chemex's myself if I am in the mood for cold coffee.
Realize this is my third post in this topic but I’ve been working from home for a couple years now (pre COVID) and the Hario cold brewer (700ml) has been doing the trick for the last couple years. I go thru about two pitchers a week in the warmer months.
Once you get the hang of it, it makes cold brew as good or better than the concentrated bottled stuff you can buy at the grocery store, at a fraction of the price. Highly recommended recommend it.
I'm confused about this thread revival and how I missed it previously. I'm sure I posted somewhere in a cold brew thread. Anyway, Filtron is not the original--unless it is, I didn't do my research--but the original upon which filtron would seem to be based is Toddy. We were hooked on it in the 80s in New Orleans when PJ's coffee started doing these amazing ice coffees using Toddy and their own freshly roasted beans ("Viennese" darkness)--they added a splash of mexican vanilla to a gallon for their secret recipe. Anyway, on paper you can do it in any container (Chemex, a big bucket, etc.) but the felt filters in Toddy (or the bags they introduced later) don't clog as quickly as paper and are reusable. looks like filtron is similar system. But Toddy is the original, basically the same price, and a good company. Mine is several decades old.
https://toddycafe.com/the-toddy-story
^ I made my first batch with a Toddy this past week and I was in orbit after every drink...definitely works, as I need to adjust my concentrate to water ratio.
I seem to recall that PJ's cut it in half with water. It also depends on how much ice you use. I have a couple of the store bought concentrate bottles that I fill at full strength to save room in fridge and get accurate dispensing. I noted yesterday on their site that Toddy says 10 uses out of the filter which is ridiculously short unless you never give them a proper rinsing. Mine last several years.
Bottle I'm talking about:
Attachment 118197
I do this now : https://perfectdailygrind.com/2019/0...ust-2-minutes/
Delicious cold brew made in 2 minutes with minimal equipement.
enjoy!
The author of that article doesn't know what he's talking about. The reality is that isn't cold brew, it takes at least 12 hours for the coffee to seep, just like cold brewed tea, while that method you showed is fast it's not having a long enough extraction time to be as good as traditional long brew times. The other thing he said which if completely incorrect too is that cold brew does not use any heat whatsoever, what he's mixing up in his terminology is iced coffee, where you brew a hot cup of coffee then pour over ice, that isn't cold brewed. I understand too that they were stirring it rather briskly, but again it's the soaking of the coffee for a long time that makes the cold brew process work. Look, if there was a fast way of making cold brew coffee, coffee places would have discovered that a long time ago. If you look at the picture of the coffee coming out of the pitcher you can see that the coffee is very light in the glass container as well as that which is being poured out, cold brewed for 12 hours or more would be black with hardly any light going through it and the pour would also be black. I suppose if you like your coffee weak well then that would work just fine!Quote:
Originally Posted by Guillaume
According to this paper (in Nature of all places) the expected extract yield for optimised cold brew is 15 to 20 %.
Strikes me that it would be very easy to test the yield of the Aeropress method. I'll do so tomorrow if I get time.
This has been my technique for the past month or so, and I'm no tasting expert, but I find the results very satisfying. I am using canning jars for mine - both to brew and store it.Quote:
Originally Posted by rainy rider
Ryan
Well, I'm doing this method a few times a week during summer and the results are quite good to me. I guess that scientificaly speaking it does not qualify as a real cold brew, but the taste is definitely there. I also tried leaving my grounds soaking 24 hours in my aeropress in the refregirator, quite similar.Quote:
Originally Posted by froze
Maybe the commercial places where I bought cold brew were not very good or maybe I have low expectations.
So I had a crack at measuring this and the results were....inconclusive.
20.0 g of ground coffee into 100 ml of distilled water at 20.0 oC, stirred for one minute, pressed through the aeropress then diluted back to 100 g with distilled water. TDS measured at 2.42% so an extract yield of 12.1%, short of the 15-20 % optimal range.
On the other hand the grind I used was probably a bit coarse so it might be possible to get closer with a bit of faffing around. Not sure I have time for that right now.
Flavour wise the result was underwhelming but I've thought that about every cold brew I've tried so that's not conclusive either.
Since I was playing with coffeee in the lab I decided to try and see if further agitation made much of a difference. I repeated the procedure but substituted one minute in an ultrasonic bath at 20 oC for the one minute stir. Extract yield was about the same but the taste was very different: still thin and pissy but with an extra layer of harshness, very unpleasant.
I have an Aeropress, so I tried the fast brew stunt and the coffee taste to me was dismal compared to my cold brewer, it was weak and thin, but I'm use to strong flavored coffee so someone who is not may find it perfectly satisfying. The typical hot brew through the Aeropress makes the coffee a lot better then the cold fast method.Quote:
Originally Posted by Guillaume
Of course if you leave the coffee in the Aeropress for 24 hours well then it's simply a cold brewed coffee like I get using my cold brewer, but not after 2 or 3 minutes of stirring.
https://i.imgur.com/v7dFWYD.jpg
The Toddy has seen lots of use since we bought it.
my Toddy is from the last century. pretty good return on investment. If folks haven't tried it yet, the Louisiana style coffee and chicory makes a dark strong brew. Not a gourmet blend by any means but decent for pre-ground
https://i.imgur.com/EzOfPsn.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/jxJpq1i.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/DcNTlHv.jpg
Drip, drip, drip....reminded me of titration in the high school chemistry lab.