ricketyclick

I tried the cold brew procedure again, but this time with four ounces of coffee, and two cups of water.

Success!

It yielded one cup (8 oz) of concentrate. One ounce (3 tbsp) concentrate in 10 or 11 oz. of hot water makes very smooth and delicious coffee. What’s more, the concentrate has held up well for two days (stored in a glass jar with a screw-top lid). I only drink one or two cups a day, so I’ve got enough for a little less than a week.

Standard 12-cup basket filter papers are too small for the vegetable steamer. When I dumped the grounds into the steamer, the filter collapsed and the grounds slopped over the sides. I had to refilter the concentrate using a conical filter in my auto-dripper. Oddly, the filter clogged almost instantly, and it took much longer for that scant cup of concentrate to go through than the usual mug’s worth. I either need to find larger papers, or go to a permanent fine-mesh filter basket.

Awhile back, I reported on my experiment with cold brew coffee. I was not impressed.

I tried again last night.

I used the recipe reported here, about 1-1/2 cups water with 4 ounces by weight of coarse, freshly-ground Community Medium Roast. Ah, except, um, the water is added in three steps, 1/2 cup at a time. I only saw the first 1/2 cup, and thought that couldn’t be enough, so I used 1 full cup. Infusion was for 7 hours in a glass bowl with a sealable plastic lid (basically, glass Tupperware.)

Again, I used filter papers on the vegetable steamer as a strainer, although this time I just set it in a large glass bowl.

I only got about one fluid ounce of concentrate, which I diluted with 9 oz. hot water, and added half-and-half and sugar as I would for an ordinary cup of coffee (yielding a total of just shy of 11 oz.)

It was delicious, if not transcendent. Very smooth, and the essence of what I think coffee should taste like. In fact, it tasted exactly like what the coffee section in the grocery store smelled like.

But I have to try it yet again with a reasonable amount of water, maybe two cups. A third of a bag of coffee and eight hours is just too much for one cup of coffee, albeit a really good one.

As a control, I also ground a little bit of the Community for my automatic dripper. That was good coffee, different although not better than my usual Yuban, but nowhere near as good as the cold brew version.

Steven Den Beste over at Chizumatic tries cold brew coffee. [Further comments here.]

His experiments finally got me to try:

OK, I’ve been reading about cold-brew coffee for a couple of months now, but that 1/2 pound of coffee just to try was a bit daunting.

You’ve inspired me, though. I weighed 8 ounces of Yuban into a 3-qt sauce pan, and let it infuse overnight in the fridge. Filtering apparatus was one of those folding stainless steel steamers, lined with three torn-open conical filters, sitting atop a glass in a tall storage canister. The steamer has enough surface area that it took only a  minute or two to drain, and then I used it to squeeze the remaining water out of the grounds.

Results?

Meh.

For me, it didn’t taste like coffee, although I see why some would like it. With cream and sugar, it actually tasted a bit like black cherry soda, which I do like, but it’s not what my mouth is set for in the morning. And if I want black cherry soda, I prefer Dr. Brown’s.

If I had liked this, I’d have tried basket filters, which I think would be just about the right size to fit in the steamer. Or maybe even something like this fine-mesh permanent coffee filter.

Recommendation: This seems to be strongly a matter of taste. It produces a radically different flavor than hot-brew, and appears to be very sensitive to coffee type and grind. I recommend trying it once or twice.

Steven notes that a coarse grind is probably best, since it will tend to clog the filter less than a fine grind, and the fine grind is only necessary because in the normal drip process, the water is only in contact with the grounds for a few moments, so large surface area is crucial.

I did not pay any attention to how much water I used, either in brewing (enough to fill the pan) or in diluting (about 1:3). (Um, did I mention that this process results in a concentrate which must be diluted? No? Well, now I have.)

Every article I’ve ever read on this emphasizes the importance of fresh-ground coffee, so I may have to try this again, and find an actual recipe to get the proportions right.

vegetable steamer on an inverted drinking glass used to filter cold brew coffee