How to Make Cold Brew Coffee

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I am reeeally behind on this, as my acutely scientific research has Cold Brew Coffee hitting major media more than fifteen years ago. However, I never said I was a bleeding edge food trendsetter. Oh, sure, I hear about food fads and trends all the time. I just don't really listen.

My personal introduction to cold brew was in the form of a dark, "stubby" bottle of Stumptown Coffee's Cold Brew only to be found in specialty shops and cafes at the time. Deep, slightly more intense than my usual morning cup of coffee. It was refreshing of course, it was, you know, good, but I didn't find cold brew all that much more extraordinary than just regular old iced coffee. That, of course, says nothing, because I'm a filthy whore for anything brown, bitter, and caffeinated.

So, What Exactly is Cold Brew?

Cold brewing coffee doesn't require any special skills, ingredients or equipment, not even a coffee maker, though there are products on the market specifically designed for making cold brew at home. About the only thing you need that might be hard to find is — pardon me for a moment while I conjure my inner Axl — patience.

Cold brewing is a process that takes time. I let my cold brew mixture of coffee grounds and room temperature water sit for almost 15 hours before having to pour it first, slowly over a few layers of cheesecloth, then second, even more slowly through a paper coffee filter.

For someone who can barely wait three minutes for the dregs of a paper shredder to "instantly" reconstitute into ramen, the process is excruciating (but obvs, worth it).

Is Cold Brew Better in Some Way?

So yes, you're probably wondering why someone would choose cold brew coffee over regular iced coffee or vice versa. It comes down to a couple of things: taste and health.

Cold Brew Tastes Better

Taste-wise, cold brew coffee has a smoother, rounder taste than regular hot-brewed coffee. The slow steeping process pulls out less of the compounds in the coffee grounds that can make coffee taste acidic or bitter. It's also easier to control the flavor and strength of cold brew by diluting a concentrate with water, than trying to backwards calculate how strong to brew hot coffee so it dilutes to the right strength with ice cubes.

Health Considerations of Cold Brew vs. Iced Coffee

More importantly for some of us though, cold brew is easier on our digestive systems than regular hot brewed coffee. For the same reason the coffees taste different — cold brewing process pulls out fewer of the acidic compounds in coffee grounds — cold brew is less acidic and therefore less irritating to the stomach.

There's a trade-off though. Cold brew extracts less "stuff" from the coffee, which means less acid, but also less of the antioxidant compounds that can make coffee beneficial to our health.

Ingredients You Need

As far as actual ingredients and equipment for cold brew, you do need:

• ground coffee
• filtered water
• large glass containers
• sieve
• cheesecloth, paper coffee filters, or if you really want to MacGyver it, paper towels

How to Make Cold Brew Coffee

Cold brewing boils down to — not literally obviously — only two steps:

• steep coffee grounds with water
• filter cold brew

I had a large enough glass pitcher to hold the coffee grounds and water whilst it cold-brewed, but that was it. To filter, I had to pour the cold brew from that big glass pitcher into several smaller glass containers and then wash the glass pitcher and then pour the filtrate — omg, that dirty word just took me back to AP Chemistry— through a paper filter back into the glass pitcher. I could have used plastic containers I suppose, but I am freaked out by freaky shit in plastics and other weird chemicals.

(Oh, right, not that I didn't sweeten my life with the white powder of hate and drink a 6-pack of Diet Cyanide every day for years).

What I did find extraordinary about cold brew was the slightly obscene-at-the-time $4.50 price tag for a 10-ounce bottle. Shocked as consumer, awed as businessperson.

The true revelation came when I got home and looked up "cold brew" online. Wow. There was so much information out there.

How had I missed it all? Of course, you could look up just about anything and marvel at how quickly google can return millions of result. Non-acetone nail polish remover for chihuahuas? 1.39 million sites in three-tenths of a second! You know, um, as an example.

It was finding out that cold brew is first and more often, something you make at home, and only very recently a store-bought product, that put the obsession in my head to make it myself.

(Wait. What? Packaged product that actually started at home? Isn't that, like, everything? Even pop tarts?! Yes, you sarcastic little parenthetical.)

So I'm a little behind in discovering this. And so I'm so slow to follow the fad that it isn't one anymore. So I'm a little late in the season to bring up something that is usually enjoyed on a patio in the full summer sunshine, but summer in LA lasts until October and sunshine lasts...? Forever.

Now, have you heard about these tiny versions of cakes called "cupcakes?"

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4.91 from 22 votes

Cold Brew Coffee Recipe

A note from moi: Most "recipes" out there seem to think that whatever dark and stormy liquid that is rendered after 12-15 hours of cold-brewing is a "concentrate" that you dilute to your desired strength each time you serve and drink. I diluted mine to a strength of I-didn't-dilute. Maybe I'm nuts. Maybe I'm hyper-caffeinated. makes about 1 quart of cold brew, which, if you treat it as a concentrate, can be mixed with 1 quart of water to make (math time) ½-gallon

Course: Drinks

Cuisine: American

Keyword: coffee, cold brew, iced coffee

Ingredients

• 1 12-ounce bag medium-ground coffee a 12-ounce bag of grounds was roughly 2½ dry cups
• 7 cups filtered water room temperature or cold

To Serve Cold Brew

• ice cubes though I don't seem so behind on the giant ice cube fad, now do I, hmm?!
• simple syrup
• milk or cream

Instructions

• In a large glass container, combine coffee grounds with 7 cups of water. Stir gently for a few seconds just to combine the coffee grounds with water (sometimes the grounds float, etc).
• Cover the container with cheesecloth and leave it at room temperature for 12-24 hours. The longer the coffee steeps, the stronger the cold brew will be. It goes without saying, I maximize the stteep-time.
• Line a large fine-mesh sieve with a few layers of cheesecloth, then place over another glass container. Slowly pour the cold brew over the cheesecloth to strain out the grounds. You can probably stop here, or you can punish yourself and filter the coffee again through something even "finer" like a sieve lined with a paper coffee filter.
• (The punishment isn't that you're filtering it a second time; it's that the paper filter takes forever. But hey, you waited this long to make cold brew so what's the rush anyway?)
• Discard the cheesecloth, any filters, and grounds (though I am now going to be exfoliating my face with used coffee grounds).
• To serve cold brew, dilute it with additional cold filtered water to desired strength. Serve over ice with simple syrup, milk or cream. I used none of the above because I'm a fucking full-strength boss.
• Cold brew will keep in your fridge, covered, for up to a week.

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