Cold Brew
Zachary has worked tirelessly to come up with the perfect formula for our cold brew. And by that, I mean not at all. Tehehehe…. Our cold brew recipe is as simple as it can be and yet the vibrancy of our coffee always shines through!
The term “Keep it simple” can not be over-stated when it comes to our Cold brew. To make, you will need coffee, water, a container large enough to hold however much coffee you want to make (preferably two containers), a mesh strainer or paper filters, a spoon or other stirring device, and a gram scale if you have one. We like to use 1 gallon jugs and a fine mesh strainer, but mason jars and pour-over filters work just as well!
Once you have gathered your supplies, its time to do a little math. No matter what container you’re planning on using, we can’t fill it entirely with water before we add our coffee. We like round numbers in our household for simplicity. A gallon jug will hold just under 3800 grams of water. We pull that down to 3500 grams which lets us use the handy markings on the liter side of our container (3.5L). Common 32oz mason jars will hold about 900g of water, so we can lower that to 700g to make use of those markings once again. Regardless of what you make your cold-brew in, just account for some headspace at the top for your coffee.
Math part 2: now that we have our vessel and some amount of water, we need to figure out how much coffee to add. We generally use a ratio of 1:14 or 1:15, or 1 part coffee to 14-15 parts water. Since we already know how much water we’re using from our first step, we can just take that number and divide. Lets use our example of a gallon jug of 3500g water. We’ll use the 1:14 ratio, and dividing 3500 by 14 nets us 250 grams of coffee. Don’t overthink this part too much, if you want a thicker, richer cold-brew opt for the 1:14. If you prefer a shade lighter and brighter, go with a 1:15 or even 1:16. And again, regardless of your preferred container, figure out how much water you’ll use and then divide that by 14-16 depending on your preference.
Now that we have our coffee and water sorted, we can put everything together and get on to the waiting game. For grind, we recommend a very medium, middle of the road grind. Not to coarse and not too fine. Fill your container with water, either by scale or marking, and add your coffee on top. Lets not complicate this part, grab something from the kitchen and stir your concoction. Spoon, fork, knife, ladle, it really doesn’t matter (we opt for a giant chop-stick). Make sure the coffee gets good and saturated, that is your only goal. Now that everything’s good and mixed take note of the time. We like to come back within the next 30 minutes and give it one more stir to break up the crust that forms. Depending on your schedule anywhere from 12-24 hours after getting everything together is fair game in terms of total time. Some coffee’s are a little more picky about how long they steep for (yes, steep, just like tea), but cold-brew is a fairly forgiving process and most coffee you’d want to make cold-brew from won’t mind a few hours either direction. Some folks chuck everything into the fridge, but we find it’s easier to leave out on a counter overnight. We’re not dealing with anything that should be making microbial rich environments overnight so you shouldn’t run into anything weird.
Now it should be the next day depending on how you timed everything out and it’s time to strain and enjoy the fruits of our labor. It really helps to have 2 of your container for this part but you can make it work with cups around the house if need be. If you have a pour-over setup at home, you can simply pour your cold-brew into a (prewetted) filter and glass and repeat until everything is strained. We use a fine mesh strainer we picked up for a dollar and make multiple passes. To do this, we simply pour from our gallon jug, through our strainer, into our second gallon jug. Once the initial jug is empty, we dump out our grounds into the trash (or compost for our fellow homesteaders), rinse any leftover grounds out, and repeat the process. We’re really just looking for there to be no silt at the bottom of the jug after we’ve passed the cold-brew over, about 5 passes in our experience. If you don’t mind or even enjoy the extra body from the silt you could be done after just one pass! We’ve heard of folks using a cheesecloth or “coffee sock” to strain, or even using a french press for a smaller batch. We’ve also experimented using an aeropress and many small passes to strain and create a rich, super smooth finish, but it does take a bit longer to finish this step. Just remember, the whole point is to remove the coffee grounds from the cold-brew, whatever way you make that happen is up to you.
Wrap up
Lets recap here: container, water, coffee, stir, time, strain. No fancy bags or self draining receptacles. No dilution/concentrates you have to fuss with after brewing. Just throw everything together, give it some time, and strain it however works best for you. Then you can enjoy your cold-brew how you prefer. Straight black? Go for it. Cream and sugar? Whatever floats your boat!