How about we take a break from serious (well… at least as serious as I tend to get) matters and talk about something near and dear to my heart?
Coffee.
Specifically cold brew ice coffee, which is one of my favorite parts of Summer. It’s a beauty to behold and refreshing on a warm day. It also happens to be pretty damn easy to make if you want to save some money. Or, if you’re stuck at home during a global pandemic.
So here’s my top secret recipe for… actually, this is pretty much what I’ve found on the interwebs with a couple tweaks. However, since I spend enough time drinking and talking about coffee, I figured sharing would be nice.
First, there’s the coffee. Whatever brand or roast of coffee you use, it needs to be a coarse grind. I tried using pre-ground coffee because it wasn’t the greatest quality and I thought cold brewing might help smooth it out. Don’t do it. I was filtering mud. I’ve been using the medium beans from the Vermont Coffee Company and been very happy, but go with whatever you enjoy.
You’ll want to take 1.5 cups of coarse ground coffee and put it in a 60-ounce pitcher. Fill ‘er up with cool water and then stir to get those lovely little grounds circulating through the whole pitcher. Cover and let it sit on the counter for 15-18 hours. This is actually a divergence from some of the recipes I’ve seen where they recommend 12-15.
When you’re done steeping, uncover and then you’ll want to skim the grounds off the top. I’ve found a good sized serving spoon with small enough holes that I get most of it in one shot. Skim as much as you can to help filtering.
What I use to filter is a very large sauce pan, a wire sieve, and regular coffee filters. Put the sieve on top of the sauce pan, the filter in the sieve, and… you guessed it, pour your coffee into the filter. You’ll have to do a couple pours and it’ll take a few minutes for everything to filter through. The coarser the grind on your beans, the less silt, and the easier to filter.
Rinse out your pitcher, transfer the filtered coffee from pan back to pitcher, rinse the pan and sieve, then repeat the filtering process with a new filter. The last couple times I’ve made cold brew, this step hasn’t been as important, but I still do it anyways because… filters are cheap and what else am I going to be doing? Going out somewhere?!
Once you’re done the second filtering, put back into the rinsed pitcher. From here, I pour into a couple mason jars I can seal so it takes up less space in the fridge. This is also why I make cold brew concentrated.
When you serve, drop some ice in your glass, fill halfway with your cold brew concentrate, and then fill the rest of the way with water. I’m a black coffee drinker for both hot and iced, so I won’t bother to get into the sacrilege that is cream and/or sugar.
Hope you enjoyed. Stay caffeinated my friends.