"cold brew coffee" news and stories

So I've done two days of cold brew coffee now, and I am here to say that I love the coffee it produces. It is so smooth and has a nearly-sweet taste. I grind up a full grinder of beans, trying to keep the grinding time as brief as possible (the finer the grind, the harder it is to strain out the grounds from the mix). I dump the grounds into a wide mouth quart jar and fill it up the rest of the way with filtered water (you could use straight tap water if yours tastes good). I stir to combine, put a lid on the jar (I use these nifty plastic ones as they are much more leak-proof than the metal canning ones) and let it sit overnight.

The next morning when I get up, I strain it through a regular sieve and then through a reusable gold mesh coffee filter. There's still a little bit of fine coffee grind at the bottom that I could get rid of if I used a paper filter, but it seems good enough to me without taking that extra step. It's definitely no worse than when you make coffee with a French Press. The only problem I've discovered with this method is that you don't get the smell of brewing coffee that comes when hot water meets ground coffee. The absence of that aroma makes me think that while I adore the taste of this coffee, I may not be a permanent convert. I like the ceremony and scent of making coffee almost as much as I like drinking it and this just doesn't give me that total coffee experience.

Photo by Marisa McClellan

I started drinking coffee when I was a pre-teen (quite possibly the reason I never grew beyond 5'2") and over the last 16 years, I have tried just about every coffee brewing method available. I've had several French Presses (still a favorite when I'm making coffee just for myself), both cone and cup style filter machines, the Bialetti stovetop espresso pot and the classic Chemex pour through model (in addition to the plastic cone on the coffee cup set up). I also own a 50-cup party percolator that used to be my grandfather's and several pieces of an ancient aluminum stovetop percolator.

With all this coffee making power at my fingertips, I have never branched out into cold brew territory. However, I am becoming increasingly intrigued* by that particular style since reading this post by Leland over at Eat. He has been on a coffee journey similar to my own, and is loving the cold brew method for his summertime fix of iced coffee. There are a number of different ways to go about cold brewing coffee. He does his without any special equipment, but you can buy a kit to make the brewing process even easier.

*The process of writing this post made me so curious about making my own cold brewed coffee that I leaped off my couch and ran to the kitchen to whip up a batch. I put a full grinders worth of beans in the jar you see above, filled it the rest of the way up with water, gave it a bit of a stir and left it to do it's thing. I'll report back later on how it turned out.

photo by Marisa McClellan