Cold Brew

Hello one and all, and welcome to Coffee Month 2017! I'm a spazz-tastic sometimes writer going by the handle Compendium of Steve, and also as I Wanna Be The Guy fangamer conlycameobasher. I'm a guy who likes coffee, to the point where I like to try out new aspects of coffee whenever I get the chance. For this month, I'll be making posts about my own tips to coffee appreciation, and relate my own musings and experience with that wondrous bitter black stuff. So for a good opening post, I'll begin with a good type of coffee you can make at home: Cold Brew.

For those unawares, cold brew is a means of coffee extraction that makes for a smoother, bolder taste that's otherwise lost during a the hot drip brew method. Now what I know about the method itself I got from this fine British bloke here, but if you'd rather read than listen, I'll just summarize this relatively simple approach to enhancing your daily Joe.

You take start 3/4 cup of coffee grounds, be it something you got from the store like Maxwell or Folgers or ground up yourself if you're extra fancy, whichever type of grounds you prefer. You put it in a medium sized bowl and pour a liter of filtered water over it; whether filtered at home or store bought it's up to you. Be sure to moisten as much of the grounds as you can as you pour, and once you're done, you cover the bowl with a small towel and put it in the fridge overnight. Preferably you want it to sit in there 20-24 hours.

Now for the tricky part. You take the bowl from the fridge, get another bowl, and grabbing a sieve or similar type of strainer you pour the coffee through it, letting the liquid drain through and separating all that soggy groundage. After getting as much fluid as possible from the mass, you throw it away in a proper disposal bag (those grounds get everywhere), then taking a moistened paper towel you line the sieve, then pour the coffee fluid through it back into the bowl it started out in. The paper towel is there to further filter out the coffee and make it cleaner. You may have to repeat this process once more with another paper towel, and it can take a while to do. But what I found is that the higher you hold up the sieve from the bowl, the faster the coffee drips. Pretty handy there, gravity!

Once the coffee is sufficiently filtered, you then pour the results into a sealable container, preferably a glass jar with a screw top lid, then put it away in the fridge for storage up to two weeks. The cool thing here is that all you need to do is just pour in a little bit of the coffee juice at the bottom of your cup, fill the rest up with hot/boiling water and voila, a refreshing cup of coffee without the need of your coffee maker! Saves on preparation and clean-up, and as I mentioned before it has a smoother, less bitter taste to it.

Hopefully you found those directions easy to follow and will give it a go for yourself. Or if not, there's always that link I provided where a professional can more expertly explain it. And with that, that wraps up this post. Dunno if I'll be able to make this a daily thing, but there will always be time for Coffee Talk either way! (heh, cheesy)