Cold Brewed Coffee

making cold brewed coffee

I recently started an experiment in cold brewed coffee. I heard Nathan Lowell talking about it on this episode of the Living Proof Brew Cast and I went for it. The recipe I used is here.

I’d like to say that my motivation is for the perfection of the coffee. The truth is that I more like the aspect of having concentrate that I can reconstitute and microwave that won’t taste like ass. We brew decaf in my house and over the weekend I get caffeine withdrawal headaches. At work we have a Keurig machine. While I’d never claim it is delicious, I do appreciate the convenience of making coffee cup by cup and the lack of workplace coffee pot drama. I have considered getting one for the house but the cold brewed coffee tastes much better to me.

I’ve gone ahead and bought some infrastructure for the brewing. There are kits but I just bought a strainer and a big pitcher to dedicate to this. I also modified the recipe slightly as it calls for 1/2 pound of beans and I have no scale. Instead I will grind 2 cups of beans and use 8 cups of water. The internet tells me one pound of roasted beans is 4.4 cups so my modification scales both down coffee and water by approximately 10%. Tonight I’ll brew my first full scale batch instead of my small test ones. It should be fun and I hope it is tasty.

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Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.

2 thoughts on “Cold Brewed Coffee”

  1. It sounds like the Toddy system that Orleans Coffee Exchange (Rick loves their coffee and so do I until the caffeine ban baby girl imposed on me) suggested I look into when I asked about low acidity coffee. Let me know how the experience works out as we are a two coffee pot family. One for my decaf flavored coffee and one for Rick’s strong non flavored coffee. I would love to brew mine up for the week.

  2. Hey Maggie,

    I looked at a few of those systems. I didn’t want to drop $30-$80 on something I wasn’t sure I was going to like but more importantly I didn’t want to bring one more potentially underused kitchen gadget in the house. We’re trying to get rid of them, not get more.

    I’m going to write up a post with the details of what I did and how it worked. I dropped about $5 at Dollar General buying stuff that I can dedicate to this or wash really well and repurpose if need be. The first full batch tastes good on day 1 and 2. The logistics of filtering were a little dicey and I’m waiting to see how it holds up over the life of the batch. So far so good though.

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