--- title: Coffee Technique visibility: public --- The main technique I'm refining these days is cold brew. You can make excellent cold brew with a pretty simple process, but this technique does depend on specific tools I already have on hand. The goal is to make coffee so good that it doesn't need any additives (although it can be fun to make simple lattes or other drinks with this coffee as a base). All recipes on this page are subject to change as I make tweaks to my technique, with the intent to always be cleanly up to date. You might come back and see these recipes different than you remember. Make your own copy if you don't want to lose a version. ### Maddie's Cold Brew Equipment: * A coffee grinder. * 2 mason jars. 16oz is a good size. * An aeropress. * Optionally, a metal filter funnel. * Some way to boil water. This recipe can be used whether you're starting from whole beans or grounds. I do recommend whole bean because it stays fresh longer and allows you to get a better product in bigger batches. It'll work with grounds too, but you _still_ need a coffee grinder. It's smart to apply some sort of persistent label to one jar that marks it as the "brew jar," so you don't confuse it with the "ready jar" of filtered coffee. #### Prep Cold brew is all about slow extraction, usually 24 or 48 hours (preferably the latter). To maximize the extraction in that time, you want your coffee to have maximum surface area exposed to water. There's two ways to make that happen, and you'll do both. First of all, you need the coffee blitzed to an espresso grind _or finer._ You can't take it too far. Dust those puppies. This is why you always need a coffee grinder, store-sold grounds are way coarser than you want for this method. Secondly, they're going to mix freely in the water. Just put the powder in a mason jar and add cold water, screw on the lid, and _shake._ Put it in the fridge and let it brew in the background of your life. It can be nice to have the jar in a visible part of the fridge, so you can get in the habit of shaking the jar again every time you see it. _Note: I've tried "tea bag" methods that made filtering a lot easier and simpler. They're alright, but I don't currently recommend them, because you lose so much depth of flavor and caffeine content. You will straight up make weaker coffee. Also, depending on how you make the bag, you may have issues of paper flavor leaching into the product, and it's **really** hard to prevent this without destroying the structural integrity of the bag._ #### Filtering Now you have a real challenge. You have a mix of fine particles in water that really does look and behave like a silty mud/sludge. You need to filter pretty fine to deal with the fine grind of the coffee. Here's my current best take on how to do that. ##### Rough pass If you have a metal filter, put it over the "ready jar," and pour your unfiltered brew through. You'll probably clog it at some point, and I recommend you handle this by: 1. Dumping the liquid in the filter back into the brew jar. 2. Rinsing the filter out in the sink. 3. Pour more brew in again. 4. Repeat as necessary. You can probably do everything in one pass, but it'll be its own kind of slow pain in the ass. I do recommend doing the rough pass first, _and using the wait time to prep the fine pass._ ###### Fine pass The aeropress is a great tool for hot coffee, because it works on the same grounds-free-in-water principle, just at a higher temperature and therefore a faster timescale. This also makes it a great final stage filter for batches of cold brew. Boil water. While it's boiling, assemble the aeropress the usual way (screw a filter in between the bottom and the main chamber, and have the plunger ready to go). When you have boiling water ready, pour it through the chamber (good idea to do this in the sink) to clean the filter and leech it of any paper flavor. Assuming you have roughly filtered coffee in the ready jar and some remaining debris in the brew jar, rinse the brew jar clean and pour the half-filtered coffee into it. You can pour it through the metal filter again if you're feeling smart. Rinse the ready jar. Rest the aeropress over the ready jar and pour roughly filtered coffee into it, pausing as necessary. The final round of this, you can push the remaining coffee through with the plunger. **I recommend only using the plunger at the very end, because pulling the plunger out will pull up the filter, and then you have to prep a new one. That's _very_ annoying to deal with, and burns through your supply of filters at a wasteful rate.** This should get you some truly excellent and clean coffee, that you can drink immediately, or put back in the fridge. I usually pour myself a cup immediately and put the rest away for later. It keeps pretty well, but I wouldn't drink anything a week old or more.