How to Brew Cold Brew Coffee!
Summer might be fading but the best solution for your summer woes? Denial. Denial and cold brew. Toss on your favourite hoodie, start making some delicious cold brew coffee and pretend it's the middle of July.
Earlier in the year we went through how to brew iced coffee and reached out to our roaster partners with their favourite recipes to make iced coffee. Although cold brewing coffee does test your patience, it is a bit more popular than iced coffee because of the fact that the taste is so different and unique - the pronounced clarity and a serious reduction in bitterness. It’s a bit less acidic too because of the way it is (usually) brewed is hot-water-free.
We reached out to Cold Brew Coffee extraordinaires over at de Mello Palheta, who make an amazing cold brew during the summer months (as you can see in this video) to see how they would describe the taste of Cold Brew:
Cold brew has its own unique taste which I like to say as "flat coke but coffee version.”
Curiosity piqued?
Well we put together this video brew guide on how to make and, spoiler alert: it’s delicious and really easy.
Here’s the recipe in non-video form:
What you need:
- 1.1L of cold filtered water
- A Hario Cold Brewer known as the Mizudashi
- 110 grams of freshly roasted coffee
The filtered water is pretty important – coffee is 98.5% water, so using bad water might not bode so well for the final outcome of your coffee.
Also, the coffee we used was the Las Lajas that we featured in the September issue, roasted by de Mello Palheta based out of Toronto, Ontario. Not only does it taste amazing, but it’s got a pretty cool story on how it’s processed (which you can read about here).
Step 1: Grind the coffee and pour it in the Mizudashi. The grind should be between medium and coarse, a bit finer than you would for a French Press.
Step 2: Pour in the 1.1 litres of water. It takes a bit of time for the water to saturate and get through all the coffee grinds.
Wait 12-18 hours!
Step 3: Take out the coffee basket & pour the cold brew into a cup with ice!
We like to add ice to ours as the ice melting adds an interesting dynamic to the taste (and the temperature, of course!). However, feel free to drink it straight for a strong cup of coffee if that’s what you prefer! It is a coffee concentrate though, as you may have noticed that the ratio is 10 parts of water for every 1 part of coffee (as opposed to the regular ratio of around 17:1), so the ice helps bring it closer to a ratio our taste buds are more familiar with.
Step 4: Enjoy!
It’s also interesting to point out that it can last about a week after brewing. We throw ours in the fridge after we’re done brewing.
That was pretty easy eh? The Hario Mizudashi might not be the easiest to pronounce, but it is really easy to brew. That should be its slogan.
HARIO MIZUDASHI: “Tough to pronounce, easy to brew”
Want another recipe?
This other one here we tried is really interesting to us conceptually. However, we got mixed results when tasting it as the method didn’t hold up for all coffees. In fact, there were some pretty sharp notes with when we tested it with a naturally processed coffee. The positive with this method is that it focuses on extracting the sweet notes of the brew with a hot bloom. If you’re intrigued and want to try it out here’s a recipe:
The Hot Bloom Method for Cold Brew:
What you need:
- 950ml of cold filtered water
- 150ml of boiled filtered water
- A Hario Cold Brewer known as the Mizudashi
- 110 grams of freshly roasted coffee
Step 1: Grind the coffee and pour it in the Mizudashi. The grind should be between medium and coarse, a bit finer than you would for a French Press.
Step 2: Pour in 150 grams of hot (200 degrees F) water for the bloom. After 1 minute of the coffee sitting stir to ensure proper saturation of the grounds.
Step 3: Pour in the 950 ml of water.
Step 4: Wait 12 hours!
Step 5: Take out the coffee basket & pour the cold brew into a cup with ice!
Step 6: Enjoy!
What do you think of these recipes? Which one did you like more? Send us a tweet with your thoughts!
P.S - The first person to use the coupon code EASYCOLD15 gets 15% off the Mizudashi!
Cheers!
Comments
doris said:
Mantaaabb gaann. Nice sharing.
T. P. Scott said:
Amazing, I just came to the same conclusion myself, after experimenting with the Mizudashi for a few weeks. Here’s part of what I emailed a coffee fanatic friend this morning: “Since the whole idea of cold brew is that hot water brings out the bitterness and acidity as well as flavor, I split the difference. I put about 700 ml of room temp (filtered) water in the brewer carafe, then heated about 400 ml more nearly to boil, and used that to pour through the grounds. When all the water was in I put it in the fridge overnight as usual. It may be my imagination but it seemed to add a little more flavor and bite on top of the smooth cold brew flavor.”