How to Make Cold Brew Coffee without a Cold Brew Machine

 

How to Make Cold Brew Coffee without a Cold Brew Coffee & Tea Machine .

The thing is you can make almost any type of coffee without special equipment, and more often than not it will taste better than the equivalent because you actually hacked the system and get a mental reward for doing that. That’s true for espresso, different types of hot pour-overs, but that’s especially true for a cold-brew.

To make coffee, any coffee, you need three ingredients - coffee beans, water and some sort of container to hold your final product. You can of course use all kinds of expensive equipment and products to improve all parts of the process but you can easily do without them.

Take water, for example, some coffee purists (or snobs, mavens, connoisseurs…) will want to use special mineral-free water for their coffee. Unless your tap water are especially  bad or undrinkable, I suggest you just use tap water for coffee making. That’s especially true if you are not using an espresso machine, which may suffer from the mineral content of the water. 

Now, as for the beans. I’m not saying it doesn’t matter. It matters big time. Especially with a cold brew. With a cold brew you can really feel the nuances of coffee flavors, so you will need freshly coarsely grounded coffee beans of relatively good quality.

Now, real purists will want you to use very freshly grounded coffee. i.e. they want you to grind the coffee immediately before making coffee. That will require some equipment, say a coffee grinder. They are of course right, and I do use a coffee grinder before making my coffee.

However, if you are not after the perfect cup, you can use coffee ground in a coffeeshop and the world will not fall apart. Buy the coffee at the coffeeshop, store it in the fridge or better yet in the freezer, and wait for the right time to use it. Most important thing to note about keeping coffee after grinding is to keep it in a dry storage place. Humidity is coffee’s enemy number one, so pay attention.

Oh, and a neat little trick you can use if you do want to buy coffee beans and grind them yourself. If you have a Mortar And Pestle at home, you can use them for grinding coarse coffee. It won’t work for espresso, or when you need finely grinded coffee, but for cold-brew (or Turkish coffee) it will do. It’s a bit of a hard work, though…

Ok, and you will need some kind of a container to put the coffee in… Now, any container will do, though I prefer something made out of glass rather than plastic. 

Magic time - let’s cold brew coffee without equipment

1. take some coffee. How much coffee? If you have a scale, measure about an ounce of ground coffee for every cup of water (250ml). If you don’t, use 1/3 of a cup or 10 level teaspoons with coffee.
2. pour the coffee into your glass container
3. pour over the water
4. stir very gently
5. close the lid
6. put in the fridge and let it rest for 24 hours.
7. Voila. Enjoy your cold brew.
8. Optional: filter the coffee somehow. Your current cold-brew contains coffee-bean parts that may hurt your coffee experience. This is where you can use any type of fine sieve or filter paper to generate a clearer coffee beverage.

Some final notes:

Everything in the recipe above can be improved, but the final result won’t be super different. If you are not a coffee nut, you will get drinkable, tasty cold brew, and the gratification from making your cold brew without machines or equipment.

oh, and something about keeping cold brew coffee. Cold brew stores well for 4–5 days. After that it’s drinkable for 2–3 more days. You can, however, freeze cold-brew coffee. If you do, when you take it out of the freezer, let it defrost on the kitchen counter for 8 hours or so and drink it immediately after.

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