How to make cold brew iced coffee
15th April 2013 by
Iced coffee is the perfect thirst quencher on a hot summer’s day, when just the thought of a hot drink makes your brain melt into a puddle.
The problem with iced coffee is that it is very tricky to get right, without diluting the hot, freshly brewed coffee with ice. The obvious solution would be to brew hot coffee and let it go cold in the fridge, but I’ve found that the coffee ends up bitter and stale (think office coffee cup left to go cold on your desk). What’s a girl to do?
Cold Brew Coffee
I discovered this post on Wikipedia a while ago about the cold brew method, and decided to devise a way of making iced coffee concentrate at home, without the need for hot coffee as a base.
Grab yourself a container that will hold about 3 litres worth of liquid. It doesn’t have to be a Tupperware container, it can be a bucket (make sure you give it a good wash if it’s the one you use to wash the car/dog/cat).
I used the best part of this 400g bag of medium grind coffee in my experiment – I poured it into the tub and broke up any massive clumps with a wooden spoon.
Break up the lumps as best you can and get measuring out your water – you’ll need about 3 litres of cold tap water for this amount of coffee. Feel free to tinker with the ratios to get the taste and strength you like.
Add the water to the coffee grounds and stir around to make sure all of the coffee gets contact with the water. I found this a bit tricky as my tub had corners that the dry coffee could hide in.
I switched to a whisk to get all of the little dry lumps mixed in with the water. I left this mixture in a cool place (in the front porch, in my case) overnight.
The next morning
I set up my coffee filtering station with:
- 2 large mixing bowls
- 1 sheet of muslin/cheesecloth/coffee filters
- Fine meshed sieve
- Ladle
- Tablespoon
I set about filtering the coffee grounds from the water using the ladle, muslin cloth and fine mesh strainer:
Its a fairly quick process, the water separates from the solution very easily, with a little agitation from the back of a tablespoon.
The result
When all the filtering is done, you will be left with an iced coffee concentrate that will last for about 2 weeks tightly covered in the fridge.
To serve:
- 1 glass of ice
- Milk (I like low sugar condensed milk in mine – Vietnamese style!)
[…] you’ve made a batch of delicious cold brew iced coffee, and your wondering how to keep the iced coffee ‘iced’, without diluting the flavour? […]