My First Cold Brew

Since cold brew coffee is all the craze these days, and I had a bunch of coffee left over from my test batches, I figured why not give it a try. Plus, living in Arizona, a cold coffee option is a must or sales will drop almost too low during the summer months.


I did a little poking around on some more well known coffee companies to determine what ration they used for cold brew. A lot of companies use a 5:1 (5 parts water to 1 part coffee). To put that into perspective, drip coffee is brewed with a ration of 16:1. So cold brew is made with over 3x as much coffee. I came across Four Barrel Coffee Company and they used a 7:1 ratio. I liked that better. 5:1 seemed like they were trying to make a concentrate, which I wanted to make more of a ready to drink.

I portioned out my 200g of coffee and 1400 g of water and went to town. I ground the coffee course and then stirred it to make sure all the grounds were wet, then let it sit in the refrigerator for 24hrs.

When the time came to filter the coffee, I was surprised at how thick it was. I mean this stuff was almost syrup. I'm thinking I may need to continue with my ratio to get a ready to drink. It took forever to filter. I also noticed that there were more super fines, because they were actually clogging the paper filter. I thought that was interesting. I can only assume that the water pulled more out of the grinds than I am use to seeing in drip coffee.

The coffee was good. Because it was so concentrated, the melting ice actually made it better. The sugar was also concentrated. It was really sweet and had nice chocolate tones. The only thing is that it was just a touch too much.

After that, I went to work on my coffee cocktail. I had in mind to make a cold brew, tequila, agave nectar drink. That tasted like crap, so I pulled some other stuff out and end up with a drink that had cold brew, chocolate liqueur, vanilla vodka, a squeeze of orange and orange zest on the rim. It was like a chocolate orange with a ton of caffeine. It needs to be perfected by someone who really knows drinks, but I think I like this as my signature cocktail.

It was fun to try cold brew and I think there is definitely a viable business opportunity there. I need to focus on my whole bean sales, but this is going to be something I add soon.