The Japanese Iced Coffee Method (2012)
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I'm sure it's lovely but it's not cold brew. Cold brew is less acidic because it's not heated; it's also said to have a more "true" taste because it's not extracted with hot water.
I have some stomach issues, one of which is an ulcer, and I am unable to drink hot coffee regularly as it tends to upset my stomach much more. Cold brew besides actually having a richer taste because of the slow brewing process actually hurts my tum tum less.
... Granted I also live in PDX, so I'm fairly sure (based on some comments) not everyone out there has had, or is actually being served, cold brew. Putting hot coffee on ice just doesn't even begin to compare.
Update: hit post early.
Luckily the majority of independent coffee shops where I live (Houston) are particular about the distinction, and will pointedly list "cold brew" on their menus if it is such.
Not going to make a claim I can't back up, but a lot of people take acidity to equal flavor - which is why Starbucks coffees are insanely acidic. Whether or not that's why the author prefers iced, hot-brewed coffee (for the acidity) and is conflating that with flavor, is not something I know for sure, but it's a possibility.
Granted, I'm really lucky to live in PDX because we have such good access to great coffee it's made more noticeable. In my youth, I was actually of the same mindset until drinking a lot of different coffee and discovering my "misguided" way ;-)
Note that the initial time of small decrease of pH corresponds to under-roasted coffee, and coffee with this degree of roast would be unacceptable even to fans of light roasts.
That's more about the low grade beans, robusta beans and a very dark roast. Dark roasts are much harder to identify as "stale" because they have basically only got a burnt flavour. As a general comment (not directed at parent) if you get the chance to buy some green beans, have a go at roasting them and taste the difference between different roasts. You don't need anything flash to roast them, I use a heat gun. It's cheap, easy and the coffee is never stale.
I personally like roasting in small batches, because I don't drink a _ton_ of coffee, and it only takes a few days for roasted beans to lose a lot of their volatile flavor compounds.
I usually just go to a cafe and ask if they have cold brew (most do in Portland at least in summer), and New Seasons (local grocery store chain) makes cold brew all year round.
* Courier Coffee has probably the best cold brew in town on a regular basis.
* Barista is good, always good, courier is just ever so slightly better. They have it year round too which is a lifesaver for someone like me.
* Pie Spot actually has damn good cold brew on the inner E side.
Breakfast places with enough of a "hipster" (I don't say that as a negative, I probably am one, more just a way to identify them) vibe usually have cold brew as well.
In the summer, I generally consume a lot more coffee will more regularly make myself some. It's quite easy, you really just need a cheese cloth and some sort of bucket. Throw it in and wait ~12 hours. Last about a week.
I use the Toddy, which steeps 12oz grounds in 56 fl oz of water, drained through a fuzzy fabric filtering puck; the extract can be refrigerated and diluted with hot water or cold milk.
There are smaller CoffeeSocks (cloth filters) if you don't want to have a carafe of extract in your fridge for two weeks.
But here's what I did:
Get a big french press, a narrow mouth pitcher or a wide mouth bottle, and one of those single serving coffee maker funnels (mines a Hario, which seems to clog up more slowly).
Put about 3/4" of coarse coffee grounds into the french press. Fill it with water to a little below where the plunger sits, stir it a little, put the lid on (plunger up) and push it back under a cabinet on your counter where nobody will mess with it.
24-36 hours later, push down the plunger slower than you've ever thought you could push down a plunger. Put an unbleached paper filter in your single serving coffee funnel, put the funnel on top of your pitcher/jar, and pour. There's gonna be a lot of fines in the coffee so this may take a while. After you're done put the pitcher in the fridge.
Some people make a second pitcher from the grounds. It takes a bit longer to reach full strength the second time, so let it go for another 12 hours. But if you need the second pitcher before the first is gone your doctor may have some harsh words for you.
[1]: http://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/37712/why-using...
Ingredients - 40g of beans (4 25ml espresso scoops) - 250ml water
Method - Use a grinder to course grind the beans. - Put grinds in a pyrex measuring jug, add the water, then cover. - Leave overnight, at room temperature. - Filter first through a sieve to remove the coarse grinds, then through a coffee filter to remove the fine grinds (it may take several mins to drip through). - Store in the fridge.
http://www.coffeegeek.com/guides/aeropresscoldbrew
Pro tip: if you use iOS, Timers by Clean Shaven apps is a great sequence timer for stuff like Aeropress and other coffee recipes:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/timers-interval-timers-for/i...
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=cold%20brew%20coffee
It is true that brewing with room temperature water doesn't extract some of the acids in the coffee that would be extracted with hot water. With specialty coffee, the purists like Giuliano, want to extract these acids in an effort to showcase the "terroir" of the coffee (where it was grown, the variety, the process after it was picked). There are a lot of cold brew haters in the industry for this reason. I'm not one of them. Saying one is better or worse is a dumb argument to make. Cold brew is great because it does have a really round flavor profile, it highlights sweetness and roast, and it has the body to pair really well with milk, which is how many iced coffee drinkers prefer it.
The Japanese iced coffee is great if you want to highlight the nuances of a better coffee. There's more complexity due to the extraction of these [good] acids. Bonus points for flash chilling a coffee, wherein you brew hot, send the brew through a heat exchanger, and chill without diluting with ice.
I read of a similar method to the article a few years ago. Use a regular drip brewer with 50% of water normally used (by weight). Place an equal weight of ice in the jug. Brew as normal to get tepid or cold coffee in the jug. Add more ice after you pour or add milk. What I read said the results tasted better than simply pouring over ice because of the process of dripping the hot coffee over the ice as it brews gives a different flavour than simple diluting by adding ice later. OP's article seems to support that and I found that to be true - it works very, very well and it's very simple.
As you say, the aeropress method is basically the same as diluting at the end by controlling the strength of the brew and I'm not sure it will work the same way.
Though, I find it strange that the PH for cold brew, iff extracting less acids, is the same. Reading (very briefly) on google scholar it (acid) looks to be more a result of the way the bean was roasted-- with darker beans having lower acid. Have you seen any scientific doing that analysis?
... I'm just curious as to why (and I'll admit, it COULD be just in my head, I'm a sample of one) I find cold brew much easier to consume having an ulcer.
"This is what happens in cold brew: the technique tries to make up for the relative insolubility of coffee at cold-water temperatures by brewing for a long, long time. This creates the illusion that you have made coffee- the resulting liquid is dark and tastes something like coffee- but many of the coffee solubles have never made it out of the grounds and into the liquid. Cold-water brewing has a way of deadening flavor, since the elusive and charming elements of flavor that make coffee special never get dissolved into the brew, and remain in the coffee grounds, which get thrown away."
> I have some stomach issues, one of which is an ulcer, and I am unable to drink hot coffee regularly as it tends to upset my stomach much more.
The way I understand this is that you are making a point that a hot brew will somehow increase your ulcer?
1.) Cold brew isn't something all coffee aficionados dislike. 2.) That cold brew doesn't _irritate_ my ulcer as much. I'm not at all saying it increases or decreases the ulcer itself.
http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Peptic-ulcer/Pages/Causes.aspx
> Stomach ulcers are usually caused by Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) bacteria or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs)
> It used to be thought that stomach ulcers may be caused by certain lifestyle factors, such as spicy foods, stress and alcohol.
> There is little hard evidence to confirm that this is the case, but these factors may make the symptoms of ulcers worse
http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Peptic-ulcer/Pages/Treatment.as...
> If your stomach ulcer is caused by an Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) bacterial infection, a course of antibiotics and a medication called a proton pump inhibitor (PPI) is recommended.
In any case, the most important phrase in the story is "many of the iced coffee processes I liked the best brewed coffee hot". If you find the coffee you like best, brew it that way. I'd also recommend trying the other brew methods to make sure you're not stuck on a local optimum.
And remember, you can brew coffee with water anywhere between freezing and boiling - the hotter the water, the more parafins you'll melt. If you're using a French Press (Cafetiere) and you think your coffee is too bitter at 200F, try 190F, then 180F, etc.
And coffee will change flavor as it stands. Brewing hot onto ice as described in this article eliminates post-brewing flavor changes. If you cold brew your coffee and then let it stand at room temperature for several days, it won't taste like the freshly brewed coffee either.
TLDR: Experiment until you find what you like.
As a long time coffee drinker, I've realized that the bitterness is what wakes me up in the morning, rather than the caffeine in the coffee. The first sip of coffee is usually enough to bring me out of my morning stupor. It's probably some kind of conditioned response, which would probably be lacking with a non-bitter cold-brew. :P
An espresso cup is brewed with a proper, bar sized espresso machine (or with a Nespresso, which IMHO is the only thing that comes close to it.) Then it is sugared, mixed, and poured in a shaker over ice cubes. The shaker is agitated quickly and vigorously for a short time, then the mixture strained into a tall glass.
We call it Shaked coffee ("caffè shakerato") and it's notoriously difficult to get right.
I have a stainless steel cocktail shaker that I use every summer for this very purpose, but even after years of trying I cannot get the right timing, quantities, and temperatures as a proper Barista would.
Oh, and it's delicious!
http://www.funraniumlabs.com/the-black-blood-of-the-earth/
"Fast forward 14 years. An acquaintance working and living in Japan went on holiday and discovered a bar with this exceptionally beautiful rig for the preparation of Viennese Triple Cold Extraction Coffee. Upon sampling this, he felt that, and I quote, “I could see colors that weren’t in the visible spectrum, and could vibrate through walls.” I looked at this I said to myself, “Hey, you’ve got enough virgin laboratory glassware lying around the house that you could probably build something like that.” Probably several somethings, actually, but that’s beside the point."
For the record I have not tried black blood of the earth but would like to try it. It is just I am cheap.
I think cold brew is an attempt by coffee shops to upsell what used to be regular coffee + ice. Taste wise, it's completely subjective. Value wise, nothing beats Starbucks double shot on ice.
At home, I just aeropress into an ice cube. That way, I don't have a pitcher of cold brew concentrate that has to be used within a week.
Does aeropress allow you to use cold water?
My general approach is: ~2.5 scoops into the aeropress, fill with 165 F to just above the -2- marker, stir a few times, immediately press out over 20 seconds directly onto tumbler of ice.
BTW, if you want your coffee slightly sweetened, you can put a tsp of sugar into the aeropress with the grinds and press the combination over ice. Saves needing a simple syrup or having the sugar not dissolve if you put it into the iced coffee afterwards.
This is of course very similar to how vietnamese iced coffee is made. https://ineedcoffee.com/brew-vietnamese-coffee/
If you are implying shops repurpose old beans and use them to make cold-brew, then you are correct.
I can't speak for all coffee shops, but for 'specialty' places the above statements are always true.
> Taste wise, it's completely subjective
True, but the taste profiles are objectively different.
Grilled chicken vs roast chicken. Which one is better? Subjective. Do they taste different? Objective.
That being said, I am going to try this aeropressing onto an ice cube method.
You see the same thing with the "third wave" movement who espouse that very light roast is the "best" way to roast coffee. Light, medium and dark roast coffee is all perfectly fine ways of roasting, and all return different flavors for different beans.
I prefer a roaster that has mastered the whole range.
Or we could keep drinking coffee because it tastes good.
0) https://www.kickinghorsecoffee.com/en/blog/caffeine-myths-da...
Cold brew oxidizes, and doesn't extract many of the flavor compounds from coffee. That's why it always tastes kind of stale and flat. Now, you might like that, but I'm sure you can see why many people would say that it's a worse way to make iced coffee.
Similarly with roasting beans---lighter roasts preserve more of the flavor of the beans. So, if you have really high quality beans, dark roasts are just a waste. That's not to say that dark roast coffee can't be delicious, but it's less complex.
Similarly, sangria is delicious, but you probably shouldn't mix your 1982 chateau lafite with orange juice.
I really disagree with the third wave snobbery that the only coffee to be enjoyed is light roast though. There's a pretty wide range that will produce some amazing coffee. Putting them side by side for a cupping is interesting, I personally became more sensitive to roasting too dark after tasting the same beans under different roast profiles, and seeing how quickly the dark range began diminishing complexity, brightness and clarity in my cups. On the other hand, all too frequently I get underdeveloped third wave coffee that is just as unenjoyable as a burnt batch.
I don't think it's that, I think it's because they last longer on the shelf (light roasts go stale faster) and because dark roasts just taste burnt, meaning you can swap out one bean for another and not notice a difference. So if a cheaper beans becomes available, that will get switched in.
Dark roasts are not more shelf stable than lighter roasts though. The oils in dark roasts become rancid substantially more quickly because a darker roast has expanded more, and therefore has more surface area to come in contact with air. Starbucks and other big companies say their coffee is shelf stable for about a year, but the reality is coffee peaks 24-72 hours after roasting. Burnt notes grossly outweigh staleness though. That with the benefits of consistency is great for bigger brands exactly for the other reasons you mention.
To add a bit more perspective, green unroasted coffee beans are considered fresh or in season for about 9 months. The more you get away from this in a roast profile the shorter the shelf life.
Depending on the coffee or roast, the coffee will do better as cold-brew or Japanese-style iced. Some coffees are absolutely terrible as cold-brew and vis-versa.
That being said, I almost always prefer cold-brew (bias-disclosed).
Furthermore, this article seems to follow a trend in speciality coffee of taking some loose science then jumping to completely arbitrary conclusions. Often it is hard to tell if they are on to something, just want the attention, or have something to gain economically by propagating their view.
This Kyoto-style coffee tower, however, is:
http://drinks.seriouseats.com/2014/03/japanese-style-slow-dr...
http://www.seriouseats.com/2014/05/whats-the-best-way-to-bre...
> With milk, the diner-style and cold brew tasted the best, whereas the Japanese style and immersion-over-ice were terrible, their bright flavors clashing with the creamy dairy, giving them the flavor of curdled milk.
And what about the iced Americano? I guess you could consider that to be "Japanese method" as well. I'm not convinced.
Along the similar lines, I like a nice double cream brie, or a gruyere cheese. I also like a good slice of kraft american cheese. They all have their time and place.
Couldn't the 2nd sentence simply be shortened to, "Oxygen has a habit of monkeying with oils to make them rancid."
When I was in Japan (July 2015) I was surprised at how common iced coffee was – it felt like every street corner had a vending machine that sold (among other things) iced coffee. You can buy some of it here in SF, too, even at Wallgreens.
That said, so is that shop's cold brew, espresso, and pour overs. I think quality of ingredients and the attention to detail they pay is more important than the specific technique. To me this is more like getting your sourdough in a boule vs a baguette than a "stop drinking cold brew" experience.
It might make sense to use the technique used by those who have that level of attention to detail and quality – presumably they would be less likely to use a sub-standard method.
What doesn't get dissolved into the cold water is often the more sour (or "bright" if you're feeling charitable) flavors.
(I have had the stale, flat kind of cold brew the author mentions. It sucks. I have also had plenty of terrible hot coffee.)
The founder is a pal of mine! He exhibited recently at the Caffe Culture Show in Olympia, London. In a huge hall filled with all the complex paraphernalia of coffee-brewing and consumption, his stand was situated at the periphery, in the artisan foods section.
Interestingly, with all the bustle (and hustle ;-) of the main venue, this section - arguably, the most interesting - had relatively light traffic. But a few savvy people came by to sample this unique coffee (and other awesome products in the vicinity), including one prominent coffee critic/blogger. His opinion: a very interesting flavor profile that was too earthy; not enough acidity. My friend patiently explained that this is the intention: to preserve the natural 'sweetness' of the bean. The critic wasn't swayed, but I was delighted: at least his product had elicited a strong reaction!
Most significantly, many people mistakenly equated 'cold brew' with 'cold drip'. Huge difference!
Visitors tended to love it. Some came back for a second and third sampling. We gave away a lot of bottles...
Friends of mine have a roastery in Berlin and for "cold brew" the coffee extraction process takes a long time:
> Basically, cold water is used in a Cold Brew for extraction, that is heat is replaced by time.
Full step by step recipe is at https://www.flyingroasters.de/blog/cold-brew-rezept/ (German only, Google Translator: https://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=ht...)
I personally like it very much with Tonic water. Especially in summer. Everybody who also likes Gin Tonic should try a Cold Brew with Tonic.
If you happen to live in Berlin and want to try one without much hassle, they have a booth at the next Weddingmarkt on 3 July. Highly recommended.
Isn't this just elegantly adjectivezed nonsense? The net result of a stoichistic process isn't altered by the speed at which it occurred. So cold-brew shouldn't end-up with a different composition if timed correctly relative to hot-brew?
https://ineedcoffee.com/brew-vietnamese-coffee/
I've been brewing my coffee directly over ice since I first got an aeropress... which is old enough to be the original blue plastic, whenever that was.
It never occurred to me that this was some magical technique.
Cheers!
Any iced americano is going to be a lot like this method, except with espresso instead of brewed coffee, and water added. I add minimal extra water just because i like it as-is.
If you enjoy the taste do it, if you don't, toddy brew on my fellow humans.
so… long story short, the ice you use matters a lot
no more words required :)
I thought this article was recent, but the date stamp reveals that it's four years old.