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Comment by rubyn00bie | Hacker News Reader

The writer of this article is really wrong to assume coffee aficionados don't drink cold brew, that's absolutely false. It's made even worse that he's conflating cold brew with iced coffee. They are very much not the same.

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.

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Coffee shop and roastery owner here... Interesting fact: cold brew acidity as measured by PH, is in the same bandwidth as other coffee drinks: espresso, filter, japanese iced, etc etc... Average usually falls around 4.8.

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.

For iced coffee at home, I’m a fan of aeropress coffee over ice. The aeropress gives a lot of control over water temperature, steep time, coffee/water proportion, and grind size, and you can effectively brew the coffee pretty strong, which leaves you room for the dilution with ice.

I'm going to start experimenting with that today. I didn't think it would work very well though.

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.

Put crushed ice in the cup you’re pressing the aeropress into if you want.

I like to aeropress on ice and then shake the coffee with ice to get a froth

Awesome information, mate! Thanks for learning me something.

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.

The article specifically addressed what's 'wrong' with cold brew:

"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 couldn't agree more and also prefer cold brew to iced coffee. I have actually seen instances of the inverse name-swap as well: places which serve cold brew but label it as "iced coffee" because their customers/market have been exposed to iced coffee by various chains but wouldn't know what cold brew was (or bother to explore new options).

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.

I also prefer it - I think it tastes better (even if I then microwave it, seriously) but it's also way, way less acidic, and for people with acid reflux (moderate or severe) it makes drinking coffee a lot more comfortable.

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.

Ah, only to pass on some knowledge. It's because their drinks are so sweet that with lighter roasts the sugar and syrup cover up the coffee. Most really good baristas will tell you the lighter the roast the more "flavorful" the coffee will be. Starbucks "intense flavor" is just folks confusing burned/overcooked beans for coffee flavor.

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 ;-)

Longer roasting raises pH (decreases acidity). See: http://www.idosi.org/wasj/wasj2%285%29/17.pdf

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.

> which is why Starbucks coffees are insanely acidic.

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.

Lots of people start off using cheap popcorn makers as well. They can only do small batches, and the plastic eventually warps, but it's a low barrier to entry. http://legacy.sweetmarias.com/airpop/airpopmethod.php

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.

Exactly right. I'm a heat gun, pan and wooden spoon user. I tried a dedicated home roaster and found it slow and unreliable. Fresh coffee and and Cheaper too. At 10ish years roasting it's firmly part of the routine now. My Silvia is at something like 13,000 made coffees now.

Btw about your ulcer. Not sure if you know this but it may be curable

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.

And, if your stomach ulcer is caused by NSAIDs (ibuprofen, aspirin, etc), stop using them is also recommended :)

I've been to specialists, trust me if it was a direct answer to a cure-- I wouldn't have had one for over a year. Interesting the bacteria H. pylori is present in over half of the UK's citizens (not sure if it's in the linked material but the NHS has an article about it somewhere).

The article was written back in 2012. I hadn't even heard of cold brew coffee at the time, so maybe you were just ahead of the curve.

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=cold%20brew%20coffee

Could you share your recipe/process of cold brewing to someone that never heard about it? Thanks!

I've seen recipes for 1:6/1:7 (2 tablespoons to 6 oz) ratio of coffee to water. I've used 3/4 a cup of coffee to 4 cups of water in a french press.

Not who you were asking, but it's pretty much steeping coarse coffee grounds and cold water in a cup overnight, then filter out the grounds, sort of like cold sun tea. In New Orleans toss in some chicory.

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.

A knee-high nylon stocking works very well for this method, is very inexpensive and reusable.

I tried this but the coffee kept filling up my shoe.

I had to stop making cold brew because I was overcaffienating to an extent I was afraid my molecules would match the harmonics of the ground and I would fall through to the center of the earth.

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.

I suggest you try using multiple small extraction volumes instead of a single big one. The long extraction time could be shortened, and you will get less heavy molecules out (which in tea, for example, tend to make the brew taste a bit bad). See [1] for an explanation. It might just taste better, let me know if you try it!

[1]: http://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/37712/why-using...

Here's my cold brew recipe. Note that this does create a very caffeinated brew, perhaps twice as strong as a normal espresso, so it is very easy to overdo it (one of the few times I've ever felt the effects of caffeine was with one of my early cold brew attempts, which I realised afterwards was probably equivalent to around 16 shots of espresso, and I can't say I particularly enjoyed the jittery feeling). Anyway, it is great for cold drinks, although I haven't found a way of heating it up which is as good as my espresso machine.

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.

I started using this Aeropress iced coffee recipe. It's a nice breakdown that doesn't assume any prior Aeropress experience:

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...

> 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.

The way I understand this is that you are making a point that a hot brew will somehow increase your ulcer?

Well two points in what you quoted,

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.

Does anyone ever heat up cold-brew and drink it hot? I have no idea, but I wonder if it might have better flavor, but some people might want it hot.

I'm a cold brew fan and once in a blue moon I'll heat it up when I'm in the mood and it tastes fine.

It's how I usually drink my cold brew. Just mix with hot water.

Do you make your own cold brew, or buy pre-made (like what stumptown sells)?

Generally I buy and I usually don't buy Stumptown's prepackaged products as I don't think they're great and generally overpriced.

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.

Courier Coffee is great! Been there many times.

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