Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

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Label your mason jars in the communal fridge. Its my coffee, I don't want anyone else drinking my coffee. There are some nice Mason Jar labels which dissolve in water (so you can wash them in the dishwasher when you bring it home each week).

https://www.bedbathandbeyond.com/store/product/ball-reg-cann...

Basically: put cold brew into the home fridge on Saturday. Wake up Sunday to do the filtering (roughly 1.7 liters of cold brew). A "standard" cup of coffee is 6oz, which is 170 milliliters.

Bring your ~1700 milliliters of coffee to work (labeled!!) in a Mason Jar on Monday. Drink 2-cups / day (average) from Monday through Friday. Bring the mason jar home on Friday, wash it, and repeat the cold-brew / filtration process on Saturday / Sunday.

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I'm sure I'm saving the environment and stuff. But really, I do this because its more convenient. Its far faster for me to open up my mason jar recap, pour out 6oz of coffee, and then return to my desk.

Sometimes, I split it up into 16oz jars on Sunday as well. In case I wanna leave some at home, or drink something on the drive to work. But a singular giant 64oz jar sitting in my office fridge has plenty of benefits too. Ball offers jars in 8oz, 12oz, 14oz, and 16oz, 32oz, and 64oz sizes, so you have a lot of options for how you want to store your individual servings of cold brew.

In any case: even a K-Cup requires you to wait for the coffee to pour through the cup, which is slow due to the internal filter in the K-Cup. In essence: I've "time shifted" all of the filtration time to Sundays (where I have more time to wait for the filter), instead of during the workday.

>Its my coffee, I don't want anyone else drinking my coffee.

If we're concerned with the environmental impact of K-Cups this isn't really a solution. You need something that scales for the communal group instead of just individual consumption. If you're just talking about coffee for yourself you could just as easily recommend everyone brings their own beans and keep and aeropress at work. Or just make pourover for themselves by keeping some kalitas in the kitchen.

> If we're concerned with the environmental impact of K-Cups this isn't really a solution.

I'm simply talking about the convenience factor, personally.

> If you're just talking about coffee for yourself you could just as easily recommend everyone brings their own beans and keep and aeropress at work. Or just make pourover for themselves by keeping some kalitas in the kitchen.

Those options are no where nearly as convenient as K-Cups, or Cold brew. People use K-Cups because of the convenience factor.

When I pour my cold brew, I don't need to do anything at all. No cleanup (not even throwing away anything). Its purely pouring out of a 64oz Mason Jar, which I clean once a week at home (and put more coffee in).

K-Cups are almost as convenient. But in comparison to the Mason-Jar method, you have to wait for the filter (K-Cups pour relatively slowly), you have to wait for the water to return to a ideal temperature (I don't like my coffee to burn me. I prefer to gulp the cold brew ASAP). In any case, K-Cups are very convenient, just not QUITE as convenient as cold brew. There's usually a line in the Keurig machine too at my office, since its a popular device.

Once we're talking about Aeropresses, now you have a cleanup stage. Which means you're touching the icky sponge in the office kitchen. You've also got to measure the proper amount of coffee. That's a LOT of work if you only plan to drink 6oz to 12oz of coffee.

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The hack works because:

1. Making 1750 mL of coffee at a time is convenient. Bigger batches means less work in the aggregate.

2. The recipe itself is incredibly easy. Less than 5-minutes prep time on Saturday (120g of Coffee + 1750 mL of Water), less than 10-minutes waiting for the filter. And I can do other things while waiting for the filter to go through, its mostly a passive process.

3. 32oz or 64oz mason jars are surprisingly space-efficient uses of the office fridge. You don't really use much space when you do this.

Based on the discussion, it sounds like there may be ways to optimize the filteration process that I wasn't aware of. I'll play around with the recipe as I go along, but its relatively little work for a whole lot of coffee.

Optimizing for time is the name of the game.

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