How To Make Cold Brew At Home

 How To Make Cold Brew At Home

Cold brew is one of the easiest and tastiest iced coffee drinks to make at home. It’s perfect for summer, doesn’t require a lot of equipment, and because it’s steeped for 12-24 hours, there isn’t any acidity or bitterness. 

What exactly is cold brew? It’s simply ground coffee steeped in cold, filtered water for 12-24 hours. There’s two versions you could make; a cold brew concentrate and cold brew ready to drink. A cold brew concentrate (which is what we made) uses a 1:4 ratio; 1 part coffee to 4 parts water. This one will turn out stronger in flavor so if it’s a little much for you, you could dilute it by adding ice and/or extra water to your cup. If you want a cold brew that’s ready to drink, use a 1:8 ratio. You could still add ice to your glass to keep the coffee chilled. It will dilute a bit with the ice cubes melting, but not by much. 

Since this recipe is made using just coffee beans and water, the type of beans you use will of course play a huge part in the flavor of your cold brew. We used our Mt. Shuksan blend which is a medium roast and perfect for pour-overs and cold brew. We recommend using beans that you enjoy and know taste great. Especially if you don’t like to add any sweeteners or cream, a light to medium roast bean will bring out the most flavor notes.

There are two things you’ll need to make the cold brew. A coffee grinder and either a cold brew maker (we used the KitchenAid one), or a large glass jar and strainer. Alright, let’s get to it!

The first thing you’ll want to do is grind your beans. Since we made more of a concentrate, we used 1 cup of whole beans and 4 cups of filtered, cold water. Once you’ve measured out your cup of beans, grind them to a very coarse consistency. We used a Baratza Encore grinder and set the grind size to about 37-38. The highest it goes up to is 40. So it was very coarse. It's important to have coarse beans for a couple of reasons. One, if you don’t then you’ll end up with cowboy coffee (meaning there’ll be a bunch of sludgy coffee at the bottom of your cup. And two, the most flavor is extracted from the beans when it’s super coarse.

Once your beans have been grinded, add them into your cold brew maker (or glass jar, even a french press will work) and pour 4 cups of water over the beans. A little pro tip: add fresh blackberries for extra flavor, it’s so tasty! 

And that’s basically it! Just pop your cold brew in the fridge and let it sit there for 12-24 hours. We recommend 24 hours to get the most out of your beans, but try to not go over that otherwise your cold brew may end up tasting a little bitter. 

After 24 hours, strain your cold brew and it’s time to enjoy! Use a cheesecloth or even a pour-over filter to strain out the coffee beans. You don’t want any ground coffee in your drink so use whatever you have to make this happen. 

If you like to enjoy your cold brew with some delicious cold foam on top, here is our recipe for that. It’ll add some sweetness and mouth feel. Not to mention it tastes like vanilla bean ice cream. 

So to make the cold foam, we use a 1:1 ratio of non-fat milk and heavy whipping cream. Add 2 tablespoons of milk and 2 tablespoons of cream into a pitcher or cup. Add 1 tablespoon sweetener of choice; we used our house-made Madagascar vanilla syrup.

Then whisk it up using a handheld milk frother for about 7-10 seconds. At this point you’ll see that it’s thickened up a bit. Pour it over your cold brew and you’ll be mesmerized at how cool it looks when it starts to mix in with the coffee.  

This is definitely one of our summer favorites and we hope it’ll become yours as well! For the full video on how to make this incredible drink, click here.