This cold brew is ideal when you are brewing a beer with coffee. But of course you can also drink it without using it as an ingredient for beer.
By making a cold brew coffee you are steeping coarse ground coffee beans in cold water. By doing it this way you prevent the extraction of a bitter and tart tast from the coffee. This technique is almost the same as you can do with cold steeping dark grains.
For a good (let’s say perfect) cold brew, it is best to steep it for about 12 to 24 hours. The longer you let it steep, the better (stronger) the coffee will be.
You then filter the infusion with a cold coffee as a result. You can then put it away in the fridge and enjoy it with some ice cubes.
But the greatest thing is that you can also use the cold coffee to brew beer. A good example is adding the coffee to a porter. You are actually brewing a coffee porter this way.
Cold brew recipe
With this recipe you make a nice cold brew coffee. You can just drink it as cold coffee or use it when brewing beer.
Ingredients
- 30 grams of coarsely ground coffee beans
- 500 ml cold water
Steps
- Measure the coffee beans and punt them in the coffee grinder.
- Press the button 5 times
- Put the ground coffee in a jar
- Pour the cold water or ground coffee
- Give the mixture a good stir
- Let it steep for some 12 – 24 hours
- Filter the coffee with a filter
- Catch the coffee in a jar and put the lid on it
- Place the coffee in the fridge
- It is ready to drink!
Which coffee beans to use?
I personally prefer the strongest beans possible and therefore I would choose for a dark roast coffee. For a recent cold brew I have used Dark Roast from Starbucks because I find these very tasty myself.
It is also sensible to choose for coffee beans and not for already ground coffee. You want the coffee ground too fine and by using beans you can influence the coarse yourself.
Preferably, I recommend grinding the coffee beans with an electric coffee grinder. By briefly pressing the button a few times, the ground coffee does not become too fine.
Filtering the cold brew
There are a couple of options for filtering. If you choose to put the infusion in the weck jar or other sealable jar you just can filter the cold coffee by using a coffee filter. Put the filter on a clean jar and then pour the mixture over it.
An alternative is to use a French Press or a cafetière, so you don’t have to filter it with a coffee filter. It depends on what you find handy and what you already have at home.
Drink or use it for brewing?
Like I’ve a said before: you can make a cold brew coffee and add this to the wort during brew day. You can just add the coffee at the end of the boil or during the fermentation.
Or you can just drink it on a hot summer day by making a nice ice coffee. Mix it with, for some example with soy milk or ice cream. Add some ice cubes to it and you have a tasty drink.
Photo by Rachel Brenner on Unsplash
