Food Adventures #28: Cold Brewed Coffee

I read Cory Doctorow's latest novel Homeland not that long ago and one of the many things that caught my eye as I was reading was the main character, Marcus' love of cold brewed coffee.   This intrigued me as iced coffee is something that I have never really been able to wrap my head around.  I can get behind it when there's a shitload of cream and flavoring but black iced coffee?  Iced coffee with just plain old skim milk?  Not so much- and summer is coming and I'm always looking for a refreshing drink to keep cool.

The basic recipe- and this is taken straight from the book itself, is as follows:

Just grind coffee--keep it coarse, with grains about the size of sea salt-- and combine it with twice as much water in an airtight jar.  Give it a hard shake and stick it somewhere cool overnight (I used a cooler bag loaded with ice from ice camp and wrapped the whole thing in bubble wrap for insulation).  In the morning, strain it through a colander and a paper coffee filter.  What you've got now is coffee concentrate, which you can dilute with cold water to taste-- I got about half and half.  If you're feeling fancy, serve it over ice.

Sounds pretty basic, right?  How could I resist something as simple as this--  not only is Doctorow usually on the cutting edge of technology in his novels but his politics aren't bad either and both of his novels have been packed with real world technology and issues you can read about in his book and Google if you're interested in learning more.

So I found me a mason jar, grabbed a bag of unground Caribou Roast and ran into a problem.  I didn't have a coffee grinder.   When the Missus suggested the Food Processor we gave that the good old college try and that's when things got messy- because we discovered that coffee beans have this tendency to fly out of a food processor when you're trying to grind them.  And covering the opening at the lip of the jug didn't help us much either.   But we switched to the blender got the job done and added the appropriate amount of water, gave the mason jar a good hard shake and put it in the fridge overnight.

The next morning, I ended up with this:

After I had strained out my yummy coffee concentrate, I decided I'd stick with the recipe from the book and just go with half concentrate, half water and I got a big enough glass that I could just use all of it and then I did something that I don't normally do:  I drank it straight black.

My Verdict:  I have a sneaking suspicion you could get the same results with a French Press but the recipe isn't wrong.   The coffee that results is more flavorful and less bitter than usual and there are hints of chocolate and hazelnut that make it seem sweeter than usual.  The only downside is that it's a little time consuming and the payoff amount to one extra large cup of coffee. I'll give this another shot though-- and maybe this time, I'll add milk.  Or creamer.  And see what it tastes like then.