cold brewed coffee...

Doesn't look like much, does it? Or indeed particularly appetising, despite my attempt to make it look pretty with a pot of geraniums, but bear with me.

I love coffee, but I'm lazy. It's too expensive to use pods for the coffee machine, too laborious to make it using an espresso maker and filter and drip coffee just makes bad tasting, weak ass coffee in my opinion, so I drink instant. Which is sacrilege in itself if you actually do enjoy coffee.

I'm also really bad at actually remembering to drink the mug of coffee I've made. At uni, I would make a mug, go to a lecture without drinking it and drink it cold when I came back. I do the same at work, getting caught up in putting jobs together or with phoning. Plus, seeing it's the basement and up until a few weeks ago I still had the heating on in the lab, it was always stone cold when I come to drink my mug anyway. It's lucky really that I really like cold coffee.

So after seeing it pop up in my Pinterest feed on repeated occasions - and figuring it if you can't beat it, you're better joining - I decided to try and make cold brew coffee using a recipe from Gimme Some Oven and it's so beautifully simple.


Ingredients:
1 cup Ground Coffee (approximately 85 grams)
4 cups/1 litre Cold Water

Method:
1. Stir together coffee grounds and water into a large, seal-able container.
2. Place in the refrigerator for 12-24 hours.
3. Strain coffee through a very fine strainer, muslin cloth or coffee filter into a clean container.
4. Pour into a bottle which can hold approximately 1 litre, and store in the fridge.


Essentially you're making a coffee concentrate, which you can then dilute to however you like it best. For me it's milk and sugar because that's how I would drink hot coffee, however I can get away with less sweetness when it's cold. In general go for 1:2 ratio using a 1/3 cup as a measure:

Remember, if you like it sweet, the sugar will take longer to dissolve in the cold liquid so, either you can put it in a jar and shake it up* to speed it up. Or use honey. Or if you're feeling like you feel a little decadent and want to make it flavoured coffee, use something like Monin's Caramel Syrup. It will probably still have fewer calories in it than the mainstream mainstays frozen coffee drinks.

It's also cheaper. For every litre in an average brew, I can have approximately 12 cups of coffee and for every bag of coffee, of which a measuring cup is a third of the bag, I get 36 cups with very little effort and cheaper than instant coffee... it also tastes a million times better!

Seriously, if you like cold coffee, try it, because it's easier than making instant and definitely less hit or miss flavour wise. You get your caffeine fix, it's not as bitter, less acidic so hopefully no coffee related heartburn (or burns in general) and again, it's throwing coffee grounds in a bowl with water, leaving them overnight and straining, if that's too difficult then step away from the coffee and find a barista!


* "I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, I shake it off, I shake it off... I, I shake it off, I shake it off..." That's Taylor Swift and variety of parody's stuck in my head for the remainder of the night, if not the week. 

Link | Cold Brew Coffee from Gimme Some Oven
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Listening: Shake It Off - Taylor Swift