French press Cold brew, part II

Filtering the french brewed coffee

Over a thousand years ago, coffee has been the beverage of choice to countless millions for getting a start on the day. Brazilians love their coffee so much that the term breakfast is "café da manha", literally translated as coffee of the morning. The method of brewing coffee has changed only slightly in the past millennium and remains much the same across cultures; steep the beans in hot water to extract their caffeine and flavor.

That changed in 1964 when a graduate student by the name of Todd Simpson developed a method of cold brewing coffee. He went to develop the Toddy Coffee Maker which at its core is a gravity-fed brewing system. The result is much more potent than a normal brew and has nearly 70% less acidity. Writen by Sean

The filtering of the brewed coffee, close up

This project started off by some inspiration from my local coffee shop, cause they were offering the newly imported Hario drip tower at staggering 1.700 DKK ($295). I personally hadn't tried any cold brewed coffee before and were curious about how the taste would develop when using cold water.

One day the owner of the coffee shop had made a pot of freshly brewed cold coffee (brewed for eight hours) and I took my first sip. The flavors was just magnificent! It was very sirupy and sweet without any bitterness at all, a completely renewed summer drink. 

Slowly filter of the cold brewed coffee

 I therefore started investigating if I could build my own drip tower at a lower cost, but I found a webpage delivering a method of using a french press, which I already had. PERFECT!! I went grinding some freshly roasted beans and poured them over with could water in the french press. The mixture was placed in the fridge for 12 hours, when I finally filtered the cold brewed coffee. 

Almost done filtering the cold brewed coffee

 The cold brewed coffee was filtered through a normal coffee filter into a pitcher. This took a while because the brewed coffee had a very thick and sirupy texture, leaving a slow pass trough the coffee paper. 

In the next French press Cold brew, part III I will describe the final result and judge wether the experiment have been a success nor a failure, stay tuned.

// Hendrup

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