Cold Brew Coffee | Easy DIY Cold Brew Coffee Guide

Cold brew coffee seems to have taken off everywhere in the last couple of summers. With its icy texture and mellow, balanced flavor, and a preparation method that's almost laughably simple, it's easy to see why. Today, let's explore its charm and find out what makes it so appealing!

Table of Contents

1. What is cold brew coffee?
2. The difference between cold brew coffee and iced coffee
3. Making your own cold brew coffee

What Is Cold Brew Coffee?

Cold brew coffee originated in the United States and spread to Japan and Europe through social media platforms like Instagram. After Starbucks officially launched its own "Cold Brew," it finally became a worldwide phenomenon.

As the name suggests, cold brew is coffee extracted with cold water, a true "iced coffee" from start to finish. Like cold-brewed tea, it achieves a mellower, more balanced cup through long, low-temperature extraction.

Cold Brew Coffee vs. Iced Coffee

The iced coffee most of us know is hot-brewed coffee extracted at high temperature, then rapidly chilled with ice cubes or ice water. Cold brew, by contrast, is extracted entirely at low temperature over a long period.

Because the beans never meet high heat, the release of tannic acid and caffeine is restrained, which is why cold brew tastes milder and sweeter, neither sharply acidic nor astringent.

The method is also wonderfully simple: master the coffee-to-water ratio and steep for a long time (12+ hours), and you're done. That has made cold brew a favorite among office workers, grind and brew the night before, refrigerate overnight, and wake up to icy cold coffee in the morning.

Cold brew also reportedly keeps longer without losing flavor. In short: a genuine blessing for black-coffee lovers!

Making Your Own Cold Brew Coffee

Ingredients (450 ml)

• Coffee beans: 40 g
• Cold water: 500 ml

★ The coffee-to-water ratio should run slightly stronger than your regular pour-over. Once you're familiar with the process, adjust to taste. This recipe uses 40 g of beans to 500 ml of water because I still add ice when drinking, so I want it concentrated. If you drink it straight, reduce it to 30 g : 500 ml.

★ When shooting this recipe I used lightly roasted FrontStreet Elida beans, so the brewed coffee looks lighter in color. These beans had sat unused for a long time because they were really too acidic for hot brewing... but the cold brew method tames that acidity nicely.

Method

❶ Weigh and grind: weigh out the beans and grind them. Finer grinds need less extraction time; coarser grinds need more.

❷ Cold-water brewing: fold the filter paper, set it in the teapot's filter basket, add the grounds, then slowly pour the cold water in.

★ There are many ways to do this, a French press works too; just steep and press. Or add water directly to the grounds and filter before drinking. I simply used the tools I had on hand.

❸ Cold extraction: refrigerate overnight to let the extraction complete.

❹ Enjoy!

❺ You can even follow cheese-foam recipes to make cold brew with a cheese-foam cap!

Glass cups, teapots, cup coasters...

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

FrontStreet Strawberry Candy Gesha Blend: Gesha is world-famous for its classic florals and fresh fruity sweet-sourness. FrontStreet's Strawberry Candy combines the most representative Panamanian Gesha with Costa Rican honey-process coffee, one contributing delicate rose and orange, the other raisin-and-blueberry sweetness with a strawberry-gummy finish, building rich layers of flavor. As cold brew it's tangy-sweet and lively, and if you let it ferment and settle briefly, it even takes on a fruit-wine character.

FrontStreet Natural Huakui (Flower Queen): Cold brew amplifies floral-and-fruit tones while downplaying woody and roast notes, so a light-medium roast shows the method off best. If you love florals in your iced coffee, grab FrontStreet's Huakui. It comes from Ethiopia, coffee's birthplace, and because it's a natural process, the beans absorbed a wealth of sweet compounds inside the fruit skin. As cold brew it shows magnolia, creamy strawberry, dried mango, guava, and black-tea notes.

FrontStreet Kenya Cherry Tomato: For a cold brew bursting with fruit-juice fullness, reach for FrontStreet's Kenya Cherry Tomato. The tangy-sweet tones of cherry tomato, snow pear, black plum, and dried plum unfold completely at low-temperature extraction, low bitterness, full acidity, wonderfully refreshing over ice, with a long fragrant finish. It comes from Thika, Kenya, on carefully bred SL28 and SL34 with their complex berry aromatics, and uses Kenya's distinctive K72 double-washed fermentation, which lets the green beans express their character to the fullest. Roasted medium-light, it converts precursor aromatics into more complex scents, giving the coffee its rich fruit profile.

FrontStreet Colombia Sidra + FrontStreet Costa Rica Tarrazu: Cold brew consumes more grounds than pour-over, so instead of pricey top-grade beans, start with affordable everyday beans, or blend to get both flavor and value. Many people love the passion fruit, grape, apricot, and dried-fruit aromatics of FrontStreet's Colombia Sidra but find it too costly alone; add FrontStreet's Costa Rica Tarrazu at a 1:2 ratio and you keep the Sidra's floral-fruit character and the Tarrazu's crisp citrus acidity while stretching the budget.

FrontStreet Worka (Idido) Cooperative Yirgacheffe: Yirgacheffe is the most iconic African coffee, and its rich florals and fruit tones have captured a huge following. Washed Yirgacheffe in particular brings clean, bright sweet-sourness at an everyday price, and it's endlessly versatile, pour-over, siphon, French press, cold brew all work, making it the first choice for most home brewers. FrontStreet's Worka lot is among the most representative washed Yirgacheffes, with outstanding quality and cold-brew character to match: very sweet berry notes, clear layering, and honeyed flavors.