Step-by-Step Guide: How to Make Cold Brew Coffee at Home - Cold Brew Coffee Recipe Ratios and Process

The Essence of Cold Brew

Cold brew extraction, in its essence, refers to the process where small molecules that tend toward aroma and acidity are more easily released into cold water under low-temperature conditions. As a result, the coffee tastes light and predominantly exhibits sweet and sour notes. Additionally, due to the lack of equipment and venue limitations, cold brew can be considered an easily accessible form of coffee. At home, as long as you have the ingredients, a bottle, water, and a refrigerator, you can easily achieve caffeine freedom.

Actually, making cold brew coffee is quite simple. As long as we choose coffee beans that suit our preferences and use the right parameters, we can brew delicious cold brew coffee even with our eyes closed. After all, this extraction method simply involves mixing ground coffee with water and placing it in the refrigerator to chill, which basically completes the process.

The Three Key Parameters for Perfect Cold Brew

The reason many friends cannot brew delicious cold brew coffee is mainly because they haven't grasped the correct parameters. If we want to make a delicious cup of cold brew coffee, we must master three key parameters: grind size, ratio, and time.

Coffee Grind Size

The grind size determines the total surface area of the coffee grounds. When the total surface area of the coffee grounds is larger, water can penetrate more quickly to the interior, extracting flavor compounds from the coffee grounds. For long-duration static immersion extraction, a finer grind helps dissolve flavor compounds. Therefore, for coffee grind size, we can adjust it to be slightly finer than that used for pour-over coffee.

Coffee-to-Water Ratio

The coffee-to-water ratio refers to the proportion of coffee grounds to water, which determines the concentration of the coffee. Many friends find their cold brew coffee to be weak because they use too low a coffee-to-water ratio, injecting too much water, which causes excessive dilution of the coffee concentration.

Actually, we can brew cold brew coffee slightly stronger, because if the concentration is too high, we can dilute it by adding ice, but if the concentration is too low... hmm, "reduce the sauce over high heat"? That clearly won't work. Therefore, in the initial stage, we would rather use a relatively high coffee-to-water ratio to make the coffee more concentrated than use too much water and end up with coffee that is too weak.

Coffee Steeping Time

The last thing to pay attention to is the steeping time of the coffee. Because cold brew requires "steeping" to extract substances from the coffee grounds, the duration determines how much material is dissolved. If we want to make the coffee as concentrated as possible, it's best to appropriately extend the steeping time.

Once we are familiar with the above three points, we can proceed to the cold brew coffee making process!

How to Make Cold Brew Coffee

First, let's choose a coffee bean that suits our preferences. If you want to drink cold brew coffee that is full of juicy, sweet, and pleasant characteristics, then you can choose lightly roasted coffee beans. If you want cold brew coffee with very specific and prominent flavors, then we can choose beans that have undergone deeper fermentation during processing. And if we want something with a heavier mouthfeel, then we can choose some medium-dark to dark roasted coffee beans (when making cold brew with dark roasted coffee beans, you can add a small amount of osmanthus, and the resulting coffee will have unexpectedly delicious flavors).

For specific bean selection, everyone can refer to "How to Quickly Find Coffee Beans You Like?" FrontStreet Coffee chose "Mozart," which has been quite popular among shop customers and friends recently, as the brewing bean for this session. The cold brew coffee made with it will have a very full-bodied juicy feeling, with flavor notes of: grapes, berries, red wine, and some purple floral notes similar to lavender.

Mozart Cold Brew Brewing Parameters:

Coffee amount: 80g (everyone can adjust according to their own consumption needs)
Grind setting: Ek43 setting 9, with 85% pass-through rate on #20 sieve, fine sugar grind
Coffee-to-water ratio: 1:10
Steeping time: 12 hours

Remember to prepare a sealable container! When we grind the coffee beans into grounds, the first thing to do is to pour the coffee grounds into the container!

Then pour in the target amount of water! Because FrontStreet Coffee uses 80g of coffee grounds, we will pour in 800ml of room temperature water.

After pouring the water, stir a bit to speed up the wetting of the coffee grounds!

Afterward, the bottle can be sealed and placed in the refrigerator to chill.

When the steeping time is reached, we can take out the coffee, filter out the coffee grounds with filter paper, and enjoy the delicious cold brew coffee! (If it's brewed stronger, remember to dilute with ice~)

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473