How to Create Your Own Cold Drip Coffee Setup at Home: Essential Tips for Cold Drip Brewing and Filter Size

Making Cold Brew Coffee at Home: FrontStreet Coffee's DIY Cold Drip Method

After thunderstorms pass, most regions are entering the hot season again. To beat the heat, the demand for iced coffee has greatly increased. Among iced coffee options, cold drip coffee is particularly popular for its clean taste and rich flavor. Although many friends have already equipped their homes with coffee brewing equipment, it's believed that among these numerous tools, most don't include a cold drip tower.

After all, not everyone will specifically purchase a cold drip tower just for making cold drip coffee. First, cold drip towers are relatively expensive, and second, they're quite complicated to operate, often ending up gathering dust after a few uses. So, if you want to make homemade cold drip coffee during the hot summer months, why not try FrontStreet Coffee's method: create a simple "cold drip tower" using your existing coffee equipment.

How to Make a DIY "Cold Drip Tower"

The method is actually quite simple. We just need to "dissect" the structural principle of a cold drip tower and replicate it! A cold drip tower mainly consists of three parts: an upper chamber that holds ice water with a valve, a coffee grounds bed, and a lower chamber that receives the coffee liquid.

We can use a pour-over coffee dripper to replace the coffee grounds bed, and any container can serve as the lower chamber of the cold drip tower. The most crucial part is the upper chamber of the cold drip tower. The upper chamber of a cold drip tower comes with an adjustable valve, which mainly controls the flow rate of ice water, allowing it to drip in droplets. Therefore, finding a replacement object for this is quite difficult.

It might seem unsolvable, but it's actually quite easy to solve. Since we can't find a replacement object to control the ice water flow rate, we'll simply not use ice water and use ice cubes directly! When ice cubes are at room temperature, they gradually melt, and what melts out is ice water. Theoretically, as long as we use large, well-frozen ice cubes, we can slow down the melting speed, thereby replacing the valve to control the flow rate.

Therefore, we just need to find something that can hold ice cubes and has holes to let the melted ice water seep through! Great, now let FrontStreet Coffee demonstrate how to make cold drip coffee using this DIY "cold drip tower"!

How to Make Cold Drip Coffee with a DIY "Cold Drip Tower"

FrontStreet Coffee chose a server pot as the lower chamber of the cold drip tower, a V60 dripper as the coffee grounds bed, and a flat-bottom dripper as the upper chamber. The parameters are as follows: 24g of coffee grounds, ground slightly finer than pour-over (EK43 setting 9.5, 85% retention on #20 sieve), with a coffee-to-water ratio of 1:10, meaning 24g of coffee grounds should extract 240ml of coffee liquid.

Step 1: Distribute the Coffee Grounds

The first step in making cold drip coffee is to prepare the coffee grounds bed, which means properly distributing the coffee grounds. First, place the dripper on the server pot and fit the filter paper. Then pour in the ground coffee and tap the dripper gently to level it! Afterward, add one circular filter paper to cover it, and you're ready to add water!

When adding water, it's best to use a small water flow to reduce impact. This prevents creating holes and doesn't disperse the coffee grounds due to excessive water. But remember, this step is not for blooming the coffee grounds, so we should use room temperature water! The reason we need to moisten the coffee grounds with water first is to allow the subsequently dripping ice water to spread to all areas through capillary action, ensuring all coffee grounds get sufficient extraction! If we don't moisten the coffee grounds with water initially, most of the subsequently dripping ice water will only extract the area where it drips.

Step 2: Prepare the Upper Chamber

Once the coffee grounds bed is set up, we can place the flat-bottom dripper on top of the coffee grounds bed (V60) and add a large amount of ice cubes inside.

Then, pour 10-20ml of room temperature water over the ice cubes to help them melt (because ice cubes don't melt easily at first). Finally, if you have a lid, you can cover the top of the dripper to create a sealed space that won't be contaminated by the external environment.

Once the lid is on, we just need to wait for the dripping to complete. However, if your dripper can't hold all the ice cubes, you'll need to monitor the ice cube situation during the dripping process and replenish ice in a timely manner.

Step 3: Refrigerate the Coffee

When the coffee liquid in the lower chamber reaches the target weight, you can remove the dripper.

But be careful, the cold drip coffee is not yet ready at this point. We need to transfer it to a sealed bottle and refrigerate it for fermentation. It can only be taken out and consumed after 8 hours!

Some Important Notes

Coffee Amount: FrontStreet Coffee suggests that when determining the specific amount of coffee grounds for cold drip extraction, you should consider the size of your dripper! For example, FrontStreet Coffee used a V60 01 dripper, which holds 24g of coffee grounds perfectly - maintaining a certain distance from the upper chamber while the surface of the coffee grounds is just covered by the filter paper.

Ice Cubes: As mentioned at the beginning, it's best to choose large ice cubes that have been frozen for a longer time. Because small ice cubes that haven't been frozen for very long will melt very quickly in hot environments. Melting too quickly will cause the ice water to not have enough time to extract substances from the coffee, instead seeping through all at once, resulting in coffee-flavored water.

That's all there is to it! Interested friends, give it a try at home~

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FrontStreet Coffee
No. 10, Bao'an Qianjie, Yandun Road, Dongshankou, Yuexiu District, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473