After visiting Bluebottle Coffee in SF, trying out their cold brew awesomeness and subsequently seeing this whole cold brew thing blowing up across the California coast I had to give it a go.
The big coffee drippers at bluebottle are these amazing steampunk-esque brass looking behemoths. They drop cold (presumably filtered) water over loosely packed coffee grounds at a couple drips a minute. It probably takes in the region of 12-24 hrs for a complete batch to ‘brew’, but it looks amazing and tastes even better!
I figured I had to try it for myself. Cue playing around with a Hario V60 and some plastic bottles. The hardest part to make was the dripper – I needed something super slow, but reliable. I didn’t want it to stop part way through a 12 hr brew obviously. Also low tech is far more exciting. So I cut the bottom off of one of those 2 litre water bottles, and then cut it in half, and put the top end upside down in the bottom half – making a sort of supported funnel. I then made a pin/needle sized hole in the cap of the bottle, testing it a few times to make sure that a sufficiently slow flow of water got through.
This was then positioned over my Hario V60 with lots of pourover ground coffee in the filter. And then this was delicately balanced on a jug to collect this awesome cold brew. I poured some water in, and waited. And waited. It took a while, like 30 mins before anything came thru, but it was working. At this point I decided to say fuck it, stop watching it and go to sleep.
Next morning, let’s say 12 hours later, it was done. 300mls of cold brew. It had that great almost nutty and ester-y aroma that I’d come to expect, and with a couple ice cubes in it, it was grand. Easy to do, just took a little while. Maybe I’ll try a little lower effort method next time!
