Level Up Your Cold Brew (with 2 easy steps)
Do you love cold brew? You definitely need to try this method. Do you know someone who hates Cold Brew? This could change their mind.
Today Cath is going to show us how to level up your Cold Brew and impress the experts. Before you get started, you might want to check out our first Cold Brew video, where we should you a super simple traditional way of making Cold Brew.
Today we are building on that method by adding two easy steps, and the differences in flavours will blow your mind.
- Step 1 is a Hot Bloom
- Step 2 is an Iced Bath
Why are we doing this? Well, there are some really tasty acidic compounds in coffee that only dissolve in hot temperatures. If you use the traditional method of making cold brew (which uses room temperature water to brew the coffee), then you complete miss out on this flavours.
This is why we will do the Hot Bloom or the Hot Infusion. There’s a catch, though. We want to dissolve these flavours, but avoid exposing the coffee to prolonged heat, because that’s when oxidation occurs and you get nasty flavours. That’s the whole reason why we make Cold Brew in the first place, and we don’t just make hot coffee and cool it down. This is why we will do an iced bath.
Let’s make it!
You will need:
- 50g coffee grounds medium to coarse
- 150ml hot water ( 92-96ºC)
- 550ml room temperature / cool water
- (Total 700 ml of water)
- Ice bath
- Metal bowl
We are using a metal bowl because we will be taking this from hot to cold really quickly and other materials might not be able to withstand the change in temperature.
Let’s go!
- Place your coffee into the bowl
- Pour in your hot water, making sure you cover all of the grounds (you can give it a stir with a spoon if you miss a little)
- Immediately plunge that into your iced bath
- Add the remaining 550ml of water
You can just pour the remaining water into metal bowl and pop that in the fridge, you could transfer the whole thing to a Tupperware or you can do what I’m going to do, which is transfer the whole thing into a Cold Brew bottle like one of these Hario Bottles.
The Hario Filter-in Bottle has an built-in filter which makes it really easy to filter the coffee grounds after you’ve placed the bottle overnight in the fridge (it also fits nicely in the drawer of the fridge, taking up much less space).
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