Focus on cold brew coffee
Cold-brewed coffee for extra freshness !
Hello again, coffee lovers! With the return of the heat, we wanted to tell you about a little-known but refreshingly original drink: the cold brew. ☕️
It’s a cold-brewed coffee, but let’s stop you right there: this one is very different from an espresso that’s been left to cool.
It’s designed and made to have the best possible taste to delight the taste buds of coffee lovers like us (and maybe you too? 👀). Traditionally, making a cold brew is a process in which tempered water runs, drop by drop, through coffee grounds for several hours.
But in truth (and fortunately for us) there are many recipes and many ways to make a cold brew depending on how much time you have on your hands. 🕔
In this article, we take a look back at these different recipes.
The traditional method: the slow drip
The original cold brew method comes straight from Japan, where it has been practiced for centuries! As we’ve just told you, there’s a traditional method that involves extracting coffee for 12 to 24 hours. Indeed, it may seem a little long, but this method will guarantee you a tasty result, more concentrated in caffeine and above all rich in aroma. 😋
In fact, the coffee is in contact with water at room temperature and flows through freshly ground coffee for several hours for a directly cold-extracted coffee. ❄️
Cold water will have a harder time soaking up the coffee’s oils, which is why it will take longer and why we recommend using more coffee than usual for a classic slow coffee.
To your surprise, the coffee maker used for this is called the ‘slow drip’ and you’ll find one of its models above.
For the curious, it’s available everywhere for sale on the internet! 😌
The bottle infusion method
The Japanese brand Kinto and the Hario brand have released carafes that allow you to brew your coffee directly inside the bottle.
This method is the most convenient and the least cumbersome, as all you have to do is place ground coffee inside the carafe’s filter before filling it with cold water. In effect, the coffee will brew in the same way as a tea or herbal tea. 🤩
Thanks to this method, you’ll get light, smooth flavors. Cold water infusion makes the coffee very smooth, without any bitterness, for a pleasant and very refreshing result! 🧊 (it’s also a good bottle for easy iced tea at home 😉)
This is the method we adopt at Occasion Café. It allows us to produce a large quantity of cold brew in one go! But when we don’t have one on hand, we’re adept at the next method we’re about to introduce: the dripper on ice.
Dripper on ice
Coffee on ice, or dripper on ice, is a slow coffee dripped onto a bed of ice cubes! Using the V60 method, for example (we’ll explain just how it works here), it’s easy enough to turn a hot coffee recipe into a cold one! This method is also widely used by Japanese coffee lovers. 🇯🇵
For those who need more details, the dripper is a manual coffee maker that uses gravity to make the coffee flow (unlike a traditional machine, which uses pressure).
In other words, hot water is poured through ground coffee to pick up the coffee’s oils and flavours. Our water then simply becomes coffee 😉
So when we pour this coffee over a bed of ice cubes, we get a super cold brew that’s quick and easy (well, still longer than a machine would take, but hey, it’s a far cry from the traditional 24-hour technique 😂).
You can try it out at home if you have a manual coffee maker of this type, and you’ll see that the result is quite impressive!
The result of a dripper on ice is not very bitter, as the coffee is diluted by the ice cubes. However, the taste will be stronger than with the kinto method (infusion in the bottle), because we’re using a slow coffee method, and slow coffee never disappoints 😉
Nitro cold brew
The last method we wanted to tell you about is a rather original, less common and surprising one!
Nitro Cold Brew is a sparkling, frothy coffee that’s going to be drawn from a machine (weird, doesn’t that sound a lot like another type of drink? 🍺).
It’s actually a coffee that’s served in exactly the same way as a beer would be. Yes we told you it was amazing, and so is the taste! 🤯
In fact, it’s completely different from the drinks we’re used to seeing like cappuccinos, lattes or macchiatos. The nitro cold brew was invented by a food scientist who wanted to give his coffee more flavor and so decided to inject nitrogen, to make the coffee less bitter and slightly fizzy.
Who would have thought that coffee could be a fizzy drink?
Try it out and arouse your curiosity 😉
In conclusion, what you need to remember about cold brew for those who don’t know is = refreshment and smoothness. It’s the perfect alternative to iced latte or iced americano, because this way of extracting coffee directly cold will offer you a very different aromatic palette.
Cold brew is the lemonade of coffee lovers 🤣
On a more serious note, this is a drink we recommend you try if you’ve never tried it before (and if you like coffee, of course). Regardless of the recipe used, this drink really does have refreshing benefits and above all a unique taste, that of (good) cold coffee.
Because, as we said at the start of this article, cold coffee doesn’t have to be synonymous with a coffee bottom that’s been left to stand for too long. For a good cold coffee, recipes have been invented, methods that make it possible to achieve a tasty cup. ☕️
At l’Occasion Café, we have our own bottles of cold brew for sale (on site or to take away)! Don’t hesitate if you want to take a caffeinated break 😉
See you soon at Occasion Café! ✅
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