Cold brew
Cold brew is coffee made with cold water and lots of patience: the grounds steep for hours instead of minutes 🧊. Without heat, fewer of the sharp, bitter compounds come out, so it's smooth, sweet and chocolatey with low perceived acidity. You make a big batch once and enjoy it over ice all week. The hardest part is waiting!
Grind: Extra coarse, like peppercorns
Pick your kind
- Easy jar cold brewStir coarse coffee into cold water, wait 12–18 hours, filter. Smooth all week.735 min · easy
- Kyoto-style slow drip cold brewIce water drips through coffee about one drop per second for a few hours. Clean and sparkly.300 min · a little practice
Words you'll hear
- Steep
- Letting the coffee sit in water to extract. For cold brew that's many hours, not minutes.
- Immersion
- All the coffee sits in all the water at once, then you filter it out.
- Concentrate
- Extra-strong cold brew that you dilute with water, milk or ice before drinking.
- Ratio
- Water weight divided by coffee weight. 1:8 means 100 g of coffee to 800 g of water.
- Drip rate
- How fast drops fall in a slow-drip tower, usually counted in drops per second or per minute.
- Extraction
- How much flavor the water pulls from the grounds. Under-extracted tastes sour and thin; over-extracted tastes bitter, woody or dry.
- Bloom
- Pre-wetting the grounds with a little water first, so the rest of the water soaks in evenly instead of channeling.