Better coffee. One cup at a time.

Month: May 2016

How to Cold Brew Coffee 2.0- Three Cold Brew Hacks that will Start Your Summer Right

The average daily temperature is rising, you can hear the drone of lawn mowers throughout the neighborhood and, most likely, your urges to sit outside and drink a cold refreshing coffee drink have returned. It is cold brew coffee season again (I’m a little late actually).

If you have never made cold brew at home, it is one of the more simple brewing methods. You need minimal equipment and experience. I recommend starting with my Introduction to Cold Brew Coffee post. This will give you a basic understanding of the process and a recipe with an equipment list. If you have never read it, go now and get started.

If you have brewed a batch or two of cold brew or are just looking for some ways to experiment with your coffee, this post is for you. I am upping the cold brew ante and sharing a couple of my favorite cold brew hacks to get your summer started off on the right foot.

Here are three cold brew techniques that will help you take your cold brew coffee to the next level (or at least give you some fun experiments to try).

Easy Kyoto Style Cold Brew

Credit for this technique goes to Prima Coffee and this sweet post featuring a DIY Aeropress Kyoto method (and a Hot Bloom recipe) from last year.

Kyoto Style Cold Brew is a different take on cold brewing coffee. I like to think of it as the cold brewing equivalent to a pour-over (since most other recipes are full immersion). For this brewing method, ice cold water is dripped over a coffee bed for a period of hours and the cold brew slowly drips out of the bottom of the coffee bed into a collection container.

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Eggs in Coffee – How to Make Norwegian Egg Coffee

Looking for a new variable to add to your coffee brewing? Putting eggs in coffee might seem a little bit strange but it is a hearty tradition rooted in American Midwest church basements.

When I did research for my post on cowboy coffee, something that I came across quite a few times was the concept of putting eggshells in coffee while it brews. There is apparently something in the chemical makeup of an eggshell that binds with the ground coffee and makes it sink to the bottom.

If you are interested in clarifying your cowboy coffee a bit, I recommend giving the eggshell method a try. Start with my cowboy coffee recipe and simply add one or two crushed eggshell.

Recipes for Norwegian egg coffee take this concept in a different direction and include a whole egg minus the shell.

As I was reading about Norwegian egg coffee, I came across claims of the proteins in an egg binding with some of the astringent and bitter compounds contained in coffee and essentially removing them.

I was curious.

Even though I know that a great coffee, brewed properly should not be astringent or bitter (or at least the bitterness should be balanced with the sweet and acidic flavors), the thought of throwing an entire egg into the mix was too interesting to pass up.

Conventional wisdom says that adding an egg to your coffee would not be an improvement but as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The only thing to do was to get a few eggs and try it out.

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