Cold brew coffee

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Ingredients:

  • 75 grams coarsely ground coffee
  • 500mL cold water

Combine the above in a large enough jar or pitcher. Allow to steep for 12-24 hours, then strain.

I use a Hario mizudashi pitcher (affiliate link) to make the process a lot easier.

This is pretty great on its own, but with my most recent batch (using the same overly-caramelly dark roast as in the coffee soda experiment), I poured it into a nitro cream whipper (affiliate link) and gave it a nitro boost. The resulting coffee was a bit foamy (I probably shook it too much and brought in too much nitrous) but it tasted way creamier and sweeter, without any need for cream or sugar. And, this has the benefit of being decaf; as far as I know none of the local or chain coffee shops offer decaf cold-brew, and certainly not nitro decaf.

Just a word of warning: decaf coffee still has some caffeine in it, and the cold-brew process is extremely efficient at extracting every last little bit. If you’re particularly caffeine-sensitive you’ll still want to limit your consumption of this.

Coffee soda

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During the COVID-19 lockdown, my favorite local roaster had temporarily closed their retail shops, and being unwilling to spend $8 to get a bag of coffee shipped literally across the street, I decided to try to find other local roasters who made decaf that I could buy at the grocery store, with the hopes of finding something espresso-suitable. I failed.

Thankfully, Vivace reopened this week so I am now well-stocked on good coffee. But I still have a bunch of other coffee hanging around, so I decided, why not try making other things with it?

The first experiment: making cold-brew coffee soda.

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Improving my tamper

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I’ve been very much enjoying the Flair, and have gotten very used to pulling shots with it. Since the making of the video I’ve streamlined my morning routine, and also started using a cork trivet as a tamping pad, which is easier on my countertops and the portafilter.

The big downside to the cheapest Flair model is it doesn’t really come with a tamper though, it just comes with a dosing cup that sort of doubles as one. But it’s not very good.

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Brewing with Flair

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Today I got a Flair manual espresso maker, and I found that the manual that came with it was a little hard to follow, and the official “how to use Flair” videos were all about the higher-end models and also not that great to follow, and I couldn’t find any useful videos from reviewers on how to actually use the darn thing.

So after I played with it a bunch I figured out how to use it and drew a few shots (which all came out excellent! Espresso Vivace knows how to roast.). So I decided I’d share how I do it, which might be helpful for someone else.

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