Hasta La Gadget!

Cold-brewed coffee is the right place to start for great iced-coffee

Cold-brewing is yet another way to make a great cup of coffee. The idea is that the long, slow process, without heating, gives coffee with less bitterness and acidity than conventional hot-water methods. Of course, you probably won’t want to drink it to warm you up on a miserable winter morning, but for making iced-coffee, it’s ideal.

The easiest (and classic New Orleans way) is to just mix up a pack of grounds with cold water and leave it at room temperature for 12 hours. Strain, and you have around 8 cups of concentrate which will keep in the fridge for a couple of weeks.

Or you can spend $265 on this admittedly beautiful cold water dripper. Made by Hario, it looks like something from a science lab. The kit has enough parts that you can really enjoy setting it up and tweaking everything before the four-hour process begins.

The machine has three layers. Up top is the water reservoir with silicone seal and a stainless steel tap which drip, drip drips the water slowly on the ground coffee below. Here it extracts the coffee goodness and passes through a French-press-like metal mesh filter into the jug below. When the water has finally finished its journey, you have a jar of concentrate ready to go.

I certainly don’t have space in my tiny kitchen for such an elegant rig, but I’m going to be scrubbing a stainless steel saucepan clean later today and cold-brewing a batch of concentrate the ghetto way. For those of you who just can’t bring themselves to slum it like me, the Hario Cold Water Dripper is available now.

Hario Cold Water Dripper [Williams Sonoma via Uncrate]

See Also:

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