For fans of coffee, empiricism, and honesty in the face of failure, this weekend I decided to try pushing the envelope on a cold brew recipe I’d seen earlier in the week. I decided to try a “triple cold brew” technique of my own devising.
While I admit that this comes with significant “sample size of one” qualifier, my results are as follows.
The “triple” idea is “cold brew, made with ice cubes, left to steep in the fridge”. Three different kinds of cold, you see, because I’m clever. The methodology is, take a measured amount (25g-30g) of ground coffee, put it in a pre-rinsed Hario filter in the code, then put a second filter on top of that. Gently work the second filter down so the grounds are evenly spread between the two filters, to a width of about 5mm. Then take 250-300g of ice cubes, about 10x the weight of the coffee, and put those in the top filter.
Then, balance all of that on a pint glass and put it in the refrigerator to brew slowly over a day or two.
“Brew slowly” in this case meant very slowly; it took more than 36 hours for the ice to fully melt and drip through the coffee. Water loss in the process, either through evaporation or absorption into the coffee and filters, was high; I ended up going from ~280g of ice to ~180ml of resulting cold brew, the bottom 40% or so of the pint glass. But that’s a small price to pay for good coffee from a novel process! Results are everything.
Those results were… fine. Adequate cold brew, good because cold brewed coffee is good. Beyond that, unremarkable. I didn’t see any hints that this new process of mine was a step on the way to anywhere special. I’m going to do one more experiment in this vein, stirring large ice cubes ice and ground coffee together and then letting that sit, to be filtered later, and see if that goes anywhere interesting. As far as the two-layers-of-filter part is concerned I don’t think it’s worth a reattempt.
A little while ago I was introduced to a fascinating idea that credit for inventing something doesn’t belong to the first person to come up with it, but to the person who first understood and explained it well enough that it never needed to be reinvented. The negative space around that argument deserves extreme suspicion; “it can’t be done” is a seductive position when the reality is “I could not do it”. But we are rescued from that vanity in some sense – if this argument makes any sense – by putting our faith in empiricism. If our only true failures are in learning nothing, then explaining our failed experiments turns humility into generosity.
And it’s not like I burned my eyebrows off or set my house on fire or anything. I just won’t bother doing it again, I’m not waiting two days for a mediocre coffeeish drink.
