Heaven on the Rocks aka Iced Coffee

Oh this is a fun one!  I will apologize now for the length of this post.  Give me caffeine and an outlet, and you get words.  Many words.  I feel justified, though, because this little project is gonna save you and me a ton of money on iced coffees.  :)

I'm really not that picky about my coffee.  Pour it in a cup and call it coffee and I'm on it like a fly on ..well.  However, that garbage the convenience stores try to pass off as iced coffee?  No bueno.  I had a (very) short lived gig in a coffee shop at the mall a while back.  I learned how to make it their way, which was to brew double the amount of grounds into a pitcher and stick it in the fridge.  I could make it palatable with enough syrup and half and half, but I was never really a fan.  I like the ones at McDonalds enough, and I love the ones at a family owned coffee shop by my office, though.  My goal was to recreate the latter.

This method is called cold brewing.  After lots of research (read: googled for 20 minutes), I discovered that cold brewed coffee is less acidic than hot brewed coffee and helps to retain more of the fruity and nutty notes.  Fancy.  I also found this cool kitchen gadget that takes alot of the work out of cold brewing.  Its about $40 and can be found here.  It also takes up valuable storage space when you're not using it.  As someone living with a very tiny kitchen with no pantry, storage space is precious.  Food and dishes have priority.  Now gimme a bigger kitchen and it shall be mine.

So back to cold brewing.  Its really quite simple.  Dump some ground coffee in a pitcher with cold water, leave it overnight, then strain it in the morning.  Voila.  That's what I got out of all those blogs. 

Truth?  This stuff is a mess.  Or I'm just messy.  Very probably its just me.

I say "all those blogs" because this has been blogged numerous times with very similar "recipes" and methods and they are all over Pinterest.  I could go back and cite them all for you if you insist. Fine, HERE is one.  There was even a great debate in one of the comment sections of one of them.  Fun read.  I almost bought myself a case of mason jars for the after pic just to be a toot.  Then I'd be stuck with a case of mason jars and no where to put them.  So close.

So...enough chatter..(I may have already had some of this fine creation, by the way).

Here's what I used to start.

That is just a plain plastic gallon pitcher and a 10oz bag of ground espresso coffee.  Oh, yeah. Sounds good already.

Just mix up the coffee and water in the pitcher, cover and leave it alone for at least 8 hours.  The longer the better.  Mine sat for 24 hours.

So you're back from work and the hair appointment now and its time to strain it.  This is not the fun part.  Its time consuming.  I took a second clean one gallon pitcher and put my trusty strainer on top.  I then lined the strainer with a couple layers of cheese cloth.  I have a rant about cheese cloth that I'll tell you while you're waiting on the coffee to strain.

Pour the coffee in to the strainer and let it go.  It will catch MOST of the grounds the first time through, but we're not done yet.

I then cleaned the original pitcher and got new cheese cloth to do it again.  Like chemistry.  Fun.

These grounds were still in the bottom of the pitcher after the first round, which is what I was afraid of.  I really wanted to not even blog about the second step.  I really really don't like grounds in my coffee even more, though.  I figure you wouldn't like it either.

The third step I took was to strain it yet again through a regular old coffee filter in the bottom of the strainer.  Turns out I needed several to get through the pitcher. It kept getting stopped up, so I had to change filters often.  If you've never worked with espresso, it is very finely ground.  Next time, I think I'll pay extra to get the bulk espresso beans and grind them on the 'auto drip' setting instead of buying it in a bag already ground to a powder.

 

So, now we're waiting for the last of the coffee to sift through the filter, at long last.  I will tell you my cheese cloth rant now.  Let me tell you where its NOT at Wal Mart.  Anywhere you would imagine it SHOULD be.  I walked the baking aisle, the seasonal aisle where they stick all the baking junk for folks in a hurry, the baking pan aisle, the gadget aisle, the cup towel aisle, the aluminum pan aisle.  No cheese cloth.  I even made a study of all those little plastic strips of crap hanging everywhere IN the aisles (found cute straws that way).  I gave up and went to the regular grocery store and found it with the kitchen gadgets, as it should be.  Later, someone tells me that at Wal Mart, its in the craft section.  You have got to be kidding me.

Here's the final shot after the filters.  I can live with that.

I have this handy skinny 1.25 gal (you see its about half full) jug that goes in the fridge and doesn't take much room, so that's what I'm choosing to store mine in.  Some people say it can store for a month, some say two weeks max.  That place I worked threw it out every night (coffee abuse!).  Its your coffee, so see what works for you.  I'll be lucky if this jug even lasts a week.  Just sayin'..

Now, here's how you make sweet cream (combine these two things and refrigerate).  I got this recipe from one of the many blogs, HERE.  Using this concoction in your espresso is called Vietnemese Iced Coffee.

I also bought a few things..and pulled a few things from the spice cabinet that would be fun to play with the flavors.  I have half & half, too, but forgot to pull that out.

Obviously the first step is to fill a glass with ice.  Secondly, you'll need to find your perfect coffee to cream ratio, but its generally 1/2 coffee, half cream (or milk, or half & half, or whatever you like).  Remember, this is very concentrated, so don't take a big ole swig of it out of the pitcher unless you want hair on your chest!  ;)

So make it your way, enjoy...and don't wait until 10p to taste test.  I may never sleep again.

Christi