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My experience with cold-brew coffee.
Apr. 22nd, 2013 02:09 pmAfter hearing here and there about how wonderful cold-brew coffee is, I decided to make some. The idea is that, instead of brewing coffee in hot water, you put your coffee in cold water, and leave it overnight or longer. And then you can strain it out and you have an extra-strong coffee concentrate which you then dilute with hot water for hot coffee or cold water for iced coffee. And supposedly it pulls out all the coffee yumminess, but not the bitter compounds, so it's extra delicious.
So I tried it.
I can detect absolutely no difference between it and my usual coffee. None.
I can think of three possibilities here, all of which seem plausible to me. There are probably many other possibilities I haven't thought of, too.
From most to least likely:
1. I did it wrong. It's supposed to be entirely dead simple to the point of being foolproof, but I am an EXCEPTIONALLY talented fool when I want to be.
2. My whole "non-taster" thing -- there exist bitter compounds which I just don't taste. Maybe the bitter compounds I didn't have in this coffee are ones that I just plain don't notice in the regular coffee.
3. The cold-brew thing is just a hipster delusion thing, like thinking that fixed-gear bicycles are better than ten-speeds, or that white guys other than Frank Sinatra can wear narrow-brim fedoras. (Women can wear them, I've seen a few Black guys who can, a handful of Japanese guys. A VERY VERY FEW Hispanic dudes can pull it off, but most Hispanic dudes who try for the look really shouldn't. And not white dudes. Wide-brimmed fedoras, guys. Even Sam Spade or Indiana Jones would look like a douche in a narrow-brim.)
Is this one of those things that actually only makes a difference when you're using, like, really good ingredients? Because I just use cheap coffee I buy in a can in the supermarket. The way I look at it, there are basically three levels of quality of things: there's "crap", which is really bad; there's "decent", which is where most of my stuff is; and there's "good" -- which, in practice, is a very wide range, from good, to really good, to amazing on up.
The coffee I make at home is "decent". Is this a case where "decent" is never going to get out of the "decent" range, no matter what you do, but "good" can be bumped up to a higher level of "good"?
So I tried it.
I can detect absolutely no difference between it and my usual coffee. None.
I can think of three possibilities here, all of which seem plausible to me. There are probably many other possibilities I haven't thought of, too.
From most to least likely:
1. I did it wrong. It's supposed to be entirely dead simple to the point of being foolproof, but I am an EXCEPTIONALLY talented fool when I want to be.
2. My whole "non-taster" thing -- there exist bitter compounds which I just don't taste. Maybe the bitter compounds I didn't have in this coffee are ones that I just plain don't notice in the regular coffee.
3. The cold-brew thing is just a hipster delusion thing, like thinking that fixed-gear bicycles are better than ten-speeds, or that white guys other than Frank Sinatra can wear narrow-brim fedoras. (Women can wear them, I've seen a few Black guys who can, a handful of Japanese guys. A VERY VERY FEW Hispanic dudes can pull it off, but most Hispanic dudes who try for the look really shouldn't. And not white dudes. Wide-brimmed fedoras, guys. Even Sam Spade or Indiana Jones would look like a douche in a narrow-brim.)
Is this one of those things that actually only makes a difference when you're using, like, really good ingredients? Because I just use cheap coffee I buy in a can in the supermarket. The way I look at it, there are basically three levels of quality of things: there's "crap", which is really bad; there's "decent", which is where most of my stuff is; and there's "good" -- which, in practice, is a very wide range, from good, to really good, to amazing on up.
The coffee I make at home is "decent". Is this a case where "decent" is never going to get out of the "decent" range, no matter what you do, but "good" can be bumped up to a higher level of "good"?