Recipe Friday: Cold Brew Coffee

Ask Andrew Robertson about the nuances of brewing coffee and he will gladly guide you toward a better cup of joe. As the coffee director of PRESS Coffee, Robertson has a wealth of knowledge and expertise and enjoys sharing his tips and tricks with customers.

With sweltering summer days nipping at our sandals, we thought this might be a good time to learn the art of making cold brew coffee. Robertson also teaches specialty coffee classes, if you’d like to dive a little deeper into craft coffee.

We recently asked him a few questions about cold brew.

How do you make cold brew?

To make: Put water in a pitcher or Mason jar, add the coffee and give it a few stirs to make sure it’s saturated. Brew 20 to 24 hours on the counter at room temperature and make sure you close or cover it. Final step: Pour the finished product through some kind of filter. It stays good 60 to 90 days in the refrigerator.

What is the ideal ratio of coffee to water?

The best recipe is one part coffee for every 10 parts of water.  If you use a 12 oz. bag of PRESS coffee (coarsely ground), that’s about a gallon of water. Generally, multiply ounces of coffee by 10, and that tells you how much water you’ll need.

What’s the best coffee to use?

The best advice that I’d give somebody is find a local roaster that you really like and try different coffees. You’ll end up thinking, “I never thought I’d like strawberry-noted, naturally processed Colombians,” but before long, you’re on a mission to find all of them. Phoenix has got one of the best coffee cultures on the planet, and there are plenty of good options. At PRESS, we get different coffees every week. There are so many cool origins and new coffees constantly.

What could go wrong?

We always look at brewing coffee as manipulating three variables, the three Ts of extraction: time, temperature and turbulence (stirring or anything that agitates). You’ve always got control of those variables, and as long as you’re aware of what you’re doing, you can change almost any specification in that recipe to make it perfect. Once you nail it and make the best cup of coffee you’ve ever had, make sure you write down what you did – grind size, how much water and how many grams of coffee.

Can you buy ready-to-cold-brew coffee at PRESS?

We have a product that’s basically pre-ground coffee in a sealed bag that acts as a filter. You just drop the bag in water and steep in the pouch. They come in four-packs, and each will make about a gallon. It really takes the guesswork out of making cold brew.

Multiple locations, presscoffee.com