This Cheap, No-Mess Cold Brew System Offers a Hassle-Free Caffeine Fix

Cold-brewing is a great way to enjoy coffee on a hot day or without having to have a hot drink. We've shown you a couple of ways of making it before—once in a blender, and once using a free-but-pretty jenky brewing rig. If you want something in between that's still hassle-free, this method is for you.

Author and Boing Boing co-founder Cory Doctorow (and friend of Lifehacker!) explains how his system works. All it takes is a coffee grinder (he uses a simple, bladed spice grinder he got for $20), a $10 "nut milk" bag, and a plastic pitcher. If you already have a way to grind your coffee and you have a pitcher somewhere in your kitchen, the only thing you need is the bag. Here's how to do the rest:

Every night before bed, I ground up about 15 Aeropress scoops' (570 ml) worth of espresso roast coffee — the $20 Krups grinder is fine for this, though I wouldn't use it with an actual espresso machine — leaving the beans coarse. I filled the bag with the grind, put it in the bottom of the empty pitcher like a huge tea-bag, and topped up the pitcher with tap water (distilled water would have been better — fewer dissolved solids means that it'll absorb more of the coffee solids, but that's not a huge difference). I wedged the top of the bag between the lid and the pitcher and stuck it in the fridge overnight.

In the morning, I took the bag out of the pitcher and gave it a good squeeze to get the liquor out of the mush inside. Add water to the pitcher to fill to the brim and voila, amazing cold-brew. You can dilute it 1:1 or even further.

That's all there is to it. Doctorow notes that cleanup is as simple as inverting the bag over the trash and rinsing it off, and the rig produced excellent coffee concentrate with very little grit at the bottom of the pitcher. Cheap, easy, a little easier to use and store than the plastic bottle setup, but less grit and bitterness than the blender approach. If you're interested in trying cold brew, it's an easy way to get started with great results. Hit the link below to read more.

Summer Cold Brew Coffee Reminder | Boing Boing

Photo by Dennis Tang.