Cold Brew + Cold Coffee

Cold Brew is super popular and a great way to drive a high margin/high volume menu offering with minimal labor time/beverage served. This article will provide tips for brewing cold brew.

What tools do you recommend for Cold Brew?

We suggest using either the Filtron Pro, with the Coffee Sock reusable filters or The Toddy Cold Brewing System. Both of these systems can brew a large amount of concentrated coffee easily.

Here’s a breakdown of equipment and cost for set up:
Prices current as of January 2024.

Cold Brew Recipe

1. Use a 1:4 Coffee to Water Ratio
2. Grind 2lbs of coffee (start with the consistency of coarse sand, or just a little coarser than a standard filter grind). We recommend a medium roasted coffee from Latin America.
3. Add 1 gallon of water.
4. Combine coffee and water in your toddy or cold brew maker and allow to steep in the refrigerator for 12-18 hours. 
5. Strain off the resulting liquid and dilute 1:1 – 1:1.5 to make a basic cold brew. You can run this through an inline filter to remove any remaining sediment to make it easier to serve on draft. 
6. You can also dilute the initial yield or concentrate with milk to make a draft latte. 

Kegging Cold Coffee and Nitro Setup

Here is a video that has some really good info about setting up your Nitro Coffee setup:

How to Setup a Kegerator to Serve Nitro Coffee. As they mention, setting your nitro pressure gauge to about 30psi is recommended.

Additionally, the Keg Outlet has a lot of options and resources for your nitro coffee setup here: Keg Outlet Nitro Coffee. The 5-gallon kegs that we recommend for cold brew are the 5 Gallon Kegs or these..

A couple of pieces of advice and suggestions:

• Once your coffee has been cold-brewed, it’s beneficial to charge your cold brew keg from a larger nitro tank that you keep in your production or storage area. This will save you rapidly using up your smaller nitro tank that most people have near their kegerator to push the coffee through the lines for service.
• Nitrogen incorporates into coffee better when the cold brew coffee is cold.
• If you wanted to be more precise with your dilution ratio/concentration, a refractometer is a good tool to have. Here is one that we’ve heard good things about and is not as expensive as others.
• Check out this article to learn more about cold brew and food safety.

Iced Filter Coffee/Japanese Style Iced Coffee Recipe:

1. Use 65g of coffee per Liter of water (or about 5 grams more than you would usually use)
2. Grind the coffee a little bit finer than you would grind for a usual cup of hot coffee.
3. You are going to brew with 40% of the weight of your water as ice and 60% with hot water.
   E.g., if using 500ml brew, you are going to use 200g of ice and 300ml of hot water (35g of coffee for that amount of water)
4. Rinse your paper filter over the sink to avoid heating the vessel you are brewing into.
5. Bloom the coffee with 2 to 3 times the weight of coffee as water, let it bloom for 45 seconds, and stir the bloom/slurry to ensure all the coffee is wet.
6. Pour the remaining hot water over the coffee and try and stretch out the brew time for at least 2-3mins
7. Once you have finished pouring the hot water over the coffee, give the coffee and water still drawing down a stir a couple of times.
8. Once the brewing is complete, swirl the vessel with your liquid coffee in it to get rid of any remaining pieces of ice.
9. Pour onto fresh ice cubes in a glass.
10. Enjoy!