Cold brew is amazingly good. If you haven’t ever had some, I’d highly recommend trying some in your local coffee shop, or making some yourself. It’s so simple! Get yourself a quantity of cold water in a container, add coarsely-ground coffee in a 1:8 ratio (by weight), let sit for 18 hours, and filter. When ready, dilute 50/50 with water, cold milk, ice, or other liquids, and store the rest in the fridge. Smooth, sweet and low-acid, it’s an amazingly wonderful way to enjoy coffee.
So why don’t more people drink cold brew? Probably because it takes so long to make, and you really need to think about it a day ahead. This is the scenario that confronted the engineers at a German university lab who were working on using lasers to break up tiny particles in liquids. Which somewhat resembles coffee grounds in water, right? Thinking outside the box, they experimented, and the result was a quantum leap forward (see what I did there?) in cold brew making.
Don’t want to steal the thunder, the full story is here, as well as the resulting article in Nature for the technical details.
Keep your eyes peeled for a Laser Cold Brew Machine in the future!
In the meantime, why not just make some yourself?