I knew the coffee was going to be good even before I took a sip. Why? Because the fish tacos were the best I’ve ever had (and as I tell everyone, I’ve had fish tacos by the roadside in Mexico).
Rockaway Taco is a taco shack tucked away on Beach 96th Street in Rockaway Beach in New York City. It opened last summer and this year on my first visit I noticed that it had added iced coffee to its menu. So after putting away four fish tacos, I ordered an iced coffee for the road.
Just as I suspected, it was great. No, better than great. It was the best coffee I’d ever tasted. Andrew, the main man behind the counter, explained that he cold brewed his coffee, something that was new to me.
Simply put, cold brewing coffee involves soaking grounds in coffee, a bit like cowboy coffee except that no heat is ever introduced into the process. The result is a cleaner taste, something that I can only describe as tasting like coffee ought to taste.
So I had to try it at home. There are plenty of how-to’s online, many with different coffee-to-water ratios.
My first effort was a failure, though I wasn’t sure why. It was too strong. Back to Rockaway Taco (hey, I was hungry too after surfing for three hours).
Andrew gave me a new ratio: one pound of coffee grounds, nine cups of filtered water and let sit for 24 hours. Then run that through a coffee filter.
That leaves you with a concentrate that you treat much like espresso. Pour a bit into a cup and fill it the rest of the way with water. Throw in a bit of half and half or milk if you like.
This result was much better, not as good as Andrew’s but really tasty.
One drawback I’ve found is that this process seems to require more coffee than regular brewing. So my coffee vanishes faster than if I was using my coffee maker each day.
But I’ll take that tradeoff for the taste difference.
This is a great article. I am looking forward to trying this.
Comment by Sam — June 18, 2009 @ 1:59 pm
Thanks for the great posting.
I’m going to try this weekend.
Three questions
1) how fine do you grind the coffee?
2) how many scoops is one pound (i dont have a food scale)?
3) when you finally add the coffee with water what is the ratio ?
Comment by cup of joe to go — June 20, 2009 @ 9:16 am
Cup of Joe —
–You want finely ground coffee.
–The scoops equals a pound question is a good one and I actually don’t know the answer. I also didn’t have a scale so what I did was basically grind a full can of one of Trader Joe’s better beans. The can had 13 ounces of beans so I kind of assumed that equaled 13 ounces of ground coffee. Then I took Andrew’s ratio and figured out that 13 ounces of ground coffee would take, which is seven and a half cups of water.
Clearly, I may be wrong about the bean coffee to ground coffee ratio but it has worked.
–On your last question, there’s no real ratio there. You kind of have to judge it yourself. Think of the concentrate as espresso because that’s basically its strength. I probably do something along the lines of a little over a quarter of the cup is concentrate, then I add a little half and half (which I like only with iced coffee, not with hot coffee) and the rest water.
Again, as I’ve found, this is something that even with decent ratios and such, you have to try a couple of times.
Good luck.
Comment by ENT — June 20, 2009 @ 12:39 pm