michcia's notes

v60 room temperature brew technique for the desperate like me

Long ago when I was getting into pourover coffee, I tried out the official AeroPress cold brew recipe at my uni seminar.

AFAICT normal cold brew recipes are either a) hot brew a little amount onto ice, or b) infuse for 12 hours. The way that recipe differs is, it's just "do an AeroPress but stir longer (1 minute)". So I just grabbed a bottle of water from a vending machine and brought some coffee grounds and pressed it on a lecture room desk like an animal. And it still tasted like pourover coffee to me (however poor my tasting skills are).

On second thought I had definitely already changed up the recipe that first time though. I rarely listen when AeroPress says "pour a tiny amount of water", no, screw it, I'm not watering it down later into an "americano", I'm just gonna infuse the full amount of water.

And that seems to run in the family a bit. When I left my AeroPress in a drawer at my parents', and came back a month later and found it on the dish dryer — turns out my dad vaguely remembered my moves and started hot brewing it for himself every now and then — then my dad also changed up the recipe, intuiting that there should be a period of steeping, at least 5 minutes if not longer, between stirring and pressing.

All that said, coffee recipes are like arcane magic to me. There are many enough variables, and my control feels poor enough, that I at some point gave up. It is normal for me to just set the grinder fineness to "whatever ballpark number largely worked", heat my stovetop kettle (gooseneck kettle though), and stick to the 12g coffee to 200g water ratio (as well as I can (not really)). This to me is part of the beauty of pourover coffee, because sure, you might not satisfy the True Nerds like you can find on YouTube, but you will, more likely than not, drink something more interesting than your bean-to-cup machine at the office can squeeze out. It's a beautifully forgiving hobby to me.

I almost never drink cold brew, and part of it is that I don't actually like using the AeroPress. It is funny that I was never making this big of a mess with inverted method initially, but now I do. Grounds used to stick to the paper, now they don't. Everything is wrong with the world. But like a month ago, it was peak heatwave, and I was visited by family, so I had to make coffee, and I had no intention of turning the stove on.

My cousin, who I'm told favours my former favourite Ethiopia Sidamo origin, was interested in how I achieved cold brew in much less than 12 hours, and so I promised I'd check out if this method could be adapted to V60, cause she only has that and maybe a French press. I thought internet would've had something to say about it, but I guess not.

And my results are, uhh I guess it works?

Both AeroPress and V60 resulted in something I recognize as mild cold brew coffee. V60 feels like it received a little less flavour, but it's unclear to me if it's from the lack of pressure, or if I just stirred it shorter because I have incredibly poor control. But whatever this is, it tasted pleasant and it seems doable.

I think it might be interesting to start from just what you do with V60, with your standard grind setting, and do this kind of "1 minute stir 5 minute steep then drain" and try to adjust the variables from there.

I would experiment with that more myself, but I'm on a forced leave of semi-absence from coffee, as my laryngologist is trying to treat me for GERD after the allergy test came back all-negative, and at least one of us if not two is trying to find a plausible explanation for my throat and ear issues.