Cold brewing coffee without grinding

quite amazing that someone would tell you that, because someone recently told me the same thing. as a cold brewed coffee aficionado, i felt obligated to learn more through experiment :) here are my findings:

using dark roast beans and soaking them for 12 hours at room temperature resulted in a beverage that i found enjoyable. it was amber colored rather than black, but had some of the flavor of coffee, as well as some amount of caffeine judging by its effects on me. i postulate that it contains a lot of the oils from the beans, since in a dark roast these are brought to the surface.

i then dried the beans out in order to grind them and then put them in for another 12 hour soak. my reasoning was that i would be able to tell which components of the coffee are extractable by using the whole bean and which require grinding. the resulting beverage looked just like coffee, but tasted slightly stale. this might be due to the drying process and could possibly be circumvented by grinding the beans wet in a mortar, which would be adequate since a coarse grind is desirable anyway. this beverage also still contained caffeine, but as for the relative amount in each batch, i couldn't say.

so there you have it. i would recommend trying the whole bean brewing, because the result is quite tasty, and quite different from regularly brewed coffee. on the other hand, i would not adopt it as my default method because it does waste a lot of what i like in coffee. more experiments need to be performed, such as the wet grinding mentioned above, as well as using whole beans in hot brewing. also, i would expect different results if not using dark roast.

i hope this helps :)

dollardeth in Home Cooking