How to make coffee concentrate

Question

I searched around a bit and found a few recipes for coffee concentrates, but most of them read more like high test cold brew recipes.

Where I work we have a few "coffee" _{(note the quotation marks)} machines that use the stuff. The "coffee" from these machines is really awful and I was wondering if there are alternative methods for making it.

My first thought was to take drip coffee and cook it down and reduce it into a concentrate, has anyone tried this?

Am I way off track? Is there a better way?

Answer 1

Just make cold brew! It's called "cold brew", but you can still make good hot coffee out of it.

Cold brew is essentially hyperconcentrated, but slow-brewed, coffee. It's very popular in the United States in the summer, because it's very easy to make excellent iced coffee with a cold brew concentrate. (Just add water and ice.) But you can also make a cup of hot coffee out of cold brew concentrate: just add hot water instead of cold water and ice.

Here's a recipe, but I'll summarize it.

You need:

• ~12 oz coarsely ground coffee
• ~6 cups water

Pour water over coffee in a large bowl or pitcher and stir. Cover with a tea towel and let sit on the counter (or fridge) for 24 hours. You can vary the coffee:water ratio and brewing time depending on your preferences. Strain thoroughly. Reserve the delicious liquid and discard the grounds. The concentrate will keep in the refrigerator for up to a week.

To make a cup of hot coffee, add about 2 parts hot water to 1 part cold brew (depending on your taste). Add the hot water slowly until it's tasty to you. Dilute with a similar amount of cold water for iced coffee - then add ice. Add milk, sugar, and other fixings as desired. (If you're drinking it iced, you'll want to use simple syrup to sweeten, since plain sugar won't dissolve well in cold liquid.)

Bon appetit!

Answer 2

It's more of a syrup than a concentrate if I recall correctly. While it's a whole lot of flavor in a little container that needs to be diluted in order to reconstitute, it's not like heavily concentrated coffee that's been cooked down, as you mention.

You could try strong coffee and any gum that you'd use in cooking to make a relatively thin non-sweet syrup, I'm pretty sure nothing in any common bean would prevent them from binding. What you'd have to look out for is the tincture possibly damaging the machine, which leaves very little room for trial and error (or margin for error at that). You'd also have to watch out for machines that need to 'validate' the capsule as 'authenticated' before agreeing to make coffee.

Note, I'm assuming you mean those "Nespresso" machines or similarly clever abominations. But anyway, even for other applications, a syrup made using a strong espresso would probably work the best.

Answer 3

I'm a big fan of the elegant simplicity of Cory Doctorow's coffee concentrate recipe. Not quite as much of a syrup as others here have described, but it's a great way to get quality out of medium quality beans.

My tweaks: I use a 5:1 water:coffee ratio (usually 1 liter of water & 200 grams of beans). Instead of a coarse grind, I use a medium grind. I steep for 12-15 hours. I tend to use medium-dark roast beans (Costco often has 2 pounds of Major Dickason's pretty cheap, and those work fine if you don't have anything else available).

Answer 4

You can make regular drip coffee with 4-5 times the usual amount of ground coffee. Dilute as desired. Any remaining can be refrigerated a good 48 hours if you store with minimal headspace of air.

Answer 5

First, open the box which contains the bag of the liquid concentrate. Then, you cut open the bag and pour it into a squeeze bottle or container and then leave it in the fridge. When you are ready to use it, take a table spoon of the liquid and mix it in a 8-10 oz. mug or cup of hot water. From there you mix and taste; you may have to adjust to the taste you like by adding more liquid concentrate, or if the table spoon is too much, restart the process with less liquid concentrate. The best ratio that most machines are set to is 32 parts water/1 part liquid