<aside> 👤 Author: @Aaron James

</aside>

Gather 'round, friends. We'll be skipping the coverage of Kali Linux today in favor of a hacking tool even more essential to hackers of all shapes and sizes. Like most hackers, I too have a crippling chemical addiction to caffeine. If you stick around and read this blog post, maybe you will too. Isn't that exciting?

Today, I'll be walking you through how to turn a bag of fresh coffee beans into delicious cold brew unlike anything you've ever tried. Maybe, I don't really know what you're drinking over there. If you haven't had a nice cool glass of refreshing cold brew on a hot summer day, you're missing out on one of the finer things.

Beans

This paragraph is for people who think just any kinda beans can make a good coffee as long as they don't use jelly beans. I'm here to tell you to that the Starbucks, the Dunkin, the Peets, and yes, even the Costco coffee beans aren't going to cut it here. You're gonna need to pick up something a little bit more special, and hopefully a little bit more local.

I can just hear it now: "but Aaron, you live in California! Where am I suppose to get high-quality, local coffee beans without breaking the bank?" To this end, let me tell you my secret strategy that allows me, as a ~~very broke~~ college student, to afford my luxury coffee beans. Shockingly, the answer lies with Whole Foods!

Here's what I do when I get to the coffee section of a Whole Foods:

Grab whatever's on sale. Everything else is expensive, just grab something you haven't tried before.
When you check out, use your Amazon Prime account to get a flat 10% off.
Do you use the Venmo-alternative from Square Inc, Cash App? If you have a Cash App card, you might have access to their Grocery Store discount, which I use on this purchase if I can for an extra 10% off.

Whole Foods Coffee. Look for the yellow tags!

And before you know it, you've basically robbed Whole Foods and are walking away with some fancy, premium bags of coffee with more "tasting notes" on the outside than beans on the inside.

Tools

As mention in our introduction, we're making delicious, refreshing cold brew. Sorry, your Kurieg, Nespresso, Moka Pot, and AeroPress aren't going to cut it this time. The French press is a valid tool, but today I'm going to be using this steeping apparatus that's become more popular for making cold brew with due to the ease of cleaning and storing.

You can see in the picture that we're using two such apparatuses, the larger, two quart one for storing fully-brewed coffee, and the second, smaller one with the grounds steeping filter inside of it to brew coffee. The big one holds drinkable coffee, and the small one holds brewing coffee. Hence the labels!

To grind the coffee, I'm using the cheapest hand-grinder I could find on Amazon, a JavaPresse. I find it difficult to recommend now, partially since the price has gone way up since I last purchased it, and also partially because it totally broke while I was using it to grind my last batch.

There are three main reasons why you want to grind coffee yourself:

You want to control the grind level of the beans. A little known fact about cold brew is that you actually want a much courser grind then what you get from a bag of pre-ground coffee, and the default grind setting for most in-store grinders is "obliterate to powder".
You can use any grinder you want, just make sure that you're using a burr grinder instead of a blade grinder. A burr grinder produces a much more consistent grind since the beans fall out of the grinding cavity and into a holding cavity as soon as they're fine enough.
Whole bean coffee keeps much longer than ground coffee, so if you're a slow drinker like me (and everybody gives you coffee during holidays), your coffee will still taste fresh when you finally get around to it.

Finally, just make sure you get some coffee filters too if you end up wanting to filter the coffee further (which I will definitely demonstrate later).

Process

Alright scout, you've got everything you need. Let's buckle down and make some coffee.