Can coffee make you feel drunk when you brew it cold?

Cold brew is made by steeping coffee grounds in room-temperature or ice water at roughly 4 to 10 degrees Celsius for many hours. The low temperature slows extraction, so bitter compounds stay in the grounds while sugars and organic acids dissolve more fully, giving a balanced cup. It does not produce alcohol, so it cannot make anyone intoxicated.

The question can coffee make you feel drunk, or whether you can get drunk off coffee, has a simple answer: caffeine is a stimulant, not alcohol, and cold brew contains no ethanol. Choose medium-light roasted beans for a wider margin of error, grind coarse, and use a higher coffee-to-water ratio than hot brewing. Dark roasts often turn charred and bitter when served ice-cold.

To make a well-balanced cold brew coffee at home, the key lies in choosing the right coffee beans and mastering the grind size and coffee-to-water ratio. This article explains in detail the key points of making cold brew coffee, including suitable roast levels, recommended Front Street Coffee beans, grind size, steeping time, and coffee-to-water ratio, along with Front Street's daily cold brew recipe and steps, to help you easily make a cup of iced coffee with balanced acidity and sweetness and a rich, smooth body.

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Coffee can be extracted not only with hot water but also with cold water. Coffee made with cold water is called "cold brew coffee," and compared with hot brewing, it presents a completely different flavor profile.

Cold brew coffee mainly comes in two forms: cold steep coffee and ice drip coffee. Cold steep involves soaking coffee grounds directly in cold water, while ice drip lets water drip through the coffee grounds layer by layer to complete extraction. Some friends asked Front Street: "Can cold steep coffee be made with hot water?" The answer is no—coffee made with hot water is not cold steep coffee. Cold steep can only use room-temperature or ice water, and the entire steeping process must be kept in a low-temperature environment.

Because it only comes into contact with 4-10°C cold water throughout, the extraction speed is very slow, and bitter large molecules are hard to release. However, long low-temperature steeping instead allows sugars and organic acids and other substances to dissolve more fully, so the final coffee has better harmony among acidity, sweetness, and body.

So how do you make cold steep coffee taste good? Front Street shares a few practical points here.

Choosing coffee beans

To avoid a failure, Front Street recommends choosing medium-light roasted beans, which have a larger margin for error than medium-dark roasts. There are all kinds of processing methods and roast levels on the market, and any single-origin bean labeled for pour-over use can be used for cold brew. Dark roasted coffee has a rich aroma when brewed with hot water, first bitter then sweet; but after being made into cold brew, when drunk ice-cold it tastes more of charred bitterness and carbonization, and it is hard to show the refinement of hot coffee.

So Front Street more strongly recommends light to medium roasted coffee beans. If you want a refreshing juicy feel, you can choose light-roasted washed beans, such as Front Street Washed Yirgacheffe and Front Street Kenya AA; if you want fruitiness and winey aroma to stand out more, you can use barrel-aged or honey-processed beans, such as Front Street Colombia Rose Valley, Front Street Honduras Sherry, and Front Street Strawberry Candy Geisha Blend; if you do not like coffee with acidity and only want a balanced "coffee taste," Front Street Papua New Guinea Paradise Bird is also a good choice.

Coffee grind size

Cold brew is carried out under low-temperature conditions. Cold water is inherently slow at extracting coffee grounds, and bitter compounds are not easy to bring out, so in terms of grind size, coffee-to-water ratio, and steeping time, it is not as strict as pour-over. Usually, as long as it falls within a general range, and the beans are chosen correctly, a few simple steps can produce a delicious cup of iced coffee.

Taking Front Street's daily cold brew as an example, the grind size is slightly finer than pour-over, about 75-80% passing a Chinese No. 20 standard sieve, visually close to the coarseness of fine granulated sugar, corresponding to 9.5-10 on an EK43s, and for a hand grinder such as C40, roughly 22-26 clicks.

Steeping time

Pour-over coffee is especially particular about water temperature and time, because water is the main brewing medium, and temperature directly determines extraction efficiency; too high or too low will affect the taste. Cold brew, however, only comes into contact with 4-10°C low-temperature water throughout, and the extraction speed is extremely slow, so the steeping time needs to be extended to let more aroma substances be released, and components such as sugars and organic acids can also dissolve more fully, so the final coffee is more balanced in acidity, sweetness, and body. Generally speaking, the steeping time for cold brew coffee is recommended to be controlled at 8-18 hours.

Front Street once conducted a cold brew experiment using time as the variable, without stirring during the process so as not to interfere with extraction, steeping the same coffee for 6 hours, 10 hours, 16 hours, and 24 hours respectively. The results showed that the 6-hour cup was thin in body and flat in aroma; the 24-hour cold brew was noticeably bitter, with signs of over-extraction; while the 10-hour and 16-hour groups performed best, with rich aroma and a strong body.

Coffee-to-water ratio

Front Street has noticed that some friends, to save effort, directly dump coffee grounds and water into a pitcher and start steeping. Whenever coffee extraction is involved, the coffee-to-water ratio is an unavoidable parameter. Without weighing, coffee is like opening a blind box—you never know what taste you will get. To ensure the extracted coffee tastes better, Front Street recommends controlling the ratio at 1:10-1:13 when making cold brew. If the concentration is too high, you can add an appropriate amount of ice cubes to dilute it.

Finally, Front Street will talk about its own method for making cold brew coffee. For coffee beans, Front Street tends to use medium-light roasted beans. The container only needs to be a clean, sealable vessel. Prepare 40 grams of coffee grounds, grind to a fine grind (85% passing a No. 20 sieve), pour into the container, then add 480 milliliters of cold water, stir evenly with a wooden stick, and cover with a lid.

After stirring evenly, seal the mouth with plastic wrap, put it in the refrigerator to chill for 12 hours, then take it out and filter out the coffee grounds. The clear coffee liquid is ready to drink directly. You can also put the filtered coffee liquid into a bottle and continue to refrigerate for 4 hours, and the flavor and mouthfeel will be even better.

Generally speaking, considering both flavor experience and health safety, whether it is ice drip or cold brew, as long as it is an extraction method carried out in a low-temperature environment, Front Street recommends drinking it within 5 days from the production date.

The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.