a follow up to the previous post
Observation 1:
Brewing with 30g:450ml the result was 380.7ml of brewed coffee. This would need 210.14g of sucrose to prevent freezing up to -3. How did it taste? Fucking gross. Sickly sweet like some kind of nasty coffee syrup. The texture is thick, and despite having a coffee flavor, it really bends the frame of enjoyment.
Observation 2:
Brewing with 30:450ml the result was 391.2ml of brewed coffee. This would need 107.97g of glucose. How did it taste? Bitter I guess? The level of sweetness is much more pleasant than with sucrose. It tastes much more like coffee. It does have an unpleasant bitterness which forms on the finish when you really do hope to be tasting the coffee. After adding a hand full of ice to the mix, I felt it brought out a lot of aromatics. As an iced coffee it’s good, not great. I think it needs to pack more of a coffee punch.
I think a combination of glucose and sucrose would be the best. Perhaps glucose for the anti freezing and sucrose to adjust the taste. I am going to try again at a stronger ratio with a darker roast and see if the bitterness of the coffee can mask the bitterness of the glucose.
Observation 3:
Brewing with 45g:450ml the result was 350.8ml of brewed coffee. For that I needed 99.58g of glucose. This coffee was a very recently roasted Guatemala. mmm… so good. This is what I am going to go with. I put it into our deep freezer at -17c and checked on it periodically. at -0.3 the coffee is still totally liquid (yay) however the foam on top of the coffee (from the glucose?) started to freeze. At -0.8 the coffee was freezing against the walls of the metal pitcher. So… I guess because the freezer is making the outside metal so cold, I can’t really accurately do any testing. Well shit. I guess I need to buy a freezer?
How could I have known that this would be my biggest problem. Mini fridges don’t seem to get cold enough to dip into the negatives. Mini freezers don’t seem to get warmer than -18. What a pain in the ass it is to even try and find out the temperature range of these things. In the end I found a company called Koolatron which seems to be the best for this. It cools 25 degrees Celsius colder than the surrounding ambient temperature, so if I were to keep it in my basement I guess it should be able to get cold enough, but… what if it didn’t? That’s a $400 test which might not pan out. Uhhhhhhhh….
Luckily I found that one of our fridges at work can actually be set into the negatives. Lets go with that.
I tried curing the barrel 6-7 times, there’s a consistent leak on the top side if the barrel is horizontal. I’ll just ignore it and have the barrel sit vertically. No big deal. Maybe the coffee and glucose will seal up the leak over time.
Most of what I wrote in this post is just stuff I jotted down on paper. Last thing to mention is what is in the barrel, and some of the techniques/tools used, just to use as a reference perhaps.
735.4ml of dark roast guatemala prepared with chem-ex. 2x pots at 1:10 ratio.
726.1ml of dark roast guatemala and medium roast huila prepared with chem-ex. 2x pots at 1:10 ratio
379,1ml of medium roast huila prepared with a hario cloth filter (Nel Drip method) 1 pot at 1:9ish
Total brewed coffee: 1840.6ml requires 508g glucose. Total liquid in barrel is 2348.6ml
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