The cold steep project

Hello!!!! I'm back after being busy again for these past couple of days! Where did I go? Well the usual... Classes, review, errands, lack of brain cells then I also had to mint 36 NFTs in juungle and that honestly took 2 days of my life 😅

But aside from those, I was actually pretty preoccupied with our cold steep project.

I do think I mentioned enough on noise.cash about my and my sisters' coffee obsession. I even managed to write up 2 articles regarding the topic but both articles carry very different subject matters on coffee ( One where I talk about instant coffee:  Getting to know your coffee And one where I talk about coffee acidity and how to reduce said acidity: Low acid coffee for me) So this time around, I'm pretty excited to talk about the coffee experiments we've been doing these past few days.

We actually got a little too impulsive with this project because we ended up buying the coffee beans first and foremost and that was kind of bad since The coffee beans taste the best 10-15 days after it's been roasted. Any longer bean storage than that might reduce the flavors you want out of your beans since organic compounds and oils in the beans will decompose. So that was our first mistake.

We tried this out on 3 different beans first. Mocha (Yes, apparently there are mocha beans now and I still don't have enough research on this), Sagada medium roast and arabica medium roast. I don't like dark roasts that much and the point in this project is to make low acid coffee for my sisters and that includes the acidity in the beans. I also got this cute bag of coffee grinds though so I used that to test for water volume to be used in steeping

According to most courses, the ideal steeping ratio is 1:4 (the volume of the water is 4X the weight of the grinds). So when I tried that with a 20g bean grind sample and with 80ml water in a glass jar, it came out as something like this:

So this is 24 hours after steeping and the color looks so sad to me. I really think that 1:4 ratio wasn't it. But then we only tried this while waiting for our coffee grinder to arrive.

So this is our coffee grinder ❤❤ we call it hard grinder for some reason but oh well, at least it works hard to get the job done. So we have a burr grinder but we based our purchase on this webinar my sister watched. The first grinder we planned to get wasn't that different from this one but it's better to just crush the beans, not have heat from an electric grinder evaporate all the oils you want out of the bean.

This was our first batch trial. We used the mocha beans first and foremost cuz we were all curious about what that would taste like. For the stepping water, we went with a 1:3 ratio since the first trial failed at a 1:4 ratio. Look at that color though! It was a lovely color for that amount of water. And apparently, mocha has this really sweet natural taste to it that's pretty close to chocolate. No wonder it's called mocha. It's still the sweetest bean so far since the sagada beans have this kind of nutty taste to it. The last bean we'll be trying would be the arabica and we're all pretty familiar with that since it's one of the most used beans in most coffee shops.

We've been doing batches of these cold steep concentrates recently and based on the videos and articles we read, cold steeped concentrates can last up to a week in the fridge. For now, we have enough for at least 3 days worth of coffee in the fridge. If the taste by the end of the 3 days is not affected, we'll try to see if we can make a single batch for a week.

That's all from our coffee frenzy at home. Next update is regarding my juungle collection. I remember promising @MisakiLhaine that I'll update her on when I put up traditional art on juungle. On my next article, I'll do a bit of self-promotion again, as well as a few guidelines when posting trad cuz I did encounter a lot of problems so it would be best that other people learn from my mistakes so they don't end up wasting 2 days like I did XD

So this is my updated juungle collection and there's a lot of traditional art pieces in there now so feel free to check them out UwU

https://www.juungle.net/#/collection/ca495aa47f95e6f2c2a661f49ec17eac9534ebe792b66a93d93adcc0149594c4