On Finding Closure in My Breakup With Starbucks

Way back in October, I published the groundbreaking Drink Water – a post that changed the travel blogging landscape forever. I suggested then that cutting back just $2-3 every day on soft drinks, coffee and other beverages could save you over $700 per year. $700 you could be investing in an ING account to fund your drinking habit or feed your Russian nesting doll collection on your RTW journey.

In an effort to practice what I preach and constantly prune any unnecessary daily expenses, I’ve severed my Starbucks umbilical cord in favor of brewing coffee at home. I had been using a traditional drip-style coffee maker, hot brewing the coffee, and then refrigerating it. It’s pretty darn good, but I stumbled upon this cold brewed iced coffee recipe from a native New Orleanser … New Orleansite? Whatever. He’s from New Orleans – a place with a heavy French influence, where coffee is serious business. So I figured: why not give it a shot? I tweaked his recipe a bit to suit my tastes:

What You’ll Need

• 12oz. bag dark roast coffee, coarse ground (I used Seattle’s Best French Roast, but any dark roast will do)
• 10 cups water

Now What?

1. Add entire bag of coffee to large plastic pitcher or container, preferably with a spout and handle.
2. Add 4 cups of water and let steep for 5 minutes.
3. Add remaining 6 cups of water
4. Stir until well blended.
5. Cover and refrigerate overnight or up to 24 hours
6. Pour this cold concoction into a separate pitcher using a cheese cloth or copper coffee filter to remove all of the coffee grounds. This part can be a bit slow and tricky as the thick coffee mixture is slow to give up the steeped water it’s absorped. The link above calls for a toddy coffee maker, which I don’t have so I improvised.

What you’re left with is a kind of coffee “concentrate”. To serve your iced coffee:

• Fill a glass with ice
• Fill 1/3 of the glass with the above coffee concentrate
• Fill the remainder of the glass with milk leaving just a bit of room at the top
• Top it off with a splash of half-and-half
• Add sugar to taste
• Stir well

After a couple weeks of refining the preparation, I’m really enjoying it. I’m not missing my daily $3.84 Starbucks brew all that much anymore. It’s the closest thing to an iced latte I can make at home. Somewhere an Italian is reading that last sentence, openly weeping and crying “Il heretic!”. My apologies to him.

Tune in next week for Mike’s Famous Fat-free Macadamia Scones recipe!

And thanks to Ray at Metroblogging for this recipe!