What Should I Do With Cold Brew Concentrate?

You've got a bag of concentrate in the fridge. You've made a black coffee with it, maybe a milky one, and now you're wondering if that's the whole story.

It isn't.

I've been making cold brew concentrate in a goon bag on the Sunshine Coast for about two years. Most of the good ideas on this list didn't come from me. They came from customers messaging me about something they'd tried, and me assuming they were winding me up.

This post is the ideas. If you want the mechanics ratios, serve sizes, shelf life, what to order I've covered all that in a separate guide on using cold brew concentrate at home.

One Rule Before You Start

Whatever you make, the ratio is yours to decide.

Everyone's taste is genuinely different, and the number printed on the bag is a starting point rather than an instruction. Go stronger, go weaker, swap water for milk. Take a few goes to work out what you actually like and then build everything else off that.

That's the whole philosophy behind selling a concentrate instead of a pre-mixed can. You're the one deciding.

Take It Camping Instead Of A Plunger

This is the use the bag was actually designed for, and it came from getting it wrong first.

We started with glass bottles. Glass was a mistake, and campsites are where that became obvious. Nobody wants glass in an esky that's getting thrown in the back of a 4WD down a corrugated dirt road. Nobody wants broken glass at a campsite in bare feet. And a rigid bottle takes up the same space whether it's full or nearly empty.

A bag does none of that. It squashes into the gap in the esky a bottle would never fit. It doesn't shatter. It gets smaller as you use it.

The practical upside at a campsite is that you skip the whole production. No machine, no power, no plunger you then have to rinse out somewhere with no running water, no coffee grounds to deal with. Pour, add water, drink.

If you're the one who normally gets up first and makes coffee for everyone, this is the entire reason to own it.

Batch Espresso Martinis Without A Coffee Machine

The most common "what else can I do with this" answer, and a good one.

Making espresso martinis for a group is genuinely painful if you're pulling shots. You're doing them one or two at a time, everyone's standing around waiting, and the first person's drink is going flat while you make the fourth.

With concentrate you just pour. You can batch the whole lot at once. You can do it at a campsite or a picnic with no power at all, which is a fairly good party trick.

Full recipe here: the Bellmott espresso martini

Put It In A Protein Shake

Straight into the shaker with your protein powder, then milk or water.

This one's become common enough that I'd now call it a standard use rather than a hack. Coffee and protein in one hit before the gym, one thing to wash up afterwards. It works cold because it's already cold — you're not trying to cool down a fresh espresso before it curdles everything.

Coffee And Tonic

Concentrate over ice, topped with tonic water.

This is big overseas and almost nobody in Australia has tried it. It's sharp and fizzy and a bit confusing for the first mouthful, and then it isn't. The bitterness of the tonic and the bitterness of the coffee do something odd and good together.

It's my afternoon drink. Coffee in the morning, this from about three o'clock.

Chocolate Coconut Water

A customer told me they were mixing concentrate with Cocobella chocolate coconut water and I genuinely thought they were having a lend of me.

They weren't. It works. It's sweet without being sickly and it doesn't need milk, so it's the one I go for when I want something closer to a treat than a coffee.

That's two afternoon drinks out of a coffee bag, neither of which I put on the label.

Hot, If You Want It Hot

Worth saying plainly because people assume cold brew has to be cold: it doesn't.

Same concentrate, hot water instead of cold. You get a smoother, less acidic hot black coffee than you'd get out of a plunger, because the brewing was done cold and slow in the first place.

Handy at a campsite in winter, or at a desk in July when an iced coffee sounds miserable.

The Ones I'm Still Waiting On

A few things people keep asking about that I'll be straight on.

• Baking and desserts. It should work fine anywhere a recipe calls for strong coffee, and it saves you brewing a batch just to use two tablespoons. I haven't done enough of it myself to give you a recipe I'd stand behind.
• Over ice cream. Same story. Affogato logic says yes. I'd use it stronger than you'd drink it.

If you've made something with it that works, tell me. That's where most of this list came from.

Why There's Room To Muck About At All

Coffee in this country has split into two ends.

At one end there's specialty, which is excellent and also drowning in snobbery. Single origin this, altitude that, tasting notes read out like a wine list, and an unmistakable sense that you're doing it wrong. At the other end there's the servo fridge, which is convenient and cheap and tastes like a milkshake that lost an argument with a coffee.

There was nothing decent in the middle, and that's the gap Bellmott sits in. Organic beans, roasted on the Sunshine Coast, made properly, for people who care more about convenience and cost per serve than provenance.

The point of a concentrate is that it's an ingredient, not a finished product. Nobody's decided in advance how strong it is, how sweet it is, or what goes in it. That's why it ends up in protein shakes and tonic water and espresso martinis, and why nobody's ever done that with a can of iced coffee.

Make it your way. If your way turns out to be chocolate coconut water at three in the afternoon, that's between you and your fridge.

It's not instant coffee. It's coffee in an instant.