Nitro Cold Brew Coffee at Home: How to DIY Amazing Coffee

Cold Brew Coffee,…. with Nitro Anyone?

I’m going to show you how you can make it, package it, and serve it so you can have it on hand at home all the time. A new update to the “old way” is also further down.

I’m Martin Keen and normally I’m brewing beer in my videos. But today I want to show you how to make the stuff that’s coming out of the fourth tap in my bar. That is the wonder of cold brew coffee served on nitro.

I’m going to show you exactly what you need to do to get Nitro Homebrew coffee at home and we’ll start with what I was up to yesterday.

So let’s make some cold brew coffee.

Now there are all sorts of gizmos and gadgets you can buy to create cold brew coffee. But honestly the easiest way that I’ve found is just use Mason jars.

So I have here a two 64 ounce Mason jars and that’s all I use. Now in terms of the coffee to use, there are all sorts of um, sort of dedicated cold brew type coffees you can get.

I’m using this from cold brew labs right now and what you really want to go for though is something with extra course grinds or something that would be suitable maybe for a French press.

I didn’t have much luck finding this in the grocery stores, so I ended up buying this one online. Hey, you want to go for roughly a 4:1 ratio. So something like this that’s actually not 0.8 pints. I’m not super precise about this.

I just sort of measure it out. So it’s close to just being a little bit under one pint and then it’s good enough for me.

So that’s just the case of adding the water. It is recommended you use filtered water. Fortunately, I have my little RV water filter here, so let’s put this into the coffee.

With the lid screwed on, give it a bit of a shake, make sure that the water and the coffee are all combined. Now we need to get these cold.

Fortunately I happen to have one of my fermentation chamber chest freezers here that’s a currently cold crashing one of my beers. Just going to store them in here. They will stay in here for about 15-20 hours. If I remember about halfway through, I’ll give him a shake.

But yeah, nothing to do now. But wait.

That’s that should do it. That’s about 22 hours in the fridge. The next stage is to separate the cold brew coffee from the coffee grinds. The filtering. I do in two stages, starting off with my trusty brewers Civ. So this will just pour the coffee through here, catching the grains. There we go.

Then I rinse out that Mason jar with my high-speed bottle washer.

Now at this point, the coffee is mostly filtered, but there’s probably still a few grinds in there. So I am going to run it through a second filtration.

So we’re going to place this pour over on top of the rinsed out Mason jar, add my coffee filter into the pour over and then pour the coffee back in.

So after that, each Mason jar has yielded about two and a half pints of cold brew coffee. So at this point the coffee’s made and it’s actually a good idea to just give it a little taste before proceeding further.

Technically, this is really considered cold brew coffee concentrate at this stage and you could elect to water it down a little bit.

I’m having none of that. This is going in as is.

Now here’s where it gets pretty interesting. I think I’m going to package the cold brew coffee in this 2.5 gallon corny keg. Now if you’re packaging beer and serving on nitro, you do so using something called “beer gas.”

Beer gas is 75% nitrogen and 25% CO2 and you would sort of partially carbonate the beer with CO2 first. Then you’d use the beer gas to serve it and it’s going to come out fizzy.

With cold brew coffee, you don’t really want to use any CO2. That’s going to lead to some pretty unpleasant off flavors. So you just want to use pure nitrogen, not beer gas. So the first task for me was finding somewhere that actually sells pure nitrogen “N2” rather than beer gas.

So I ended up going to a welding shop just outside the airport and they were able to supply me with a 20 cubic feet canister of pure nitrogen N2.

Now the challenge with using pure nitrogen is it doesn’t really dissolve into liquid very well and we need it to do that in order to get that sort of foamy mouth feel that we’re expecting from a Nitro cold brew.

How Do You Make Nitro Cold Brew Coffee?

So to do that, I have a gadget. This is the quick cascade nitro coffee keg lid. And what it has is a carbonation stone on the end of it and a port at the top to accept a nitrogen gas post.

So what happens is you will plug in your nitrogen gas post into here rather than its usual spot in the corny keg.

The nitrogen will go all the way through this tube and then come out through the carbonation stone, which will be submersed at the bottom of the keg and that will maximize the amount of nitrogen that’s actually getting into the liquid….That’s getting into the cold brew coffee.

The first step to this is to sanitize the carbonation stone by placing it in some boiling water for a couple of minutes. When that’s done, sanitize the whole keg with some starsan.

Add the cold brew coffee into the keg and replace the lid. (Same with the portable uKeg Nitro version)

So this is my nitrogen regulator connected to my nitrogen stream canister. I’ve set the PSI to about five and I’m going to first of all just purge the keg. So just do that by connecting my gas post on the keg here to this and just pull the relief valve a couple of times. And that way we can get the oxygen out of this thing.

With the keg purged are going to move this onto the post on the quick cascade lid. And now we’re going to be sending nitrogen in through the diffuser.

I’m going to dial up the pressure in this regulator just to sort of 5 PSI every couple of minutes until I get to my target PSI, which is about 35 – 45 PSI. And all of this nitrogen of course, is running through that diffusion stone.

So now I’m up to 36 PSI and I’m going to leave it right there so can put this to the test. So I’ve connected the liquid outpost here, put this in the kegerator.

I serve the coffee through a stout for set. This is the same thing you’d use for a nitro beer. And this little beauty is the result.

Now, if you’ve not had true nitro cold brew, it’s very different from regular cold brew because you really get that creamy mouthfeel a much like you would with a nitro beer.

And it tastes so smooth.

Normally I finished my videos with cheers!. I don’t know what the, uh, the appropriate thing with coffee is. So, um, cheers!

An Update to the Nitro Brewing Process

Transcript: I’m going to show you a super easy way to make cold brew coffee at home. And then I’m going to show you how to turn it into a nitro cold brew coffee using this nitro infuser pro, let’s do it.

Good morning. Can I get two small nitro cold brew coffees, please? Can I get one with cream, 10 72 sweet cream. So yeah, 10 bucks for two cold brew Starbucks coffees. I think it’s time to take matters into our own hands.

Now I make cold brew coffee and serve it on my nitro every week. So this is a passion of mine at this point, and I did make a video about making cold brew coffee before (above), but that was when I first started out and the whole process was a lot more complicated.

So what I’m going to show you here today is much, much simpler, and it’s the process that I follow every week. So we’ll start off by actually brewing this cold brew, and then I’ll move on to show you how to serve on nitro.

So here’s what you’re going to need. Everything I’ve got here now all came from Amazon. So I’ve got the coffee beans, um, it’s best to buy beans rather than, than the ground coffee, because you need quite a coarse grain with your coffee. Um, so therefore just grinding yourself is probably the best way to go.

So I have, uh, a cheap coffee grinder here from Amazon, and then you have these, uh, these dark roast beans. Dark roast is really what you want. Cold brew.

Let’s have some Mason jars here and this bag of French press brew bags, um, which I’m going to use as well.

And this makes the brewing of the cold brew really very easy, because what we need to do here is immerse the beans in some water, let it sit there for a while and then get the beans out while leaving the coffee in the Mason jars.

And the easiest way to do that is with one of these filters.

So let me show you how it works. The French press brew bags recommend using five tablespoons of coffee in each bag. I’m just going to fill this up to the max line here in my coffee grinder.

Then I’m going to put this in here and just pumped down on this thing, four or five times around a second each.

So that really is the sort of course crush that you want with the cold brew coffee. Now I’m going to split this between two of these brewing bags. So half in each. They just have little draw strings on them, so we can tighten these up.

I’m going to throw these and one of these Mason jars. Okay. And repeat the process as many times as you like I normally do for Mason jars, because that fills up, uh, about one of my mini kegs. Okay.

And that’s that last ingredient is the water. I am going to use some filtered water just out of my RV water filter. Um, so yeah, you might want to use like the water filter in your fridge, something like that. Anything that’s going to get rid of the chlorine in the water would be good.

I’m going to leave these at room temperature too steep with the coffee, how long you leave it for? Well, I normally just make this the day before I want it and just leave it 24 hours. But actually I have gone as short as 12 hours.

And honestly, haven’t noticed a tremendous amount of difference. I’m just going to leave these overnight, come back tomorrow and then I’ll show you how to do the nitrogen part.

And now that cold brew coffee is ready. And this part is my favorite bit. Now I used to go through a whole process of sieving and filtering and whatnot to just this. All you got to do is pull out the bags and dispose of them. That’s it? Cold brew is ready to drink. I did put this in the fridge first, the last couple of hours, just to give it a nice chill. It tastes great.

Now the fun bit getting this on nitros so I’ve got a keg here. This is a three gallon keg, kind of a mini keg, cold brew in here. You can see some bubbles in here. That’s the starsan. I just gave it a quick sanitize.

Now the thing that makes beer fizzy and the way that you serve it is CO2 carbon dioxide. You do not want to use carbon dioxide with coffee, going to get very unpleasant flavors from that.

Um, you might be familiar with beers that are served on nitro. They’re actually served on something called beer gas, which is a combination of nitrogen and CO2. Um, but for nitro cold brew coffee, we want to serve this entirely with the gas of nitrogen and that’s it, no CO2 at all, just nitrogen the, um, but the thing to know about that though, is that nitrogen doesn’t dissolve very well in liquids, the same way that CO2 does.

So you could often have problems really getting that good cascading effect, a true pour when you’re just using pure nitrogen. So I have a new tool to get the nitrogen really flowing well out of my nukata taps.

And that is this a Nitro infuser pro this was provided to me by enhanced beverage solutions. And it’s an inline infusion. So there’s two things that go in here. There is a beverage in, this is where I’m going to send the coffee in.

And then there is a gas in, this is where I’m going to send the nitrogen in some infusion magic happens in here and then out the other end is just another beverage output.

So I’ll connect this then to the output, which will go to my tap. In addition to that enhanced beverage solutions gave me a second product called an afterburner. Um, this afterburner sits further down the line and this can be used as a sort of a booster to really boost the infusion. And it’s necessary if you have particularly long lines. Okay. That’s uh, let’s get this thing in.

Okay. So welcome to this jumble of cables. We’ve got the nitrogen tank here and a regulator that goes into the side of my keezer, and it comes out here into a T.

This was provided with the nitrogen fuser. So the T splits two ways. One way is along here. And this provides nitrogen into my keg. The other way is this T follows the slide here and goes into the input to the gas in the nitro infuser.

The other input we have is for the beverage and that fall, who’s we all the way round here into the other side of the keg. So the keg has got a gas post coming in and liquid coming out then out of the nitro infuser, they go out from here and then into this hole here, which goes through my wall and to the next room where I have my taps.

And now the moment of truth, I’ve set my own regulators, 28 PSI connected everything up. Let’s see what we get. And that is a beautiful poor of nitro, cold brew coffee. Cheers!

Brew & Serve Nitro Cold Brew Coffee using Homebrewing Equipment