I drink coffee every morning. Like many folks, I arrange a cup of coffee for myself pretty early on in my morning routine, being somewhere between taking a leak (first order of business upon becoming ambulatory) and taking the dogs for a walk (which requires a fairly alert state of mind). I usually have this set-up where I filter my coffee by pouring hot water over a filter that's set on an Erlenmeyer flask. I don't do this because it's efficient or because the resulting coffee is especially good. I do it because the entire process is pleasing to my fetishistic fascination with coffee and my addiction to it. I pour water from the kettle gradually, and it seeps through the ground bed and drips into the clear glass flask, and becomes the stuff that causes my head to stop hurting. I'm am confident that all baroque coffee making methods throughout the world exist to satisfy this fetish rather than making especially good coffee. I mean, we can make good coffee at home without spending two grand, but if you want it to look like this:
A person should feel embarrassed to own such a thing, even if it was a gift or something. But if you actually spend $9000 on it, you're gayer than Michael Jackson. Actually, maybe not. Here's Michael Jackson's espresso machine:
But anyhow, to return to the topic at hand, I recently started making cold-brewed coffee and adding hot water to it when I'm ready to drink it. Why? Cold-brewed coffee is awesome, mainly.
Cold-brewed coffee has a ton of additional flavor that ain't in hot coffee. When you cook the beans, you eliminate a lot of the organic compounds that provide aroma. If you've ever had an iced coffee from a shop and thought to yourself Why's this coffee so damned good? Then you know you like cold-brewed coffee. So making my coffee this way makes it taste great, and it's easier too. But I don't plan to stick with it. It's just not intricate enough for my tastes.
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