Oxo Debuts Rapid Cold Brew Maker – CoffeeTalk

The Oxo Rapid Brewer, a new product from New York-based kitchen brand Oxo, has made actual good-tasting cold brew in just five minutes. This is a significant improvement over the previous attempts at instant cold brew, which have been proven to be wrong or different, or even terrible. Cold brew, by nature, takes time, anywhere from a few hours to a full day.

The Oxo Rapid Brewer is a multipart device with a hand pump, a water reservoir, and a tight-tamped coffee reservoir designed to use hand-pumped air pressure to push water through a tight espresso-like puck of coffee grounds. It costs a mere $40 and is small enough to take on a hike. When ground to a super-fine, nearly espresso-like grind, the device’s coffee reservoir works like a thick quad-shot puck. The coffee is then poured into a standard American coffee cup, and the air pressure is pushed into the water chamber.

The result is about 4 ounces of genuinely credible cold-brew concentrate, ready to be diluted with milk or ice water into a morning drink. The coffee has released its natural sweetness and a whole lot of flavor. This tasted the most like traditional cold brew, the stuff that takes 12 or 24 hours to make.

The Oxo Rapid Brewer works similarly to another multipart plastic tube of a brewer that uses hand-applied pressure to brew coffee quickly. However, the process is different. The AeroPress is like a French press that’s been hand-pumped through a filter, with a bit of pressure to aid extraction. The Oxo is more like a combination of Kyoto-style slow-drip and espresso, but also hand-pumped.

For five minutes, water dribbles through a shower filter into a thick, tamped coffee puck, working its way slowly through the puck but releasing very few drops. Only when the water starts hand-pumping is the water pushed more quickly through the puck, dribbling out over the course of another minute or so. The air in the chamber reaches higher than one bar, about double what you’d usually expect from an AeroPress but still way less than the nine bars needed to qualify as espresso.

The resulting cold brew concentrate benefits from pressurized extraction, but also super-fine grounds aid faster extraction. Using a boatload of coffee grounds also means a greater bulk of flavor compounds is extracted. The device manages to coax out a surprising amount of sweetness, especially with roasts that lean caramelly and medium-dark. In side-by-side testing, the results were significantly better than fast cold brew made with an AeroPress.

The Oxo Rapid Brewer is a fast, blunt instrument that produces cold brew, but not as complex and sweet as a 12-hour cold brew. It extracts sweetness and full body but not all of the flavor. The right roast matters, and subsequent attempts with different beans showed limitations. Light roasts, in particular, came out underextracted to the point of sour, while too dark risked some bitterness.

The Rapid Brewer uses a lot of beans for each mug of cold brew, using 40 grams of coffee for four ounces of concentrate, enough to make eight to 12 ounces of drinking-strength cold brew once diluted. By comparison, you would expect to use less than half that if making a 10-ounce mug of drip coffee. The portion used for the Rapid Brewer is also significantly more than you’d need to make the traditional cold brew that involves patience and forethought.

As a daily driver, this Rapid Brewer would quickly become expensive, making it not a cold-brew maker of first resort. It is a magic trick reserved for hiking, camping, or mornings at home when long-extracted cold brew is not available.

The Rapid Brewer can produce hot coffee, but it produces its hot coffee in concentrated form, meaning you must dilute it with more hot water after brewing. The hot brew isn’t much faster than any other method of brewing hot coffee, and the results are not as complex or aromatic as an AeroPress or a good drip brewer.

However, user experimentation will eventually determine what works and doesn’t work with the Rapid Brewer. In the meantime, the Oxo Rapid Brewer offers a palatable and economical home solution to a sudden need for cold brew.

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