Clever is as clever does and this clever lad used his Clever immersion brewer to cold brew a single-serve batch of coffee. How clever!

I've been playing around with cold brewing recently but I've run aground against the sheer amount of beans to grind for the jug-filling quantities of cold brew that I was trying to make. I do not have an electric grinder and my modded Hario Skerton is just not built for grinding mass quantities of beans quickly.

With that in mind, I cast my eyes about my kitchen for inspiration and they landed, with a just audible "squish!", on the Clever.

The Clever is an immersion brewer-- you add ground coffee, hot water, let it steep, and then finally drain it out. Essentially, the cold brew process is the same, except the water is cold and the steep time much longer. I realized that I could use the Clever as a small Toddy-like cold brewer.

I figured that I could make a couple of cups worth of cold brew concentrate from the amount of water and coffee I could fit into my Clever, I just had to figure out the ratios and the amounts. Here's what I came up with.

Recipe

I went with a coffee to water ratio of 1:4. Due to the size of the Clever basket, I couldn't go with much more than 350ish grams of water and still have room for all the ground coffee. For ease of math, I settled on 320 grams.

• 320 grams of water
• 80 grams of ground coffee

The coffee I ground fairly coarsely, about 8 or 9 turns from zero on my Hario Skerton:

After rinsing out the paper filter, I filled the basket with the grounds then poured in the water. It was a pretty close fit but it worked. After stirring the combined slurry to let the grounds bloom, I popped the lid on the Clever and let it soak overnight.

My original plan was a sixteen hour steep time but the best laid plans of mice being what they are, I ended up with only a twelve hour soak for this batch. Still, I was very happy with the result.

The beans I used were a slightly over the hill batch of Kiambara Peaberry from Cafe Grumpy. The cold brew captured the Kiambara's bright acidity and was very smooth. I would have liked to have given it the full sixteen hour steep but that will have to wait for the next time. As it stands, I'm very happy with how my twelve-hour soaked cold brew turned out.

Because big batches of cold brew are beyond me at the moment, I wanted an easy way to go small. The Clever is a great solution given that the size is just about right to get a couple of servings out and, mechanically, it does everything larger devices like the Toddy do. 80 grams of coffee is doable for me to grind by hand and I can setup brews the night before to take in with me to work the next day. That's clever enough for me!