Toddy Cold brew Coffee system

I love my coffee.

Anyone who knows me, knows this.

I have two roasters (liquified air and barrel roaster), two... no three french presses, an Aeropress, a hacked Espresso machine (got rid of the aerator at the bottom of the filter basket), and a Toddy Cold Brew system.

A what?

Ahh... young Padawan, you have never heard of cold brew system?  Sit at my feet and let me tell you about it.

We are all familiar with the various heat related methods of extracting coffee's delicious goodness from the beans, using a combination of heat and pressure to do so.  May of these methods make amazing coffee (aeropress) and some of them only make crappy coffee (I'm lookin at you residential filter basket brewers.)

But one takes 5 minutes to setup, provides a weeks worth of coffee, and reduces the acidity of the coffee by up to a 1/3 of hot extraction methods.

I speak, of course, of cold brewing.

There are many different cold brewers out, there some of them beautiful and expensive but the Toddy is a simple to setup, quick and inexpensive solution.

Basically:  Insert filter in bottom, insert cork, alternate coffee grounds and water til everything is in, cover (optional) and lets sit for ~24 hours.  Afterwards you pull the cork and drain into the provided glass carafe.  Said coffee extract keeps for a week in the fridge with no problems.  Well... mine seldom stays around that long...

You can either drink it iced with milk or water, or hot in the place of an espresso shot in a latte or americano.

One thing I have noticed it that cold extraction changes the flavor of certain coffees, which makes sense since some fats and flavorants extract at different temperatures.  For example a mellow Mexican I use for drip all the time is grassy and bitter with cold-extract and a Ethiopian which I cannot drink hot-extracted makes an amazing chocolaty cold brew.  In fact to test I hot brewed some of the Ethiopian and compared it to the cold-brewed batch which I made into an americano.  It was literally like drinking two completely different coffees.

So be warned, you favorites in one method may not be tasty in the other.

Thermogenics...

*typing with clattering teeth*

So one of the principles of the 4HB book is to use minimum effective doses of an action or food or whatever to increase the effectiveness of your goal.  This is in fact one of Tim's reoccurring themes in all his books I suspect.

For example, your drink a large glass of ice water in the morning for two reasons: firstly it hydrates after 8 hours of not drinking water and secondly it lowers your core body temperature you that your metabolism has to step it up and you basal metabolism rate increases.

He also has bit about ice packs, cold showers and baths filled with ice(!!!) and their effectiveness to help, but just focusing on the water at the moment...

I've been a good boy and been drinking 16 oz of cold water from the tap when I get up as I am getting ready for work.  But, given yesterdays revelation about how many eggs I am supposed to eat in the morning I thought I would see what volume of food a meal replacement shake is.

Found a Myplox shake pack with 42 g of protein, added 4oz of Toddy coffee concentrate (Note: now linked to Toddy mini review), some Vietnamese cinnamon, 8 oz of ice, about 12 oz of cold water and blended.

The resultant mixture was considerably more then the cup I've been drinking water out of so I should should check how much liquid the cup holds as I might be underdosing.  I slugged down enough till I could carry the full cup upstairs.

Ice cream headache.  Oh yeah it's plenty cold.

So I sat at my desk and worked away, drinking the shake mechanically (it was not bad but not OMG good.) but found that after a few minutes I was shivering uncontrollably.

Wait... what?

Well this is exactly the sorta of response I was supposed to be getting every morning from drinking water, but haven't been.  Which tells me that cold water from the tap may not be cold enough and that the shake may actually be faster since it kills three birds with one stone:  Coffee, Ice water, 30g+ of protein.