Cascara brew and cold drip coffee – four ways

Nothing like an apocalyptic lockdown to allow your exploration of the coffee universe run slightly wild.

This week The Magic Roast takes you to live and direct into the world of over-the-top COVID-cabin fever, and how to best to combine the two knobbier ends of the caffeine world – cold drip coffee and cascara cold brew.

Cold drip has been one of our more favoured coffee making methods for the last few years. Slow extracting from coffee grind with drips of cold water, spanned out over eight or so hours, allows for the sweeter, delicate flavour profiles to emerge while leaving the tannins and bitterness behind – and if you dial in all the variables (coffee to water ratio, grind, drip frequency), you can end up with an insanely full, complex, yet fruity cold coffee hit.

Then there’s cascara, the usually discarded, dried fruit that surrounds the coffee bean. When cold brewed, cascara packs a sweet, raisin bread, dried stone fruit flavour-bomb.

Just like some sort of bastard-child, what if we bring the two together? Just because? And, not content with just mixing the two liquids together, The Magic Roast decided to dial-up the wank-o-meter with a few method variations as well as the straight liquid mix – the iced cascara and cold drip, iced cold drip and cascara, and finally cascara cold dripped coffee.

For the cold drip, we used a Coffee Supreme Rwanda Coocamu with a drip radio of 50g of medium-to-coarsely ground to 600ml water, which yields about 520ml of cold drip.

We used the same ratio for the cascara cold brew – 50g of dried Rocket Coffee Diafanor Ruiz cascara “tea” to 600ml of water. We put the mix into a sealable container and pop it in the fridge for about 24 hours. Then strained the liquid into a Chemex and dumped the spent fruit pulp into the compost. This yields about 500ml of cascara cold brew.

Cold drip and cascara tea 50:50

The baseline test - mix 100ml of cold drip and 100ml of cascara tea.

Result: The cascara sines through, as expected, with the 50:50 ratio placing the sweeter notes above the woody, tobacconess of the cold drip. The overall effect is a slightly more robust cascara – rather than a sweeter cold drip.

The nose is a drier cascara with the coffee notes emerging, but the palate is overwhelmingly cascara sweetness with the cold drip notes emerging with the finish. It’d be worth experimenting with the ratios to lift the cold drip profile.

Cascara tea with cold drip ice

150ml of cascara tea with three-four frozen cubes of cold drip.

Result: The surprise bolter. The bombastic fruitiness of the cascara presents a bright, (Aunty Donna) Christmas Pud smack in the face, then, as the cold drip ice cubes melt, slight mosey, earthy tones emerge and seamlessly merge with the cascara, although the cold drip coffee profile isn’t fully revealed. This is the metaphorical mullet of the cascara-cold drip experiment – business at the front, party at the back.

Cold drip coffee with Cascara ice

150ml of cold drip coffee with three-four cubes of frozen cascara brew.

Result: The full-frontal cold drip gradually becomes sweeter as the ice melts. At first this presents as a standard cold drip then after about 10 mins, as the cascara sweetness is released the notes begin to change. It’s worth noting that cascara ice melts slower than cold drip ice – probably as the cold drip contains a denser level of solids, so this blend method needs a bit longer for the flavours to merge.

Cold drip using cascara tea

Okay – this is where things got a bit silly. For this one, we used 600ml of cascara cold brew to drip through the 50g of ground coffee – that’s right – instead of water, we use cascara. Technically this one was a bit tricky as the obviously denser cascara did not behave the same as water when it came to drip frequency control, which required constant re-calibration. This resulted in a slower drip time, meaning the resulting concoction collected more tannins than a standard cold drip.

Result: An unmistakably strong cold drip with the sweetness lurking in the background. The flavour profile is heavy and earthy, with a full taste profile spanning sweet to bitter (the tannins). Not a delicate mix at all, rather a condensed syrup ripe for mixing with vodka, a bit of mint and lime.

Just saying.

ED - Massive shout to Matty T for this bad boy! He's a massive supporter of The Magic Roast, a regular coffee and whisky nerd and now on The Magic Roast payroll. Sick as.