I Haven’t Been This Confused By A Coffee Brewer In Ages

Hello there. We have a very peculiar coffee maker to look at today. I don't often use the word confuzzled. I'm not even sure if it is a word. However, this right here has me thoroughly confuzzled. So we're going to look at it. We're going to brew some coffee with it. We're going to we're going to talk about what is going on here. This little contraption right here is called the Rapid Cold Brew Maker from a company called Dash. It's a brewer that costs just around a and you get a couple things when you purchase this. So let's walk through what you receive in this brewer. You get the primary body of the brewer. You have a glass carafe here that has markings down the side. This is a max capacity of about 40 ounces or 1200 milliliters. You get the power cord, which is less of an accoutrement and more of a necessity. And then you additionally get a little cleaning spoolie. This entire brewer is not dishwasher safe, so this will be your best friend as you clean the various components. Now for the brewer itself, again, the carafe is one piece. This kind of A-frame body is one piece. And then you have this removable hopper on top that is many pieces. First things first, there's a lid that you rotate in order to lock and unlock. It's like a nesting doll scenario we have going on here. This piece right here where your dry coffee is going to go and where your extraction is going to happen is fully removable. So just kind of knock your fingers, pull, it comes apart. One thing I do want you to notice right now and we'll go into in a minute is you'll see inside here we have two different ports. We'll come back to that. Now you'll notice here we have a fine mesh filter on the top as well as one on the bottom. Again, this is a piece that is removable and you simply unscrew it to separate these two parts. Inside this little chamber right here is where all your dry coffee is going to go. It's pretty hard to see, but there are markings inside that show you where the max fill line of coffee is going to be. This is what we're going to use to kind of measure how much coffee is going to go into this. I'll tell you the gram amount when we get there. The other notable thing about this is that we have this kind of center post right here and you'll notice that on the top of the post there are these holes here that allow liquid to travel down the center. What happens is when you line it up with this lid you'll notice that this entrance point now sits above the mesh, meaning that whatever brewed coffee comes through this mesh is going to gather and then pass back down this center pole. Okay, those are all the pieces. Let me go get some ground coffee and let's make some coffee. I want to give a huge thank you to Trade for sponsoring today's video. If you're looking to explore the wide flavor of coffee, look no further than Trade. Trade is the U.S.'s number one rated specialty coffee marketplace, with coffees hand-selected from local roasters all over the country, and I've been using them for years. Your coffee subscription can be tailored to fit your exact needs, from different roast profiles to your delivery schedule, and Trade's experts have taste tested and curated over 450 coffees, meaning that all you have to do is take a short quiz and they'll match you with your best fit. From light and bright to dark and bold, Trade delivers incredible coffee directly from those roasters to your front door. Whether you prefer your morning cup as a filter coffee or a juicy double shot of espresso, you can explore different coffees tailored to all types of extraction methods and flavor profiles. So if you're ready to stop settling for just okay coffee, Trade has got you covered with great coffee. Visit drinktrade.com MDC to get 40% off your first order. That's drinktrade.com MDC or the top link in the description. Okay, I have some ground coffee. This is a kind of a medium grind. This is not nearly as coarse as I would typically go for cold brew. I went to where I would usually grind for like a batch brew and I went a tiny bit coarser. So this is like kind of a true medium right here. However, before we add it to our hopper, I do want to talk about kind of the the schematics of what is going to occur before we muck this up with adding coffee. So I mentioned earlier that inside this we have two different ports and these line up with what you see on the top of the brewer. Real fast before we get going, we're going to follow the pathway of one of these ports. If you see right here, we have two ports. This back port right here is where water is going to be drawn up into your brewing chamber and then this one right here is where it's going to pass back down. If we look here, we can see the innermost is a clear port that lines up right here. Your central area right here is now where your finished brewed coffee is going to return from, which you can see reflected in this post right here, which is again central lining up with that innermost port. Additionally, you'll see on the bottom here that this has a somewhat rubber seal, meaning that when water passes up into the brewing chamber, in theory, it's not going to leak out into all of this area. So that's the pathway that coffee is going to take to return back down. Essentially goes up, brews through, and then goes back down. You may have questions. I understand. You will see as we continue. Okay, now as far as our ratio goes, Dash recommends using 6.5 ounces of medium ground coffee to the max fill line with your max brewing. 6.5 ounces, kind of a weird amount to think about in coffee. When I weighed it out ground, that was about 150 grams of ground coffee. What that makes this ratio then is about a one to eight ratio, which is in like the ready to drink cold brew ratio zone. Cold brew is kind of interesting in the sense that there is not really a standard ratio. Sometimes people brew cold brew ready to drink, usually with a one to eight to a one to 12 ratio, maybe even one to 16, or sometimes they will brew a concentrate, meaning they're going to add water to dilute it out to their preferred flavor profile later. Usually this happens in anywhere from like a one to two to like a one to six ratio. It is really personal preference, and we don't nearly have those same confines that we do with filter coffee, where traditionally we will stick within a one to 15 to one to 17 range. Again, there's always variations. There's always different options. However, that is pretty true in the way that it's not true with cold brew. Okay, so let's start with our coffee. Here's my first thing, is we have a lot of coffee to put in here, and I don't have a scoop. I have never wanted a scoop more than I do in this exact moment, and I was, I was a little bit confused at first because, uh, this of course comes with a little instruction guide, and inside the instruction guide, they have a scoop. So initially I thought maybe I just missed it in the packaging or something, but no, I did not receive a scoop, and I've never wanted one more than this exact moment. So pardon me while I get a spoon. It feels like traitorous to want a silly plastic scoop in this moment, but I do. I've just been, I've just been conditioned by the continual use of these, these silly little brewers. You kind of want to add your coffee. Do your best to keep it level. We are going to brew the recommended ratio that they want us to brew. Again, for filling this to the max line, it's about 150 grams. Otherwise, you can keep an eye on that internal line. Okay, we're nice and level inside our chamber. Make sure you don't have any grounds around this kind of top port here, then you can screw this back together. Now you may be wondering where the water goes. Interestingly enough, with this brewer, this was a mistake I made initially. The water actually starts in our final brewing carafe. So we filled up to the max line here. I'm going to fill up to the max line in this chamber, which is going to be about 1200 mils of water in total. You'll also notice that on our little lid here, we have this, this tube, or this straw, that is essentially going to suck up all of this water and deposit it up here in our brewing chamber. It's a very curious beginning state to our coffee brewing that's happening right now. I suppose I should plug in the brewer. Now I do really appreciate the length of this cord. I think this is about a six foot long cord, and as someone whose primary outlet is way over there, the length of this is very much appreciated. Okay, we are going to press our carafe in all the way. You'll see once that happens, our screen, screen, our button begins to light up. We have three settings on here. You have mild, regular, and bold. All of these just control the time that this coffee is going to brew for. The mild is set for around eight minutes in total, the regular is for 12 minutes, and then the bold is for around 17 minutes. We also have some lights here in a row at the top. These are going to show the time that you are brewing for, and they will also kind of count down so you can somewhat see how much brewing time is left. Today we're just gonna, we're gonna go for regular. It seems, seems like a nice middle ground here for trying out our brew. So our coffee is all assembled. Slot that back in. Press it down. Make sure all those seals connect. Put on our lid. We give you a more centralized view here, and then we're gonna start our brew. Okay, everything is assembled. Let's begin. I kind of, I can't get over this sound, the kind of whine that this makes. Now that sound that you're hearing right now is the, is the pump, because essentially what's happening is that all this water, or you'll see some of the water, is being drawn up into this top chamber. Give it a minute, you'll see something start to happen here. Don't worry, this is supposed to happen. Let's just give it a minute or two. I'm gonna leave here for a minute. This will be done in approximately 10 minutes. We'll return once we have our final brew. Okay, so a lot has happened since we last talked. Let's taste our cold brew first, and then we'll get into kind of the very interesting brewing process that this machine employs. Cheers! So it does taste about how you would expect it to taste. You may have noticed some very strange things happening here. Our beginning position began with all of our brewing water in the carafe, our dry coffee up here, and when we started it, that water pump began sucking up water so that it would pass through the spet. However, it only ever took about half of the water, and then that brewed coffee started falling back down into our carafe as the cycle continued of only taking a certain amount of water up into this top section. This is a very interesting thing. When I very, very first brewed with this, I thought I had done something wrong, just because the sudden explosion of coffee water back into our plain water was quite shocking. However, no, this is how this is meant to function. Now, the problem that you're probably realizing we're running into is that this leads to a pretty under-extracted cup of coffee. With cold brew, if we are all not familiar with the concept, cold brew is brewed at a cooler temperature than we usually extract coffee at, which means it takes a lot longer to extract the flavors that we would with hotter water. Typically, cold brew goes for 8 to 24 hours in this sort of ratio, and the idea is that it is full immersion, meaning all of that coffee is in contact with all of the water for the entire brewing process. Now, that's not what's happening here. Instead, we're kind of entering this cycle where only a portion of the water is forced through before then the brewed coffee is shoved back down into the carafe and, assumedly, at some point again forced back through the bed of coffee, leading you to never really achieving a full immersion. And then, on top of that, we're using cool water and we're only doing this system for about 8 minutes, 12 minutes, or 17 minutes at the most. Now, we definitely have achieved coffee here. This is like a beverage you can consume that does have dissolved solids in it. However, the flavor profile of what you'd achieved definitely holds on to a lot of those very classic under-extracted notes. So, this kind of has that hollowness to it. It doesn't have a ton of body. It has a little bit of that kind of sour, puckery feeling. And what was most interesting to me is I'm pretty particular about my coffee and I fully acknowledge that. However, I did want to see other people talk about this. So, I went and watched some other reviews from folks and one of the common threads was this interesting kind of justification of the fact that, yes, they were very excited that this brewed coffee, cold brew, in 8 to 17 minutes. However, everyone kind of had this reaction of, oh, it's a little sharp though. Like, I think I'm going to add some cream to this to round it out. But, hey, it is cold brew. And that's kind of an interesting scenario to me. Now, one of the other things I do want to mention is that this is not a machine for me. I totally acknowledge this. I am not the target customer or the use case for this. However, I do think that there are some things that could be improved on that would make this a better machine for that target customer. So, I have made a list. It is not numbered. It is not in any particular order. But I want to kind of leave some thoughts with this instead of just saying, this isn't for me. This isn't any good for me. Now, I put my list on the sticky note so I would not forget any of the things. The first thing, and I know I said this list wasn't in any prioritization, but I do think this is the most important thing, is to provide some point where a full immersion brew is happening. I have looked at numerous of these sort of rapid brewers before. And while they all achieve something that does feel a bit more under extracted than a traditional cold brew, there are a lot out there that achieve full immersion. Additionally, a lot of them will provide a lot of agitation. I don't think that is absolutely necessary here, but I think by enlarging this hopper for allowing for that full amount of water to reach the top and to brew all together, you will result with a better final brew. I'm not an engineer. I do not know how to achieve that perfectly. But I do think having a full immersion rather than this kind of cycle where you're kind of brewing a little bit of coffee at a time before returning it, is something that is leading to a less tasty cup here. My next thing, I would like a scoop. I don't think I have ever said that sentence before in relation to a coffee brewer, but I do think I really, really want a scoop with it. It's kind of industry standard for these types of brewers, especially at this price point, to come with that sort of additional tool. And I think with this, with the amount of coffee you are carefully loading into the hopper, it would just, I would just, I would really like it. It would be a nice little touch. My next thing is, I don't have a solution for this again, but reducing to some extent the volume that the water pump runs at would be really nice. This is a hundred dollar machine. It is very loud. It is very high pitched and it's very grainy in its tone for the entirety of the brewing time. And my last thing here is, I think something that would be pretty easy and also makes this a more accessible brewer to the types of people that they're targeting. I mentioned before that inside your hopper, you have a marking for your max fill line of dry coffee. This corresponds with that one to eight ratio that your max fill line on your carafe indicates. However, on our carafe, we also have other markings. We have a minimum marking. If you want to make 27 ounces of cold brew, we have a middle marking. If you want to make 35, however, we don't have corresponding markers in our dry hopper. This means that if you are looking to make a lesser amount of cold brew, you're left a little bit more guessing. If you have a kitchen scale, it makes it easy to divide everything, but this is not made for someone who's brewing coffee with a kitchen scale. They are assuming you are using your visual indicators. In which case, I think it would be really nice if they put visual indicators on the inside of your upper hopper, showing how you can brew lesser amounts of cold brew. Now again, this is all in good fun. This is a really, really funky little rapid cold brewer, and I don't get confuzzled that much anymore. I feel like I have kind of seen everything under the sun, but this one really threw me in a loop that had me kind of like just cackling the first time I saw all of that brewed coffee dumped back into the primary carafe. This is an interesting little thing, and I'm glad I got a chance to try it. So without further ado, I think those are all the words I have to say. Felt like I said a lot today, but regardless, my name is Morgan. You can find me here on YouTube once a week, plus shorts, or Instagram or TikTok almost every single day. You can visit Morgan Drinks Coffee if you want to find even more recipes and blog posts, or you can sign up for my newsletter in the description. That being said, I think I'm going to go make myself some other coffee, and I'll see you all next time. Goodbye, everyone.