2

I've decided i'd prefer to make my own coffee and can it to have on hand when i'm in a pinch then get a bottle of cold brew at the grocery to store in the car.

I wonder if anyone else has experience with this or has suggestions/oversights that could easily be made.

Off hand I would think to sterilize the jar, add freshly made hot coffee which should be about 200°F directly to the jar, let it self seal. I do wonder if this going to be enough for the coffee to seal past being perishable both from quality and safety standpoint.

BBS
  • 31
  • 4

2 Answers2

5

For safe home canning in a water bath, you need the contents to have a pH below 4.6. Coffee typically has a pH of at least 4.8, so you need to either add an acid to bring the pH down or use a pressure canner to process the jars.

Moreover, coffee is full of volatile compounds that degrade relatively quickly when exposed to air. Canned coffee would likely degrade quite a bit within a few weeks, unless you use a process more similar to how beer is bottled to prevent oxidisation.

I honestly think it would be less effort to make a big pitcher of cold brew once a week and keep in the fridge for coffee related emergencies.

user141592
  • 10,576
  • 3
  • 40
  • 45
  • 3
    +1. Also, while 4.8 is the theoretical upper limit, generally recipes are made for lower pH, so there is a bit of a buffer if something doesn't go exactly as planned. I doubt that people would like to drink coffee that is so sour. – rumtscho Nov 05 '21 at 21:01
  • 1
    It sounds like this is a deep dive not worth the time for now. Maybe if I need a hobby. In my experience i've never had great canned coffee which i'm guessing suggests there are compounds even the best of canning methods haven't resolved degrading quality. For the time being I will just get canned coffee for when im in a pinch. Another idea might be to look into something designed to can/preserve acidic things that can remove/replace the oxygen. – BBS Nov 09 '21 at 16:47
4

You do not want to chill hot coffee. Its quality degrades rapidly when you do this -- like within hours.

Instead, you should make a large jar of cold brew and freeze it. Frozen cold brew can be kept for months or years. Storing it at room temperature is not feasible; you'll notice that commercially sold cold brew is mostly sold refrigerated, and the handful of "shelf-stable" brands are pretty uniformly terrible (Trader Joe's, I'm looking at you).

FuzzyChef
  • 58,085
  • 18
  • 142
  • 218