Home / How to Brew
into the cup
Boil it, filter it, bottle it. We make a big batch on the weekend, keep it in the fridge, and it carries us all week — hot in the morning, iced in the afternoon.
the one rule
You're brewing a roasted root, not a leaf — and roots don't give anything up to a quick soak.
Tea leaves are thin and delicate, so pouring hot water over them and waiting a few minutes is plenty. Dandelion is dense and woody even after roasting. Hot water sitting on top of it barely scratches the surface, which is why people who treat it like tea end up with a pale, thin cup and decide dandelion coffee is overrated.
So the grounds and the water go in the pan together and get boiled. That's what pulls the colour, the body and the roasted flavour out and into the water.
1 tablespoon of ground roasted dandelion for every 4 oz of water. Boil it all together, pour it through a coffee filter, bottle it. That's it.
That ratio makes a strong concentrate on purpose — most of it ends up cut with milk, so it needs to be able to hold its own.
how we actually do it
One pot on the weekend, filtered and bottled, and there's cold brew in the fridge every morning.
1 tablespoon of grounds per 4 oz of water. For a big batch, 8 tablespoons to 32 oz — roughly half a cup of grounds to a quart.
Grounds and water in the pan at the same time. Bring it up and let it boil — no gentle steeping, no waiting for the kettle first.
Pour it through a paper coffee filter. A mesh sieve leaves too much silt. Filtered, it comes through clear — it looks exactly like iced black tea.
Into bottles and into the fridge. Keeps about a week. Once it's bottled and cold it looks like legit Starbucks cold brew.
Straight out of the pan it's dark and a little cloudy. Through the filter it clears up into something the colour of iced black tea — and once it's chilled in a bottle it genuinely passes for cold brew. If yours is muddy, the filter is the fix.
dial it in
Adjust the grounds, not the boiling time. A longer boil past a certain point just adds bitterness, not strength.
now the fun part
The bottled brew is a base. What you do next is where it becomes your drink.
2–4 oz of the brew, hot, then fill the rest of the cup with steamed and frothed milk. Because there's no acidity, the milk goes silky instead of splitting. This is the everyday cup.
Same ratio — 2–4 oz of the cold brew straight from the bottle, then cold milk over ice. No reheating, no waiting. This is the easiest drink in the house on a hot afternoon.
The purist's cup, and the honest test of your roast. Deep, earthy-sweet and clean, with none of coffee's acidity. If black coffee is too sharp for your stomach, this is the version to try.
The best way to transition off caffeine. Start at 25% dandelion, 75% coffee, and shift by a quarter every week or two. Your palate adjusts before your habits have to, and the withdrawal headache never shows up.
Roasted chicory root is dandelion's sweeter, mellower cousin, and the two are lovely together — roughly half and half. Essentially New Orleans-style chicory coffee, without the coffee.
Honey, cinnamon, sage, a tiny dash of cayenne, ginger, vanilla, cacao. Dandelion's bitterness is a fantastic backdrop for warm spices — much better than coffee at carrying them.
fixing a bad cup
Three usual suspects. You steeped instead of boiling — the grounds need to go in the pan with the water and actually boil. You didn't use enough: a tablespoon per 4 oz is a lot more than it sounds. Or the roast was under-done, which makes pale grounds and a pale cup no matter what you do.
Use a paper coffee filter rather than a mesh sieve. That's the whole fix. Let the pot sit a minute before you pour so the heaviest grounds settle, then filter — it should come through clear, like iced tea.
Back the grounds off toward 2 teaspoons per 4 oz and don't let it boil hard for ages — a rolling boil for a long stretch pulls out the sharp edges. A teaspoon of honey or even a pinch of salt rounds off bitterness instantly.
About a week in the fridge. It doesn't go stale the way brewed coffee does — no oils to turn rancid — so day five tastes very much like day one. If it ever smells sour, start a new batch.
You'll get a second, much lighter batch if you boil them longer — the third is basically brown water. Since a bundle is only $2–3, we usually just start fresh.
A French press works if you give it 15–20 minutes with water straight off the boil — you're trading heat for time. A drip machine is the weakest option, since the water touches the grounds for under five minutes. Boiling on the stove beats both by a wide margin.
free grounds, no catch
We roast more every weekend than two people could ever drink, and we'd rather share it than let it sit in a jar. Pick whichever one fits you.
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