|
|
|
|
Tastes great and much less acidity
I tried Toddy coffee with my friend and found that I had less acid in my stomach than with normal coffee. This is a great product and it makes having a cup of coffee very convenient. This morning I cold-brewed my first cup with the Toddy! I think I've finally kicked my $5/day coffee shop habit! Though it's not perfect, the Toddy makes great sense for the ice coffee addicts among us. Essentially you put some ground-up beans in a giant plastic bucket, let them soak overnight, then drain the resulting liquid (coffee concentrate) for storage in the fridge. Every time you want coffee, you mix a bit of the concentrate with water and cream. THE POSITIVES: * The Toddy instructions were easy to follow and included recommendations for bean type, grind, and storage for unused beans. (Important for people who have never brewed their own beans before, like me!) * The coffee tastes great! Very smooth and flavorful. * Soaking the beans overnight provided enough concentrate for at least 10 cups of coffee--maybe more! It will be easy to store some concentrate at work. * Cold-brewing at home is good for the environment! It requires no electricity, and I can't imagine how many plastic cups from the coffee shop I'm saving!! THE NEGATIVES: * The instructions recommend brewing one pound of coffee grinds at once, along with 8 cups of water or so. However, the Toddy bucket doesn't hold a pound! The water and grinds overflow unless you reduce the amount. * The water didn't reach all the grinds, meaning they were essentially wasted in the brew. (Probably because I'd mashed the grinds down with a spoon so they'd fit in the bucket.) I wish the bucket were bigger! Otherwise, I feel quite satisfied with this purchase. After a few cups, the Toddy will have paid for itself! And it's much more convenient than going out every time I need a cup of coffee. Can't wait to make some Thai ice coffee using condensed milk... mmmm! Good Iced Coffee, but used a ton of coffee to produce I bought this product after reading an article about the Toddy was the best way to produce iced coffee. I placed a 12 oz. bag of $10 coffee in the hopper, and added the recommended amount of water. I had to wait 24 hours for it to fully drip through. Then I added the concentrated coffee to water per the directions. It was great tasting iced coffee, but the entire batch only lasted a few days making it pretty expensive per cup. Love my coffee Toddy I love this product. It makes great tasting coffee & is so easy to make. So far I have used the coffee concentrate to make iced mocha coffee every morning. As the weather is getting cooler I will start making hot coffee. Great product! Works, but is overpriced In the past, I've attempted to cold `brew' coffee utilizing a few components that I found around the kitchen. It worked using a glass carafe and a few standard coffee filters, but it was time consuming and made a bit of a mess with the loose coffee grounds. I remedied that by using coffee pods. I bought Folgers coffee pods and threw about six of them in with roughly six cups of water. At the end of the `brewing cycle', about 18 hours, I simply poured the coffee into another carafe and tossed the pods. Worked fine with no mess, but was more costly using the factory made pods. I then decided to invest in the Toddy system. It works great --- and I have experienced no problems with the filters clogging as others have noted --- and the coffee is fine ( I'm no coffee aficionado and use this system to make iced coffee only). The entire process from start to finish really takes no great effort, but if you don't have the patience for such an `ordeal', then it's not the system for you. One complaint I do have is the actual cost of the Toddy system. As others have written it sells for around $30, but feels like a $5.00 product. The main plastic brewing pot is fine, but the detachable handle is almost completely useless. The glass carafe is made of very thin glass and could easily break at some point. I'm not going to give it a chance to break, however, for I immediately purchase a much heavier, fluted carafe (with stopper) at Wal-Mart. The Toddy brewing pot actually fits better on it and it would definitely take an effort to break it. Another thing I'm not crazy about is the fact that one needs to continue to buy the proprietary components after the fact: Toddy filters and plugs, so now my quest will be to find equivalent parts in my local stores so I won't need to re-order when I run out of them. Bottom-line: This system works, but see if you can buy the Toddy brewing pot by itself somewhere at a discount and then pick up a $5.00 carafe at Wal-Mart --- if only to send a message to the Toddy company that, yes, we like your product but we think that it is overpriced. | |
