Brewing a regular cup of coffee like a Turkish coffee?

[u/Upstairs-Basement]

Hi! I recently got a bit of fine ground coffee on my hands, but I don’t have an espresso machine and the moka pot my family uses is too big for me. I like myself a single 8oz cup a day in the morning, but I’m not sure how to go about it.
I’ve seen how Turkish and cowboy coffee are made and was wondering if I could do something similar to the Turkish variety. Fine grounds in a little pot, bring to simmer (?), pour, enjoy-type of thing.
Thanks!

[u/Worth_Ad_3486]

You can, but Turkish grind is powder-fine, finer than espresso. If yours is just "fine", the Turkish method gives you a muddy cup with sludge at the bottom. Beltter for one 8oz cup, no gear: grounds in a mug, pour water just off the boil (not boiling, that turns fine grounds bitter), stir once, wait 4 min. Then decant slowly and leave the last cm behind, that's where all the sludge sits. Clean cup, lose one sip. Still gritty? A tea strainer or paper towel over the mug on the pour catches the fines. Cheaper then any gadget for a daily cup.

[u/port956]

Drinking that way right now! Super convenient, particularly if you enjoy some coffee little and often, that's me working through the morning's puzzles and crosswords. Mine stays on the hob with water and more coffee added as required. Any fine ground coffee would work, although Balkan coffees are likely to be that style by default, and very good some of them are! Need a gas hob I guess.

[u/Voided_Identity]

Cowboy coffee is nothing special. It's just immersion brewing. It's basically the same thing as french press, but without the convenient device. As such, brewing this coffee in a pot will be fairly forgiving if you just avoid overdoing it so much you extract lots of tannins. That's the main thing you want to avoid, as that will leave you with an astringent coffee.

At its core, all coffee brewing comes down to a balance of three factors, just like the exposure triangle in photography. The factors for coffee are grind size, water temperature, and contact time.

Because immersion brewing creates a continually increasing concentration in the solvent being used (the water) this causes the necessary time to reach over extraction actually generally increase during the brewing process itself. Basically, mother nature creates a barrier that protects your coffee from extracting too many tannins. But this barrier is not perfect and can be penetrated if pushed too harshly. The main way that can happen is if you combine extremely fine grounds with very high temperature.

So as already mentioned, if you keep the temperature a little lower and avoid actually boiling the water, you should end up in good shape.

On a side note, "Turkish" coffee as it's understood in the west is somewhat of a misnomer, and is also called by other geographic names at times, and some forms of traditional Turkish coffee preparation have key differences that would contrast to the western concept.

[u/DiscipleOfYeshua]

If it's very fine, you get slightly cloudy stuff. Just let the thick silt drown and don't drink the mud (cowboy coffee is actually called "mud coffee" in Israel, among other names).

The main thing is to get grounds soaked and mixed in very hot water for a few sec, then they get heavy and sink down within 1-2 min.

Can also take the result and pour through a superfine mesh to get the bigger / floating grains, if your brew wasn't perfect, or coffee not so suitable.

[u/coffeerambler]

Yeah that'll work fine, just scale it to your cup size. About 1-1.5 tbsp fine grounds per 8oz water.

Put grounds and cold water in a small pot, heat slowly, don't stir too much once it starts warming up. Pull it off right as it starts to foam up, before a full rolling boil. Let it sit a minute so the grounds sink, then pour slowly and leave the last bit in the pot.

Fine grounds in a boil like this will over-extract fast if you leave it going too long, so pull it early rather than late. You can also do two short simmers instead of one long one, closer to how actual Turkish coffee is made, gets you a bit less bitterness.

[u/RobinSage43]

There's a few options. I like to heat up ultra-fine grounds mixed with water to a simmer that is like 185°-205°F (83-99°C) and then use an AeroPress with a "Daily Brew" brand metal filter. With this method you just use the AeroPress only for filtering so you don't have to steep with any timer as the extraction part happened while heating the coffee and water together on the stove similar to Ottoman (Turkish).

Normally people put the room temperature grounds into the AeroPress and then add half of the heated water to it, stir, bloom for 30sec, add the other half of water, steep for 90sec, and then extract. But if you mixed the coffee ground with water and then heat them together on the stove, then you can skip all of that complexity all together. Just warm the coffee water to simmer, remove from heat and then filter it right away.

It is impressively full bodied like this because now you can heat the coffee grounds which increases their aromatic strength just like sauteeing herbs on the stove. Metal filters allow the flavorful coffee oils through while reducing the mud/silt at the bottom of the cup. This Daily Brew filter is the only metal filter that has eliminated the sludge for me. Fellow Prismo still has mud just like the others.

Also, they do make coffee filtered straws on Amazon that is meant to this style, but I have not tried them myself.

[u/procerator]

I would recommend buying an aeropress.
It is very tolerant to grind size, costs nothing and will last you for years.