In this informal, self‑recorded tutorial Dave Asprey shows how to brew a usable cup of coffee using only coffee beans and hot water, without any traditional coffee‑making equipment. He explains that a basic kitchen blender can serve as a makeshift grinder, recommending roughly 20 g of coffee (about two tablespoons) per 10 oz of water, though precise scales are unnecessary. After grinding the beans to a sand‑like consistency, the grounds are placed in a glass, hot water (around 200 °F) is poured over them, and the mixture is stirred for about four minutes. Asprey discusses several low‑tech filtration options: using paper towels (pre‑rinsed), a simple metal strainer, or the “cowboy coffee” method of letting grounds settle and decanting the clear liquid. He also shares practical tips—adjusting coffee strength, using a stopwatch or phone timer, and improvising a strainer from household items. Throughout, he injects a casual, gratitude‑focused mindset, suggesting a brief meditation while the coffee brews, and mentions optional bullet‑proof coffee add‑ins like brain octane and butter. The video emphasizes that, even in a pandemic or when coffee shops are closed, a decent cup of coffee can be made with minimal tools, saving money and providing a moment of calm.
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Have you ever wondered how to make coffee when you don't have anything it takes to make coffee except for coffee beans? I'm going to tell you to make coffee with nothing that a professional at home coffee maker would have. All you need is beans and they don't even have to be ground. Here's how to do it. It's nice if you have a coffee filter. It's nice if you have some basic equipment. All you need is hot water and coffee beans. Let me demonstrate. I have here some basic ingredients. This is boiling hot water, empty cup coffee beans. These are the bulletproof mold free special coffee beans. Now if you were a connoisseur, you might have a coffee grinder like this, 70, 80 bucks. You may even have a whole coffee maker which could cost you 20 bucks or a French press. You don't need any of that. In a pinch, all you need is some way to grind up those beans. And I'm going to suggest a blender is your best way to go. No, this is not world class coffee with appropriate coffee making equipment like the espresso machine over there. This is like straight up street coffee. But you can do with any beans or any coffee you have. You can even pry open one of those little Keurig pods if you need to and get the coffee out of there. So this is for, I need coffee. There's no coffee shops open. There's a pandemic and I don't know how to make it at home because someone always made it for me. So what you do, hot water coffee beans, if they're pre ground, great. If not, you just put the beans in the blender. How many beans you put in the blender? Well, ideally you would have 20 grams of coffee for every 10 ounces of water. What you don't have a digital scale that goes down to 20 grams. That's okay. Couple handfuls or about two tablespoons of ground coffee, something like that. You don't have to get it perfect. If the, if the coffee is just not strong enough, add more coffee or grind the beans more. If it's too strong, more water or less coffee. It's real straightforward, like high school chemistry. All right, next up, we're going to blend these beans. This goes on the blender? No, blenders are terrible things. They chop coffee into dust and boulders. You want even sized particles, but hey, this isn't perfection. This is coffee for life. Start. It's going to take longer than you think. What we have here is coffee that smells good. But these particles, you can see Them here are way too big. You want beach sand. These are like gravelly, nasty beach. More grinding. Faster is better. Harder is better. Oh yeah, this is looking good. You should always spank your blender because that gets all the fluffy pieces out. Now what's going on here? It's coffee. That looks like fine ground coffee. Finer is better. By the way. Since I'm self quarantined, I'm filming this on myself. If you can't see that, you'll have to just roll with me here. Next up. And put the coffee in a, in a glass. Why? So you can see what's going on in there. Basically ground coffee. Next up, hot water. Boiling hot right off the stove. You want to be about 200 degrees. Boiling water is going to be about 205. So people prefer 199. What? You're not perfect. Just use boiling water. It'll be fine. So now. Ouch. What's going on here is the coffee's sitting in the cup, it's floating to the top. So something magic is going to happen. It's called stirring. I got to grab a spoon. I chose a very special spoon for you. This spoon once fed my children and it has three ducks right there on it. This is important. It was just in the drawer. Like I said, street grade coffee. Now if you look at this going to just break the crust on top. What's going to happen is it takes four minutes to brew a cup of coffee. So you should take out your special stopwatch you keep next to your coffee gear. Oh wait, just use your iPhone or just say that's about four minutes. It looks right. And your trick. What you're going to know that right now it's even colored. When you're done, most of the coffee grounds are going to be on the bottom of the coffee, like way down here. And you're going to have clear coffee on top. While that sits. Let's talk about filtering. But I don't have any coffee filters. That's okay. I don't either. I think paper coffee filters are gross. I use metal coffee filters. I have them all over the place. But what will you do if you did a bad job of grinding and you can't get the coffee particles out of the coffee with no filter. Which is what I'm going to teach you how to do. There is a solution. It's called paper towels. No, toilet paper will not work. Do not try that coffee toilet paper unrelated. But you can take a paper towel or two. You put them over some sort of arrangement. Watch out they won't filter very quickly. You pour a little hot water through them to get most of the paper taste out and you can pour the coffee through there and you get filtered coffee. I'm not going to do that for you because frankly, it's embarrassing and I want to drink the coffee when I'm done. You can do better because there's something called cowboy coffee cowboys. It turns out back in the day didn't have a lot of coffee filters they wanted to throw away. So instead of using their socks or their underwear, which produces subpar coffee, what they would do is they would just boil the coffee or let it sit in hot water until the particles fell to the bottom of the pot. Then they pour the coffee off the top of the pot. Now I do this in airports all the time. I go to my favorite green logo coffee company. I say, please, can I have a vented hot water in a double cup, please? I'm gonna do exactly what I'm doing right here. But you can do this in your apartment, you can do this anywhere. And this will save you money in the long term over going to the coffee shop. And well, if you don't have a coffee shop that's open, what else are you gonna do to get your daily fix? Because Amazon now takes 30 days to deliver Amazon prime coffee makers and they are not considered essential. I don't understand how that is, but anyway, that's how it is. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna stir this a little bit more. Now what I like to do is I like to practice gratitude for my coffee. I take a deep breath and I have a four minute meditation in the morning. And then I take one coffee bean and I burn it in a little incense burner as an offering to the God of coffee. Or not. Bottom line is you got four minutes of free time. You could be sending an email to someone, you could be talking to someone on social media. You could be watching. This video doesn't really. It's your four minutes. I actually do recommend just practicing gratitude or meditating or taking some deep breaths. Any of the stuff that you can learn about on the blog, whatever you want to do, it doesn't have to be something that makes you more spiritually advanced than your neighbors. There's nothing like going on whatever your favorite video conferencing, chat thing with your friends is and saying, my ego is smaller than yours. So you don't need to do that to make this kind of coffee. Now what's going on here? I'm hoping you can see this in the video is there's still particles in here. So we have a few more minutes and when it all is clear, coffee, you're good to go. But you're saying, Dave, it's probably been close to four minutes and I'm impatient. I want to drink my coffee. Dig through your drawers. There's a pretty good chance you have something like this. This is a basic sieve. This actually isn't a basic one. If you look at it, it's bent all fancy. This is because Dr. Andrew Weil, who came on the podcast, sent me his Machia curry gift packet, which is really good matcha. And this was in there. And I just needed any kind of strainer. You don't have to have a strainer if you wait long enough. I don't want to keep you guys waiting. So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to take this amazing strainer. See here. Normally you don't do this over the floor so you don't burn yourself, but hey, I'm going to do my best here. Empty cup, full cap. You ready? This is going to be magic. And it's going to end up on the floor and I'm going to have to clean it up because I like you. Ready? There it goes. On the floor. Stupid coffee. I'm sorry. Coffee which provides us life. Now what? You'll notice the vast majority of the coffee grounds are here. This is all that was caught here. If I'd waited another couple minutes or ground the coffee better, I, I wouldn't have needed the strainer. So what I have here is perfectly drinkable coffee. What I have here is sludge and a little bit of extra water. And that's the magic. This is perfectly drinkable. Perfectly good coffee. No coffee maker. All I needed was beans and hot water. If you bought the pre ground coffee beans, and may I request that you buy the bulletproof coffee beans because they're mold free and because they're keeping people employed and because I lab test them and because I love them and because they're my baby. But even if you don't do that and just take whatever coffee you can find, even like street grade coffee, you know, swept up from behind the coffee shop that just closed because of a government alert and all that kind of stuff, you can still do it. Your coffee should look like this. Let's see how it tastes. 80% as good as if I used all of my crazy precious coffee gear. So there you go. Beans, hot water, blender, and a glass that's all you really need. Hopefully this was helpful to you. Of course you can add brain octane and butter and blend it, make a bulletproof coffee which is going to keep you full for hours. You get inter fuel, all that kind of stuff that I've created. But even if you don't, you just want your coffee black to have a sense of peace. Have a sense of peace.
