For those early mornings when you want your coffee to wake you up a little bit more than usual, this is the recipe for you! It’s a classic cowboy coffee recipe, and it’s as strong as it comes. It’s also very simple and versatile—you can use this recipe for fewer or more cups than I suggest here.
Just make sure that the amount of water is proportionate to the amount of grounds to get the right taste!
What is Cowboy Coffee?
When it comes to brewing methods, cowboy coffee is a throwback: this is how people made coffee before there was drip and pour-over before there were French presses or AeroPresses or even percolators. Instead of fancy equipment, all you need is water and heat. That makes it perfect for camping trips (and if you’re in the great outdoors, that’s probably where you’re going to get your heat).
Poured into hot water and allowed to steep, coffee brewed this way will have a thicker body than most other cups of coffee. If that doesn’t sound good to you, don’t worry: You can still enjoy cowboy coffee while filtering out the grit by adding a little cold water at the end of brewing.
Cowboy Coffee History
In the first half of the 19th century, many Americans moved out West to start new lives in big cities like St. Louis and San Francisco. These were people looking for adventure and opportunity — they were the original cowboys! And they needed lots of coffee to keep them going during their long days on the range.
Since cowboys didn’t exactly have access to electricity and plumbing out there in the Wild West, they had to make their coffee by hand. They would boil water over an open campfire and then add coarse-ground beans right into the pot. This was cowboy coffee!
They could carry their ground beans with them and make it anywhere that had water and fire — even on horseback.
Cowboy Coffee Recipe
Prep Time: 0 Min
Cook Time: 5-10 Minutes
Ingredients
- Coffee beans (whole) – 1 tablespoon per cup of water
- Pot or kettle
- Water – 1 cup per person
- Coffee grinder (optional)
- Strainer
Instructions
1) Boil one cup of water in a kettle.
2) Once the water boils, remove from heat and add coffee grounds to the bottom of your mug. (Note: Adding the grounds to the bottom of your mug and not the water allows you to adjust the amount of coffee used to your personal taste by measuring how much coffee remains in your cup.)
3) Pour hot water over coffee grounds and stir slowly until all grounds are saturated.
4) Let the mixture sit for 4 minutes, then stir again and let sit for an additional 30 seconds before drinking.
5) Strain your coffee so the coffee grounds don’t come into your mouth, and that’s pretty much it! Don’t use a strainer if you want to go the old school way. Instead, dribble a bit of cold water on the top of your hot cup of coffee, and the grounds will sink to the bottom.
Conclusion
This coffee is not fancy with many ingredients, but it always tastes great, and the smell of a small fire with a little bit of coffee simmering on top is just the best smell in the morning. Cowboy Coffee can be made any time, even at work. Just make sure your boss does not walk around the corner when you start a little party that smells like coffee, sugar, and smoke.
So, hopefully, if you’re like me, you’ll give this traditional cowboy recipe a try!
