Recycled Java

I’m a coffee lover like most of my family. I like a good strong cup so this hint seemed a little suspect to me…won’t the flavor and the caffeine be depleted? So I dug into the internet to find out what I could and there are certainly folks who are adamantly opposed to re-brewing used grounds and I didn’t find anyone who was in the opposing view ‘camp’.

Seems that re-brewing spent grounds works better with certain methods of coffee brewing and I found a great blog post with a thorough comparison of these methods with pictures. Definitely don’t expect the same amount of flavor or caffeine from a second brew. If you like a weak cup of coffee, this might work fine for you. However, according to Gramma’s newspaper clipping - you can expect to get HALF the flavor - so it makes sense to me that you can re-brew after drying out your grounds in the oven but you will need twice the amount of grounds (but again, don’t expect the same caffeine kick).

I love how thrifty this suggestion is. There are many other ways to re-use your coffee grounds, though. I will link here to another article with lots of ideas like putting spent grounds in a diy facemask, using them to exfoliate your skin, putting them in your garden as a soil additive… There are lots of options so there is no need to throw them out!