Masha and I have been having some good laughs recently at the cold brew concentrate phenomenon, where grocery stores are starting to carry small bottles of cold-brewed coffee concentrate for insane sums of money. Sometimes a tiny bottle that will reasonably make 1-2 large cups of iced coffee costs $6 or more. That’s more expensive than Starbucks. (Not aware of this trend? Check out, for instance, Chameleon Cold-Brew…not to mention their startling prices.)

The reason we laugh is that we’ve been making cold brew iced coffee for years now…any time the temperature outside isn’t icy. It’s delicious, refreshing, and takes less time than making a pot of hot coffee. Oh, and it’s cheap.

The reason I’m posting now is because of a fantastic new tweak, thanks to John Hamanchosi at 7 Coffee Roasting Company in New York, via a recent Slate article: mint. It adds a wonderful layer of freshness to the coffee and we’ve become instant fans.

So, here’s a recipe and methodology for making wonderful cold brew iced coffee that is so easy, you’ll have no trouble ensuring that you’re never without some in the fridge (or, skip to the recipe).

Wow, things got crazy with my two previous posts about KDE’s Git corruption troubles.

Unfortunately, what became obvious from the comments on this blog (and, I assume, elsewhere, although I didn’t read comments on any other sites) was that the essential message was, almost universally, completely lost. I wrote the original post because KDE is an open-source project and we’ve never been about hiding issues from the community at large, so I felt it was perfectly fair to be open and honest about the troubles we had, in the hopes that it could help other projects from encountering them. Rather than take something useful away from it, most people seemed to take the Gawker approach. That’s fine, and I take no offense from people shooting the messenger when it’s clear they didn’t actually read past the headlines, but the point was to make people — especially other open-source projects — think about their own systems and their procedures. If I helped one other project avoid data loss because they reexamined their own systems, then great.

So, I’m redirecting my previous two posts, about KDE’s Git troubles, to this post, which I’m going to keep relatively short — because I want to make sure the lessons I was trying to put out there for other open-source projects are very clear.