Delicious Spicy Red Pepper French Press Coffee in 11 Simple Steps

Time to Make: 10 minutes

WARNING: This is a spicy drink. If spicy foods irritate you, I have other recipes you can try 🙂

This sugar-free recipe is based on my french press coffee recipe, which has lots of extra tips and explanations on why certain steps are taken. For this spicy red pepper recipe, you’ll only need one extra ingredient, and that’s red pepper, preferably chile de arbol. Dried chile de arbol peppers impart a slightly smoky, nutty flavor, and a well-rounded blast of heat. It’s a very affordable way to add a sense of luxury to your drink. I love it for cold, cozy mornings when the snow is floating down in front of the sunrise.

Chile de Arbol

This spicy coffee recipe uses dried peppers to add heat to your drink. The pepper recommended for this recipe, chile de arbol of the capsicum anuum species, is native to Mexico and has been cultivated for thousands of years. It has a Scoville heat index of 15,000-30,000 units, which is about on par with a serrano pepper, albeit with a different flavor profile. The chile de arbol pepper is nutty and smoky, and goes great with a lighter roast of coffee.

How does it work?

Just like with coffee, hot water extracts flavor from hot red peppers as well. When you let crushed coffee beans and red pepper take a hot steamy bath in a french press, you will get a cup of coffee infused with capsaicin, the chemical that makes peppers taste spicy. It will also imbue your drink with any other flavors present in the pepper, but to a lesser degree. If your palette is used to a lot of spice, you can enjoy these flavors too.

Why drink spicy red pepper coffee?

Spicy red peppers like chile de arbol contain capsaicin, which is known to have health benefits (https://www.webmd.com/diet/health-benefits-capsaicin). This compound is said to improve heart health and aid weight loss. It is believed that it helps the heart with inflammatory properties, and it may help with weight loss by increasing metabolism or decreasing appetite. These peppers are also brimming with beneficial vitamins A, B, C, and E, and they may act as cell-preserving antioxidants (https://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/ss/slideshow-foods-hot-peppers-benefits).

Tips and Tricks

Before jumping into the recipe, I’d like to share some advice on how best to make use of it.

The best, freshest way to do this recipe is to use the dried whole red peppers from a grocery store or farmer’s market (or straight from your own plant if you are lucky enough to have one). However, if all you have in your kitchen right now is an old packet of crushed red pepper from a pizza shop, that’s fine too. No, it’s not the same thing, but chances are you’re trying out this recipe to get a general idea of it. And you may find that you really like the Italian peppers in your coffee! If you have another type of dried red pepper in your cabinets and you don’t have chile de arbol, you can experiment with them instead. Just make sure you check their Scoville rating! I’m a big proponent of using what you already have, especially if you just want to try out a recipe and see if you like that kind of thing. It is worth noting that dried peppers are usually very affordable, and they keep very well for years at a time. This makes them a great addition to the spice collection of anyone who loves heat.

If you have any questions or curiosities about how to use a french press, check out my comprehensive french press instructions.

Spicy Red Pepper French Press Coffee Recipe for 8 oz (236 mL)

Tools

French press: This hot immersion method will be enough to extract the spicy flavor of red peppers without taking compounds out of the coffee that we’d rather not taste.
Kettle
Coffee Grinder if your coffee is not pre-ground: I recommend a mortar and pestle.
Herb grinder if you’re using a dedicated coffee grinder and want to keep them separate. A mortar and pestle is a great choice for this (and can be used for both). For this recipe, I love using one mortar and pestle for both the pepper and the coffee. This helps get more of the capsaicin oil from the pepper onto the coffee as you grind it up.
Timer: You can use a dedicated timer or you can just use the one on your phone.

*Clockwise: a french press, a mortar and pestle, a kettle, and a timer*

Ingredients

–2.5 tbsp of coarse ground coffee (or 12.5 grams)

–8 oz of Water (or 236 mL, also 236 grams)

–1/3 tsp of crushed red pepper (or 0.5 grams). Feel free to increase or decrease this to your liking! Sometimes I just use an entire pepper.

*A whole red pepper on top of ground red pepper*

*Coarse ground coffee with some whole and half beans*

Instructions

Grind the red pepper into 1-2 mm pieces. If your pepper is pre-ground into a different size, that’s fine too. Don’t sweat it.
Put the ground pepper in the carafe.
Measure 8 oz of water into your kettle. I like to do this by filling my mug with water, then emptying it into the carafe.
Set your water to heat up to 197 F (91-92 C). *
Grind your coffee coarse.
Put the ground coffee in the carafe with the pepper.
Set your timer for 4:30, but don’t start it yet.
When the water is at the correct temperature, pour it into the carafe, getting all the coffee and pepper grounds wet in the process. Do not stir.
Begin your timer for four and a half minutes, and put the lid on, leaving the plunger up (the long stick part should be standing up out of the lid).
When your timer alerts you, remove the lid and stir the brew with a wooden utensil.
Put the lid back on and plunge all the way down, slowly. Your spicy red pepper coffee is now ready!

Now that you know how to make spicy red pepper coffee with a french press, you can enjoy this delicious healthy drink every day if you want to. I think you will find that this is HOT hot coffee. If you like it, it’s especially good in winter when it is cold outside and we want to have some extra inner heat. I hope you enjoy this easy recipe and the others I have on this site! If you like this, subscribe to Herbs and Brew 🙂