Iced Coffee at Home (Without Waiting 24 Hours)

Cold brew is the famous one. It is also the slowest thing in your kitchen.

Twenty four hours of waiting means you have to want an iced coffee a full day before you want an iced coffee. Nobody plans that well. So most people either drink hot coffee they do not feel like, or they buy an iced one on the way somewhere.

There are two other ways to make iced coffee at home, and both of them are finished before the kettle has properly cooled down.

The Three Minute One

This is the method almost nobody at home has heard of and almost every specialty cafe uses. Flash brew. Sometimes called Japanese iced coffee.

You brew it hot, straight onto ice, and it chills in seconds.

That sounds like it should taste watery. It does not, and the reason is the bit worth understanding. Hot water pulls out the delicate aromatic compounds that cold water never reaches. Cold brew leaves them in the grounds, which is why it tastes smooth and heavy and a bit flat. Flash brew pulls them out with heat, then traps them the instant they hit the ice, before they can steam off into your kitchen.

Smooth is not the same as good. Cold brew is smooth because it is missing things. Flash brew keeps them.

The whole trick is that the ice is part of the recipe, not something you add afterwards. You brew with less water and make up the difference with ice, so the final strength is exactly right.

Here is our V60 recipe with the water split.

Same 15g. Same total liquid. You have just moved 100g of the water into the jug as ice and let it melt on the way through.

Put the ice in the jug first. Brew onto it exactly like you would a hot V60, in the same time, with the same bloom. Swirl at the end so the last of the ice goes. Pour over fresh ice in a tall glass.

Three minutes, and it tastes like the coffee actually tastes.

The Sixty Second One

If you have a machine, the iced latte is the fastest good coffee in the house.

Pull a normal double. Our espresso recipe is 20g in, 40g out, 27 to 30 seconds. Nothing changes because it is going over ice.

What does change is the order you build it.

Ice first. Then milk. Then the shot, last, poured slowly over the back of a spoon.

Most people do it backwards, espresso into the glass and ice on top. That dumps a 40g shot straight onto frozen water and it seizes. You get a thin, sour, slightly bitter mouthful with a watery tail. Pouring the shot last means it lands on cold milk instead of naked ice, and it keeps its body.

Fill the glass with ice. Two thirds milk. Shot over the spoon. That is the whole thing.

So Which One

Cold brew still earns its place. It is the one you make on a Sunday and drink all week, and it is gentler on anyone who finds hot coffee sharp. We wrote the full method in How to Make Cold Brew at Home, including the batch sizes.

It just should not be your only option, because it is the only one you cannot decide on at 2pm.

The Thing Iced Coffee Does to Stale Beans

Here is something we run into on the cupping table every week.

We taste coffee as it cools, all the way down to room temperature, because cold is where a coffee stops being able to hide. Heat and sweetness cover a multitude of sins. Take both away and what is left is the truth of the bean.

Stale coffee tastes acceptable hot and papery cold. Under-developed coffee tastes fine hot and sour cold. The cup that is still good at room temperature is the cup that was good in the first place.

Which is why iced coffee is unforgiving in a way hot coffee is not. If your iced brew tastes like wet cardboard, the method is probably not the problem. Check the roast date on the bag.

What to Use

Iced brewing rewards a coffee with something to say, because the cold strips out the comfort blanket.

People Every Day is the safe one over ice. Balanced, chocolatey, works with milk or without. No Sleep Till Brooklyn is the one to reach for if you are making an iced latte, because those dark chocolate and jaffa notes come through the milk instead of getting buried by it. Hyperdrive if you want it to hit properly.

Whichever you pick, use it inside four weeks of the roast date. Cold will find the staleness. Every one of our blends is roasted to order and shipped the same week.

Keep reading: How to Make Cold Brew at Home · How to Store Coffee So It Actually Stays Fresh · The Brew Guide

Written by Jos at Brother of Mine, specialty coffee roasters in Perth.