Better than cold brew: How to make iced filter coffee

It's summer, it's hot. It means you probably want to drink a delicious cold cup of coffee and this is my favorite way to do that. It's often called iced filter coffee or Japanese style iced coffee. What I'm going to do here is just cut to the chase. I'm going to give you the recipe and then afterwards I'm going to explain why I'm doing what I'm doing. To start with you're going to brew with 65 grams of coffee per liter of water or five grams more than you would usually use. You're going to grind a little bit finer than you usually would. You're going to brew with 40% of the weight of the brew as ice and 60% as hot water. So in a 500 ml brew that's 200 grams of ice, 300 ml of hot water. You're going to bloom with two to three times the weight of coffee as water and you're going to let it bloom for at least 45 seconds. Try and stretch the brew between two and a half to three minutes if you can. If you don't have a pouring kettle that doesn't really matter. At the end of the brew you're going to stir once in a circular motion and then once in the opposite direction and let it draw down. After you brew, swirl the decanter as thoroughly as you can to get rid of any remaining pieces of ice and then pour onto fresh ice cubes in a glass. Let me explain why I'm doing what I'm doing. First things first, how much coffee to water. I'm going to use five grams more per liter than usual for two reasons. Firstly, when coffee gets cold it loses some of its aromatic intensity. It just tastes less intense. That's true of any cold beverage. Secondly, even though you're going to chill it down pretty cold it's still going to dilute a little bit when you serve it over ice and you take your time drinking that out and about in the beautiful weather. Now we could obviously dose higher than that but then we start to run into some problems. The more coffee we have the harder it's going to be to do a proper extraction of that coffee because we've got a lot less brew water than usual. Which brings me on to the ratio of ice to hot water. Now what I did here was a bunch of different experiments. If I had 400 grams of ice 100 grams of hot water my beverage would be very cold but the extraction wouldn't be good. So I made a whole bunch of different brews with varying amounts of ice to find out what the ending temperature was going to be and to find out the point of diminishing returns where adding more ice doesn't get it any colder. In this case I was using ice that was between minus 18 and minus 20 degrees celsius. If you have a domestic freezer that goes colder than that you could use less ice. Again if you're using an ice machine the ice may not be that cold and you may end up needing a little bit more. All ice is not created equal. Now that increased bloom time is there to help us get some more extraction out of it. Having a longer bloom increases our contact time and increases our extraction. The reason I like this way of brewing so much is that you really get to taste the qualities of the coffee that you're brewing with. Brewing with cold water, cold brew, often removes a lot of origin characteristics and kind of makes the coffee taste pretty chocolatey, very pleasant, pretty low acidity. But not really the coffee that you paid for. Not the coffee that roasters have worked so hard to to source and roast and Brewing hot lets you extract all of that good stuff even if it is difficult to do with a lot less brew water. If you still have pieces of ice left over in the brew, you've used too much ice, you could use a little bit less and more brew water. And more brew water is always good. It lets you do a better quality extraction, lets you get more out of that coffee. So you want to use as much brew water as is possible. And at the end, you should have something delicious, and cold, and complex, and incredibly enjoyable. And something you should go and make yourself and all of your friends and family right now. There is coming soon a full pour over how-to video covering lots of different methods, lots of different techniques, what I would recommend, and ways that you can play with your coffee brewing to get the most out of it. That is coming soon. I am working on that, I promise. Let me know if you're out there brewing some coffee this way. Hope you're enjoying it. Have a great day.