With it being June in the Northeast, the heat has certainly picked up, and the Spring/Summer fever is in full swing. One of my favorite parts about the warmer months is spending some time outside and enjoying my morning coffee, well, my morning iced coffee, it’s already hot enough out without a scalding mug in hand. The only issue I had was that I needed to go out and get this liquid manna from somewhere, or it came out of a carton from the store. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate coffee shops as much as the next caffeine junkie, but I was also raised to take pride in my coffee brewing and currently safeguard a recipe that’s been perfected for over three generations of coffee brewers. I also use a Keurig without batting an eye, so take from that what you will. Regardless, I knew there must be a way for me to manufacture my own iced coffee, using grounds of my choosing, allowing me to save money and trips to stores while maintaining the pride of my brewing ancestry. Indeed there was, and damn was it easy.
TL;DR
Put grounds in water, let sit, strain, enjoy.
Instructions
Tools/Supplies
- Container for steeping
- Strainer/coffee filter/cheese cloth
- Container for storing
Ingredients
- Coffee grounds
- Water
- Anything else you want
Making iced coffee is a lot like making regular coffee, you can get it done with beans and water, but some people have their own tweaks and tricks. I recommend starting off with a ratio of 1-1.5 cups of coffee to 4 cups of water and then tweaking it from there. Simply add the two together in your steeping container, mix it up to make sure everything’s evenly disbursed, and refrigerate for 8-12 hours, again tweaking as needed. I usually set this up at night, so that the fresh batch is ready in the morning, but maybe you want to do it throughout the day, so it’s ready for a grab-and-go in the morning.
Once your cold brew is ready, you then want to pour it out of the container and into the one you’ll store it in (I use a pitcher with a top, similar to something you keep lemonade in) and strain out all the grounds in the process. I originally used a small strainer like this:
which worked well for most of the grounds but let some of the finer pieces through. As I started making more at a time I started using a larger strainer with some finer mesh that succeeded in capturing more of the disposable grounds, but still was not perfect. Others recommend using a coffee filter or cheese cloth as part of the process, but I’ve found I’m too impatient to wait for the coffee filter in the morning, and I didn’t have any cheese cloth. The solution I arrived at which works well enough, is to just use the strainer as a best effort on the initial brew. Everything that escapes it settles at the bottom of the container anyway, so it’s fine until you reach the end of the supply, at which point I use the strainer again when pouring the glass. Most of the dregs remain at the bottom of the container and can be rinsed, and the strainer catches the few that would have made for a nasty surprise in my straw. Anyway, once that’s done you can put a top of that and keep it refrigerated for awhile (haven’t had it last long enough to know how long it keeps!).
Drinking the iced coffee
Now that you’ve got the iced coffee, you have to drink it. My personal strategy is put ice in a glass, pour in the coffee, then add cream and sugar to personal taste. One thing I will note is that the cold brew has a higher coffee-water ratio than my normal cup of coffee, so it has a stronger taste, but the ice will actually dilute it a bit as it melts, so take that into consideration. Others have suggested adding sweetened condensed milk or flavored syrups, but I haven’t ventured into making a syrup yet and the condensed milk didn’t really change the taste of mine enough to warrant the extra level of complexity. I’m sure there’s plenty of other ways to personalize your iced coffee, so feel free to let me know what you come up with!