Hot summer days find us shying away from hot coffee and exploring colder versions. We recently shared how to make cold brew at home, but while cold brew is delicious and smooth it does have one big downside: it takes time. In order to make cold brew you need to plan ahead and prepare for 12-20 hours of brew time.
To make iced coffee quickly, what most people try to do is ice down their coffee after they brew it. Unfortunately, this doesn't work great because what usually happens is that your normally brewed coffee gets diluted by melting ice into a light brown mess. I have done this more times than I can count!
Good news: there's a faster and better way to make great iced coffee and it prevents you from diluting your coffee at all. If you've been following our pour-over series, you already know how to do it. It's called flash brewing—sometimes known as "Japanese iced coffee"—and it's basically just making pour-over directly onto ice without any dilution. The pour over method pulls out all the flavor the way it always does; then ice chills it instantly and locks in the aromatics. It takes the same amount of time as pour over: about five minutes.
Here's how to make it. Take your normal pour-over recipe and replace roughly 40% of the water with ice placed straight into the carafe or mug under your dripper. It's a simple way to counter-act the dilution later on.
A concrete example: So if you brew with 300g of water, use 180g of hot water for the pour and place 120g of ice below.
Note: this recipe assumes that you are weighing your water and coffee beans. If you don't weigh your water and beans, and instead measure them by volume, then you're going to have to estimate how much water your ice equals and subtract that amount from the hot water you brew with. And...if you aren't measuring water or coffee by volume, then you're probably just winging it! Totally cool...but will lead to inconsistent cups. Take a look at our pour over blog post series which will help you up your game and make more consistent, delicious pour overs.
This is as simple as it sounds. Below is my flash brew setup from this morning. Since ice cubes aren't easy to measure, what I do is simply drop some ice cubes in the mason jar that I'm brewing into and see how much they weigh. In this case the cubes weighed ~90g. So now I know to simply pour enough hot water to equal 300g. In this case that will be 210g of water. (Practically speaking I will simply pour water until the scale reads 300g)
Some additional notes:
When grinding your beans do them a touch finer than usual because you're using less hot water. This will increase the extraction a little bit because you are making less with the pour so want a little more concentrated result. Bloom like normal, pour in slow spirals like normal, and watch the coffee stream down over the ice and go glossy and dark. By the time the dripper finishes, you're holding a genuinely cold glass of coffee. And because you're not pouring the last 40% of hot water, the pouring part is actually shorter than usual. It's quick!
We love this for darker roasts: ice is brutal to thin, delicate coffees so you need a coffee with body. A dark roast has the body to stand up to the chillier temps and the melting of the ice. Similar to cold brew, we recommend our Dark roast because it has a medium body with complex flavors and won't fade as the ice cubes melt. If you do use something darker, such as our Darker roast, we recommend that you plan to add dairy since the iced brew will be slightly heavy.
We've been drinking flash iced coffee a lot lately and it's honestly one of our favorite ways to drink our own coffee in July.
By the way, flash brew and cold brew aren't competitors. They're different drinks. Cold brew is mellow, smooth, low-acid, planned-ahead of time and usually bigger batches. Flash brew is brighter, more aromatic, and can be immediate in smaller batches. Keep both in your coffee repertoire and you're all set for summer.
