Coffee

Iced cold is the best

Sometimes you may crave coffee more than wine. But what do you do when your slippers melt because it's so swelteringly hot and you still need your coffee without thinking about something warm? Then these four iced coffees are your solution.

In the coffee scene, there has been a war for years over the best brewing method for iced coffee. In short, it comes down to this: brew hot and cool down or brew cold? Both methods have their pros and cons and especially significant taste differences. Here are four iced coffees to get you through the summer cold.

The Japanese method

The Japanese don't complicate things. Just brew hot coffee and let it cool down quickly. That's called crash cooling. Or if you have a Chemex, Aeropress, or V60 Ice Coffee Maker: put ice cubes in the pot and let the ground coffee drip onto the ice through the filter.

Because the coffee cools down immediately, it cannot oxidize, resulting in an aromatic, pleasant, slightly acidic, and immediately drinkable coffee.

If you think you need much more coffee here due to the dilution risk from the ice cubes: no worries. The faster the coffee cools – and it does because it drips onto the cubes – the less dilution occurs. So you don't need to make a concentrate, regular coffee is sufficient.

The Japanese don't complicate things. Just brew hot coffee and let it cool down quickly. That's called crash cooling.

Cold brew method

For this, you mainly need some patience, but it pays off, as the ground coffee beans taste subtle and mild after steeping in cold water overnight (or at least somewhere between 2 and 24 hours), and with less acidity and more aroma, it becomes syrupy and slightly sweet. There are two options: slowly dripping with, for example, the Dutch Coffee Maker or steeping in cold water.

This method is often used for Vietnamese coffee or other cold variants with milk. The flavor matches better with the sweet milk tones.

Nitro cold brew

Nitro brew or nitrogen coffee is cold-brewed coffee to which nitrogen has been added and is served under pressure. The result is a softly bitter tasting coffee with a thick, creamy foam layer that resembles Guinness beer and is tapped just like Guinness, for example at Lot Sixty One in Amsterdam.

The coffee hippies from Stumptown Coffee Roasters sell cold brew nitro coffee in cans, with a guaranteed hefty foam head when pouring.

The taste of cold-brewed coffee matches better with the sweet tones of milk than hot-brewed coffee.

Tonic espresso

Also known as espresso tonic, black tonic, caffé tonic, coffee tonic, and colloquially in Dutch as ‘koto’. This has been on the bar in cities like Tokyo, Melbourne, Berlin, San Francisco, and in the Netherlands at coffee chain Anne&Max.

A creamy sparkling tonic espresso is as simple to make as it is complex in flavor. With its hint of sweetness, citrus, and a bit of bitterness plus the lack of alcohol, it is the non-alcoholic version of the G&T (gin and tonic). Quite sensible at the beach.

Text: Favorflave.com