The hot summer is over, and of course you need a cup of iced coffee to cool down and quench your thirst on such a hot day. If you tend to "go light" when making coffee at home and want to drink different flavors, Front Street would recommend you to try ice brewing. Coincidentally, Front Street Backstage has also received a lot of questions related to ice brewing in the past few days. Today, I will compile four tips for making iced coffee taste better.
1. First replace 1/3 of the hot water with ice cubes
Many people think that cold hand brewing means making a pot of hot hand brewing first and then pouring it directly into ice cubes. As a result, the taste is as bland as water and the flavor is completely lost. In fact, the core of delicious ice hand brewing lies in "high-temperature concentrated extraction + rapid cooling of ice cubes to lock the flavor", which is divided into two parts: first, extract high-concentration, full-flavored hot coffee → let the hot coffee drip into the ice cubes to lock in the flavor, quickly cool down, and at the same time play the role of moderate dilution.
In order to allow the coffee liquid to cool down just right without being overly diluted, Front Street will make adjustments on the basis of hot hand brewing when setting the parameters: replace 1/3 of the hot water with ice cubes. For example, the commonly used 15g coffee powder in Front Street, with a powder-to-water ratio of 1:15, requires 225g of hot water. To make an ice hand brew, it will be 1/3 ice cubes (75g) and 2/3 hot water (150g). Similarly, if 20g of coffee powder is used, the same 1:15 powder to water ratio, and the total water volume for hot hand brewing is 300g. To make an ice hand brew, it will be changed to 100g ice cubes and 200g hot water.
If you are too lazy to convert, there is a universal formula on the street. You can memorize it directly: coffee powder + 10 times hot water + 5 times ice cubes. Let’s take 15g coffee powder as an example, which corresponds to 150g hot water and 75g ice cubes. It can be applied to most coffee beans and is also the first choice for novices trying to brew by hand.
2. Adjust the grinding degree
The reason why hot hand brewing has a full taste is because there is enough hot water to wash the coffee powder, allowing the flavor substances to be fully released. However, the water injection volume of ice hand brewing is reduced by one-third, that is, the tail material is missing, and the coffee easily becomes weak in flavor. Therefore, in order to make up for the extraction rate, Front Street will slightly adjust the grinding degree to increase the contact area between hot water and coffee powder particles, allowing soluble substances to be released faster.
The range of fine adjustment does not need to be too large. Front Street recommends adjusting the fineness by 0.5~1 notch based on hot hand punching. For example, when brewing light to medium-roasted coffee such as Front Street Guo Ding Ding, Front Street Panama Gesha, and Front Street Chiclaw with hot hand brewing, we will use EK43s-10 grid, and the cold hand brewing will adjust it to 9.5 grid;
For the ice hand brewing of medium to dark roasted coffee beans such as Front Street PWN Golden Mandheling, Front Street Queen's Manor, and Front Street Blue Mountain No.EK43s-10-grid grinding scale. If you are using a hand grinder, you can directly adjust the grinder to 1 level.
3. Inject water in small amounts and multiple times
Similar to the grinding degree, the water injection method is also adjusted to make up for the reduction in water volume that results in an extraction time of less than two minutes.
Bingchong15g of coffee powder only needs to be injected with 150g of water. If you add water as usual, the time will be greatly shortened, so you need to change the method. In order to keep the total time within 1 minute 45 seconds to 2 minutes, Front Street will coordinate by reducing the water flow and increasing the segments appropriately. It is divided into four sections of hot water "30g-40g-40g-40g". If you feel it is difficult to control, use three sections of hot water "30g-65g-55g".
4. Keep the coffee cold
Many readers have also reported to Front Street that they bought their favorite coffee beans and took them home and followed our set of practices, but the resulting ice brew always had no aroma and a thin taste. In short, it was unsatisfactory. Assuming that you have eliminated other factors, the problem may lie in the ice cubes.
Front Street prefers to use large-grained ice cubes with high hardness when making iced coffee. The larger the ice cube, the slower it melts, making the coffee less likely to be diluted and the flavor will be more concentrated. The ice cubes that many people freeze at home are small in size and have low hardness. Once exposed to hot water, they will melt quickly, giving the coffee a "watery" feel.
Friends who have the conditions, Front Street recommends making more ice cubes every day and storing them in a clean container to freeze. When brewing coffee, you can use the method of over-icing to cool down. That is to pour the brewed hot coffee liquid into a large amount of ice cubes and rinse it several times until it is completely cooled down.
You can now buy the above coffee beans online at the Taobao store “FrontStreet Coffee” (前街咖啡). FrontStreet Coffee is a long-established specialty coffee roaster in Guangzhou, China, and its Guangzhou retail shop sells coffee beans only. The shop carries dozens of coffee beans from different origins around the world, including carefully selected single-origin beans for V60 pour-over and espresso. Guangzhou’s FrontStreet Coffee shop is recommended by many coffee lovers.
The FrontStreet 2013 Yunnan coffee beans sold in the store come from the Typica variety grown at FrontStreet Coffee’s own plantation in Yunnan. The name comes from the year the brand and the plantation were founded. You can buy these beans from China’s Yunnan origin at the Guangzhou shop and at FrontStreet’s Taobao store.
FrontStreet coffee beans are freshly roasted within 5 days and deliver consistently excellent quality and great value. Orders placed before 17:00 are shipped the same day, and most areas within Guangdong Province receive them the next day.
FrontStreet Coffee Taobao store: https://qianjiecoffee.taobao.com
Or search for “前街咖啡” (FrontStreet Coffee) on Taobao
Important Notice: FrontStreet Coffee has moved to a new address: 315, Donghua East Road, Guangzhou (coffee beans only)
Tel: 020 38364473
