More and more people are exploring different ways to brew coffee at home, and a good iced pour-over is no longer something you can only get in a cafe - it is a pleasure you can recreate at any time. Some beginners, though, find that although iced pour-over looks simple, it goes wrong very easily in practice: not enough sweetness or acidity, not cold enough, no aroma once it warms up, or a cup that turns flat and watery by the last sip.
In this article Front Street breaks down the iced pour-over as served in a cafe, to help you find the trick to a good cup quickly.
01 The Coffee Beans
Front Street knows that taste has no right or wrong, but for beginners a good cup is 80% about the beans, and choosing the right material gets you twice the result with half the effort. Ask a barista to recommend a bean for iced pour-over and most likely they will point to a light to medium roasted single origin, then tell you how it performs. Because iced pour-over is served cold, it aims for clarity, transparency and a clean finish; the aroma must survive the ice, and fruit-forward flavours suit it best - which is why it pairs so well with beans that are low in bitterness and high in sweetness and acidity.
Last week a customer bought a bag of Front Street PWN Golden Mandheling and wanted to know whether it tastes better cold or hot. Front Street replied: do you like putting ice cubes in herbal tea? The customer burst out laughing and immediately chose hot pour-over instead. The comparison may be a little unfair, but bitterness in dark roasted beans really is amplified once the coffee is cold, and drinking it over ice also loses the mellow body it has when hot - which is why dark roasts are rarely used.
Generally you can look among three types. The first is washed light roasts with citrus and white flower notes, such as Front Street Guadingding Cooperative or Front Street Emerald Green Label Geisha. The second is the dark berry, juice-driven style with noticeable acidity - Front Street Little Tomato is a good choice. The last is the more complex aroma of ripe tropical fruit, where Front Street Xizhua with its passion fruit and grape notes and Front Street Big Navel with its blackcurrant juice character are the first picks.
02 The Coffee, Water and Ice Ratio
For iced pour-over we normally cut back on hot water, adjust the ratio to extract a more concentrated coffee, and then let the ice make up the rest of the water. The extra ice has two jobs: to chill the hot coffee properly and lock in the volatile aroma compounds, and to dilute the coffee to a suitable strength.
For the actual brew Front Street adjusts the parameters from a hot pour-over. If you like a concentrated iced coffee, use the basic formula: iced pour-over = coffee grounds + 10 times hot water + 5 times ice, so 15 g of coffee means 100 g of hot water and 75 g of ice. If you prefer a lighter, more refreshing cup, use a coffee-to-water ratio of 1:16 and split the water and ice 7:3 - that is, a hot pour-over with 15 g of coffee uses 240 g of total water, so the iced version uses 168 g of hot water and 72 g of ice. This raises the extraction yield while lowering strength and spreading out the flavours.
| Parameter | Richer iced pour-over | Lighter iced pour-over |
|---|---|---|
| Ground coffee | 15 g | 15 g |
| Total water | 225 g (1:15) | 240 g (1:16) |
| Hot water | 150 g (dose x10) | 168 g (total water x0.7) |
| Ice | 75 g (dose x5) | 72 g (total water x0.3) |
03 Grind Size
Because part of the hot water is replaced by ice in exchange for low temperature, flavour compounds from the later phase of the brew never get a chance to be released. To make up for the shortfall in extraction we need a finer grind to lengthen the brew time and so capture more aroma. To avoid a big deviation that over-extracts the coffee, the grind only needs to be slightly finer than for a hot pour-over. For example, Front Street shops use an EK43s grinder: if a coffee is ground at 10 for a hot brew, set it to 9 to 9.5 for iced. With a C40 hand grinder, if a bean uses 26 clicks when hot, go two clicks finer to 24 for iced.
04 Pouring Technique
For iced pour-over the hardest part is redistributing that smaller volume of water and still bringing the brew back inside a two-minute frame; Front Street usually divides it into more pours or keeps the stream very gentle. Take the first recipe above as an example: before pouring, put 75 g of ice in the server, set the dripper and filter paper on top, and add 15 g of ground coffee.
First pour: spiral outwards from the centre, adding 30 g of hot water, and let it bloom for 30 seconds, making sure all the grounds are saturated.
Second pour: follow the path you would use for smelling the coffee and spiral in 50 g of hot water, keeping the stream vertical and gentle; you can widen the circles slightly to increase how much the stream stirs the bed of grounds, then pause at about 45 seconds.
Third pour: when the liquid in the dripper has fallen to one third, add 40 g of hot water with the same circular motion, trying not to let the level rise above the wall of grounds you have built, so the water does not escape down the edge of the dripper. The flow stops at about 1 minute 10 seconds; wait for the coffee to drain through.
Fourth pour: when the water in the dripper is almost gone, pour the remaining 30 g of hot water in a small circle about the size of a coin at the centre, finishing the pour at 1 minute 35 seconds. The coffee should finish draining into the server between 1 minute 50 seconds and 2 minutes. Finally shake the ice and the coffee together well so it dilutes and cools evenly, and it is ready to drink.
05 Troubleshooting
A detailed recipe lowers the odds of a bad cup, but the equipment in a cafe and at home is never quite the same, so the taste will vary. If you followed Front Street's recipe from start to finish and the iced coffee still does not taste right, work through the possibilities by elimination.
If the coffee has aroma but tastes thin and has no sweetness or acidity at all when you finish it, the ice has probably diluted it too much and watered down the overall strength. Try using less ice, chill the drinking glass in the fridge beforehand, and take the ice out as soon as the coffee has cooled. (If you can, you can also cool the brew by setting it over ice - it is not affected by melting ice, so the flavours are preserved better, but it is a rather extravagant method.)
If the acidity is sharp and the aroma flat, the hot water phase probably under-extracted. Front Street suggests grinding slightly finer, or adding a stirring action to draw out more of the soluble flavour compounds from the later phase.
If you are using a fruit-acid coffee yet the cup tastes mostly bitter and astringent with a dull entry, the grind is probably too fine (or the grinder produces too many fines). Grind slightly coarser, then add more pours to bring the overall flavour back into balance.
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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
