Guests and friends often ask Front Street Coffee when brewing iced pour-over: "Why don't you use ice water to brew iced pour-over coffee? Does it have to be hot water?"It's not surprising that this question comes up, because for friends who haven't been exposed to the coffee world or have only just started, iced pour-over coffee easily leads to this kind of assumption, and there are also often bloggers sharing how to brew a delicious cup of coffee with ice water. So here's the question: can you really brew a delicious cup of coffee with ice water?To be fair, ice water can be used to brew coffee! But if we add the"delicious"premise, then based on Front Street Coffee's taste preferences, Front Street Coffee believes that using ice water alone cannot brew a delicious cup of coffee! Why? Just look at the cup of coffee Front Street Coffee brewed with ice water below and you'll understand.Water temperature, grind, time, agitation intensity, and ratio are several of the main factors in pour-over coffee that affectextraction efficiency. Front Street Coffee often says that to brew a delicious cup of coffee, you need a reasonable combination of different parameters. But the extraction efficiency of ice water is extremely, extremely low. If we want to use ice water to extract the flavor from the coffee, then logically we need to increase the extraction efficiency of the other parameters.For example, using the finest grind, stronger agitation, and a longer extraction time. So next, Front Street Coffee will use this extreme combination to pair with ice water to brew a pot of pour-over coffee!
The coffee beans used in this brew by Front Street Coffee are from the Front Street Coffee Finca La Divisoria on the bean list·Sidra. Under regular iced brewing, it has full-bodied grape juice, passion fruit, apricot, and a slight red wine flavor expression, tasting sweet and sour, and drinking very much like a grape juice with a vinous aroma. So what flavor will this unconventional iced brew express? Let's wait and see! The extraction parameters are as follows:Brewing water temperature: 4°CCoffee-to-water ratio: 1:10Grind level:Espresso grinder Q18setting 1 grind, flour-like particlesBrewing method: agitation methodSince it is not recommended for everyone to try and there is no need to, Front Street Coffee will skip the complicated step-by-step introduction here. To briefly summarize the process, the pouring water is divided evenly into three stages, and each stage is paired with manual agitation throughout.The total time was 5 minutes. On the right side of the image below is the pour-over obtained by regular brewing, while on the left is the pour-over brewed with ice water.From the brightness of the color alone, we can see that the concentration of the coffee on the left will not be very high. And the taste is indeed so. Just like the"Make Cold Brew with Ice Water in One Minute"that Front Street Coffee shared recently, it has only a faint coffee aroma, a weak coffee taste, and overall drinks like a cup of water with coffee flavor.From the above experiment, everyone can see that even though Front Street Coffee already used the finest grind, added agitation throughout, and extended the extraction time to as long as five minutes, it still could not dissolve out the flavor substances in the coffee.And this is only natural, because the extraction efficiency of ice water is too low. It cannot quickly soften the coffee's fibers and penetrate inside, so naturally it cannot quickly dissolve out the flavor substances in the coffee. Even if Front Street Coffee used the more efficientpressure-basedmethod, it still could not extract the coffee's flavor in a short time.Therefore, Front Street Coffee does not recommend using lower-temperature water for short-duration coffee extraction, such as pour-over or espresso, because the extraction efficiency of ice water is too low and it cannot rapidly dissolve out a large amount of flavor substances the way hot water can.And if we currently only have ice water, then we can make coffee through methods such as cold brew or ice drip. This is because these extraction methods use a sufficiently long time to let the ice water penetrate into the interior of the coffee beans and bring out the flavor substances hidden within. The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.
