Preserved Plum Iced Coffee: Three Recipes and Flavor Comparisons

Preserved plums bring a mix of sweet, sour, and salty notes that work well in iced coffee. This article compares three recipes: preserved plum cold brew, sparkling americano, and iced pour-over. Each uses a different coffee, such as Panama Natural Butterfly and Sunflower Warm Sun Blend, with specific parameters. The goal is to help you choose a drink that matches your taste preferences.

The Kenyan washed bean's dry aroma often reminds tasters of preserved plums, linking the fruit to coffee. Since preserved plums are cured and hard, they need heat or long soaking to soften, which releases a strong salty-sour flavor. For that reason, they pair better with cold drinks than hot ones. The three recipes below offer refreshing options for home brewing.

Preserved plums, that childhood snack with a mix of sweet, sour, and salty flavors, actually make frequent appearances in the coffee world as well. From the dry aroma associations of Kenyan washed beans to the finishing touch baristas add when developing special blends, the pairing of preserved plums with iced coffee is attracting more and more enthusiasts. Since preserved plums are mostly dried and cured, heating or prolonged soaking will release a strong salty-sour taste, so Front Street Coffee believes they are better suited for combining with iced coffee. This article compiles three preserved plum iced coffee recipes that can be made at home: preserved plum cold brew, preserved plum sparkling americano, and preserved plum iced pour-over, using Panama Natural Butterfly, Sunflower Warm Sun Blend, and Elida Natural Catuai respectively, with specific parameters and flavor descriptions provided for readers with different taste preferences to choose from.

If asked which childhood snack still retains the taste of memory, Front Street Coffee's answer would be nine-process preserved plums. When they hit the tongue, sour, sweet, and salty flavors take turns appearing, both refreshing and cutting through richness. When feeling drowsy, pop one in your mouth—the distinctive aroma of candied fruit first spreads across the tip of your tongue, then a sourness rises throughout the mouth, as if the taste buds have been awakened, promoting salivation and a sweet aftertaste, and you quickly feel energized.

In fact, preserved plums, as an everyday snack, also frequently show up in the coffee world. When Front Street Coffee cupped washed Kenyan beans, the rich fruity note in the dry aroma reminded them of preserved plums; preserved plum iced americano often makes it onto popular lists of homemade coffee drinks; and many baristas, when developing new products, also try incorporating preserved plum elements to add more layers to their specialty drinks.

However, preserved plums are ultimately a cured product, most of them dry and hard in texture, and usually need heating or prolonged soaking to soften when used in food preparation—a process that brings out a strong salty-sour taste. Therefore, Front Street Coffee believes that rather than hot drinks, preserved plums pair better with ice-cold, refreshing iced coffee. Below, Front Street Coffee shares three preserved plum iced coffee recipes for everyone to choose from as needed.

Preserved Plum Cold Brew

When it comes to which coffee method is the easiest and most favored by the lazy crowd, cold brew wins hands down. Tossing preserved plums into cold brew not only doubles the sweet-sour taste but, over time, also adds a layer of plum-like aroma to the iced coffee. Just like the "anyone can do it" series Front Street Coffee has shared before, as long as you pick the right coffee beans and set the parameters properly, making a refreshing and delicious preserved plum cold brew at home is no difficult task.

Specific steps: Take 30 grams of Panama Natural Butterfly coffee beans and grind them, pour into a cold brew pitcher—grind size should be like fine granulated sugar, which is 9.5 on the EK43s scale at Front Street Coffee's shop—and add 5 preserved plums of the kind you usually enjoy. Then pour in 300 grams of room-temperature water at a 1:10 coffee-to-water ratio, stir well, seal with plastic wrap, and refrigerate to steep for 6 hours. Finally, filter out the coffee grounds with filter paper and add ice cubes to taste before drinking.

After hours of waiting, the finished preserved plum cold brew is full of fruity aroma with a solid, clean sweetness. What surprised Front Street Coffee was that the combination of preserved plums and Natural Butterfly also produced a special complex aroma—perilla, cherry, raspberry, black grape, and other flavors interwoven—leaving a deep impression.

Preserved Plum Sparkling Americano

When Front Street Coffee looked into this preserved plum sparkling americano, they noticed that many online tutorials use the method of marinating preserved plums with syrup overnight, or boiling them with water and rock sugar to make preserved plum syrup. Here, Front Street Coffee mainly targets those who don't like sweetness, making a sugar-free version of preserved plum sparkling americano.

Step one: Prepare 4 preserved plums, pour in hot water and swirl to mix, then refrigerate to soak for one hour. The amount of water doesn't matter—just enough to submerge the plums;

Step two: Find a glass large enough, add ice cubes to about 2/3 of the glass, pour in all the soaked preserved plum water, then add sparkling water to the seven-tenths mark;

Step three: Use 20 grams of Sunflower Warm Sun Blend coffee grounds to extract 40 grams of espresso, and gently pour it into the glass.

Carbonated drinks naturally have a rich foam, so even without high-temperature boiling, the carbon dioxide gas can effectively bring out the characteristics of the preserved plums, allowing this americano to retain the sweet aroma of iced coffee and the stimulating sensation of sparkling water, while also revealing a hint of pleasant salty-sour sweetness.

Preserved Plum Iced Pour-Over

Here it comes, here it comes—the iced pour-over with a wild twist is here~

Just like the orange peel dripper Front Street Coffee played with yesterday, adding extra ingredients to pour-over is nothing new nowadays—flower petals, fruits, tea leaves, and other ingredients are all veteran players. Although success or failure ultimately depends on luck, everyone still has a great time experimenting. So today, let's try adding preserved plums to pour-over and see how it turns out.

Considering that preserved plums are mainly salty-sour and pair well with coffee beans that have stronger sweetness, and also to harmonize the final flavor profile of the whole cup, Front Street Coffee here selects Panama Elida Estate Natural Catuai as the brewing subject. As for the other protagonist, the preserved plums, we split them into two parts: first hide 3 plums in the dripper to participate in extraction along with the coffee bed, then place 2 plums in the ice cubes in the server below, letting them steep in the coffee liquid throughout.

Iced pour-over parameters: 15 grams of coffee, 1:10 coffee-to-water ratio, 75 grams of ice, fine grind at 9.5 on the EK43s scale, water temperature 91°C, V60 dripper, three-pour brewing method (30 grams, 60 grams, 60 grams).

The Elida extracted together with the preserved plums didn't end up failing after all. The pour-over starts with a faint preserved plum fragrance, followed by tropical ripe fruit flavors like mango and guava, along with the sweet-sour taste of cured plums, with a gentle and delicate mouthfeel. However, compared to the previous two coffee pairings, the pour-over version of preserved plum iced coffee is slightly milder in flavor.

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The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.