Many friends, when ordering pour-over coffee in a café, will prioritize the hot brew method, because as everyone knows, if we want to experience a relatively complete flavor profile in pour-over coffee, then hot brew is absolutely the only choice.But when the weather is too hot, it is always hard for us to bring ourselves to drink warm coffee, and many friends do not want to give up the complete flavor experience, so they come up with this idea:"Can we first brew a pot of hot coffee and then add ice cubes to cool it down?"This is a question many customers often ask Front Street Coffee in the summer, with the aim of enjoying the most complete flavor experience while drinking iced coffee.Without exception, Front Street Coffee's answer is: "You can, but it is not recommended." The reason it can be done is because Front Street Coffee can meet the customer's needs, while the reason it is not recommended is that the result of doing so will not only make the coffee less tasty, but also greatly reduce its flavor performance, and this is also the main reason why iced pour-over preparation requires adjusting various parameters!Why is it not recommended to addice cubesto hot pour-over coffee to cool it down?You can take a look at the case Front Street Coffee did below, which is to use conventional parameters to brew a pot of hot coffee normally, and then add ice cubes to lower it to a temperature that is easy to drink.The coffee bean selected here by Front Street Coffee is the very popular Front Street Coffee Finca Diviso · Sidra from the bean list. The coffee brewed with it has a very prominent and highly recognizable flavor. The extraction parameters are: 15g dose, 1:15 coffee-to-water ratio, 92°C water temperature, grind size of fine granulated sugar, 75%~80% passing rate on a No. 20 sieve, three-stage pouring method, and 2 minutes extraction time.The Sidra brewed this way has a concentration of 1.49% and an extraction yield of 22.08%. It tastes balanced, with a solid mouthfeel and flavor notes of grape, passion fruit, apricot, and floral aroma. The overall concentration is suitable and the flavor is prominent.Afterward, Front Street Coffee added 100g of ice cubes to the coffee until the temperature dropped to the same level as iced pour-over, then measured the concentration again and tasted the coffee. The measured concentration was 1.09%, and the taste and mouthfeel were greatly reduced compared with before.Because the original coffee had a higher temperature and a larger liquid volume, a large amount of ice needed to melt in order to bring the coffee temperature down to icy cold. This caused the overall performance of the coffee to become mediocre because the concentration was over-diluted. Not only did the mouthfeel become very thin, but the taste also became very weak. Only a few originally stronger flavors such as grape and passion fruit could be perceived, while the rest were difficult to catch because they had been over-diluted.In summary, you can see that although the coffee after adding ice cubes is indeed cold enough, neither the mouthfeel nor the taste comes close to being delicious. That is why Front Street Coffee does not recommend adding ice cubes to hot coffee to cool it down, and this is also why we need to adjust the parameters when brewing iced coffee.But to be fair, if you really cannot drink hot coffee, then Front Street Coffee will still recommend choosing iced pour-over directly. Although the flavor experience of iced pour-over is indeed not as complete as hot pour-over, through parameter adjustments, the difference between the two will not be too great. Moreover, just as hot pour-over has some experiences that iced pour-over does not have, iced pour-over coffee also has some experiences that hot coffee does not have. For example -- a very full juicy sensation.
Still taking Front Street Coffee as an example, when Front Street Coffee uses the Front Street Coffee Finca Diviso Sidra from the bean list to make iced pour-over, the brewing parameters will be slightly adjusted from the original: the grind size will be changed from the original 75%~80% passing rate on a No. 20 sieve to 80%~85% passing rate, and then the original 1:15 coffee-to-water ratio will be changed to a 1:10:6 coffee-to-water-to-ice ratio. The other parameters remain unchanged, still 15g coffee, 92°C water temperature, three-stage pouring, and 2 minutes extraction time.If you are someone who often watches Front Street Coffee, you should already be very familiar with the Sidra brewed with this set of parameters. After all, Front Street Coffee often uses Sidra to share iced pour-over, because it is indeed very tasty!The Sidra brewed with this set of parameters has a refreshing yet full mouthfeel, with a transparent and rounded acidity, and flavor characteristics of grape, passion fruit, and apricot on the palate. Because there is not enough hot water to extract the later stages, the coffee overall has much fewer bitter substances, and the taste is mainly sweet and sour, very much like drinking a cup of delicious grape juice.Since Front Street Coffee has often shared the brewing scheme and process for iced pour-over, this article will not go into too much detail. Those interested can search and read it themselves.The concentration of the iced pour-over brewed with this formula is just right. If you pursue a richer and more prominent flavor performance, then you might as well further increase the coffee concentration by adding more coffee grounds and increasing the coffee-to-water ratio. For example, increase the dose to 20g and then use a 1:8:6 coffee-to-water-to-ice ratio for preparation. In this way, the coffee's flavor will become more prominent due to the increased concentration, and the mouthfeel will become fuller and more rounded~
The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.
