(upbeat music)
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- Today we're gonna talk
about a better way to make iced filter coffee.
Now, there's two schools of thought when it comes
to making delicious cold coffee drinks.
There's cold brew, that's coffee that is brewed
with cold or room temperature water,
and then there is coffee that's brewed hot
and chilled and diluted by ice.
And that's what this is gonna be.
That's iced filter coffee.
And I've made a video about this in the past,
a video using a pour-over to get really great results.
And I think I used the pour-over
because iced filter coffee really was popular in cafes.
They've got big batch brewers.
That was how the technique kind of became popular.
Now, there is obviously, a downside to everything.
This might be a better and easier technique.
It is, I'll say now, a little bit slower.
What I'll do is I'll walk you through some
of the experiments I did to kind of develop this recipe.
Then I'll go into the recipe itself,
walk you through step by step,
and then to finish up, we'll cover the kind
of different tips and tricks you might think about
when using different immersion brewers.
It's kind of embarrassing to me
that I didn't think of this video sooner.
It's actually a really obvious solution to a problem.
But I also think about the fact
that over these last few years, we've made loads of videos
and we've learned some things along the way.
And I kind of wanna highlight the moments
of learning for me that happened in the past.
And this all should have started
with a video I made awhile back
called "Immersion Brewing is Better
Than Percolation Brewing."
Now, iced filter coffee has a fundamental challenge.
Because we're gonna dilute it when we chill it with the ice,
we're gonna use less water to brew our coffee with.
Water, when we brew, is kind of a solvent
and when we have less solvent,
it's harder to dissolve the flavors from the grounds.
When we compared percolation brewing
and immersion brewing,
especially at finer grind settings,
we saw immersion did a better job, a more even job
of extracting the coffee than percolation did.
When you get really fine
and you're trying to pass water through a bed of coffee,
it's more likely to channel where there are kind
of quick routes through that over extract
while everything else kind of under extracts.
It tastes uneven, sour and bitter at the same time.
It's not ideal.
That typically doesn't happen in immersion brewing.
And that was where I thought, "Oh,
this is gonna be the solution
to the problem of iced filter coffee."
But then I started to experiment some more
and it takes me to another video.
We did one called "Understanding the AeroPress"
where we experimented with all sorts of variables
and tried to get to an ultimate AeroPress technique,
and one of them was steep time.
Now, I said in that video
that my four-minute steep was a little bit better
than my two-minute steep,
and I didn't think it was good enough
to justify the additional time.
I wanted lots of people to be able to use this
as a daily driver recipe.
But Jonathan Gagné picked on that.
He is a noted coffee person, astrophysicist,
author of "The Physics of Filter Coffee,"
excellent, linked down below.
You should check it out.
He said, "Well, hang on a second.
If four minutes was better than two,
well, what about six, eight and 10?"
Then he developed the AeroPress technique,
now known as the Gagnépress
where you steep your AeroPress for 10 minutes.
The results are very delicious.
Now, I'm not saying you have to steep this for 10 minutes.
What I am saying though is while we're gonna use
a longer steep to get a better extraction,
there's no kind of stress about hitting an exact brew time.
If you miss this by a minute, you're good.
If you miss it by three minutes, you're good.
This is a very tolerant technique,
especially when it comes to time.
As long as you cross a threshold of say four
to five minutes, somewhere there,
depending on whether it's a light roast
or a dark roast, you're gonna be fine.
And that made me think of something else.
If my brew time is longer, is my resulting liquid cooler?
So I did some simple comparisons.
I brewed a pour-over and checked the temperature
of the liquid coming out the bottom of that from a sort
of short iced pour-over style brew and compared it to a six,
seven-minute steep time in something like a Clever.
And yeah, the liquid coming out
that would be hitting the ice was notably cooler.
I mean, a few degrees Celsius, but still notably cooler.
Why would you care about this?
Well, the cooler the liquid is,
the less ice you're gonna need to use to chill it down.
And the less ice you need,
the more you can turn that back into brew water.
You can sort of trade it back into the brew
and that will help with your extraction again.
The one other video I wanna highlight that we made
in the past that I realized was kind of useful here
was a video called "The Magic of Salt in Coffee."
For most people, adding a tiny amount
of salt to coffee decreases the perceived bitterness.
Now, often this is a great trick
when you're served really terrible coffee
but cold coffee has a higher level of perceived bitterness
and I realized that saline, salt, was a great solution here.
It's really easy to make up.
You can buy a cheap dropper like this.
You're looking at an 80:20 ratio,
so you could do say five grams of salt in 20 grams of water,
dissolve it and here, we're gonna be using two, three,
maybe four drops depending on your preferences
and how bitter the coffee itself is going to be.
What we're gonna end up with is this,
a coffee full of complexity because we brewed it hot
and we did a good job with the extraction
but it is cool and refreshing and delicious.
One other quick note.
I would recommend lighter, fruitier, juicier coffees
because they do so well
as iced filter coffee, washed Kenyan coffees,
washed Ethiopian coffees in particular.
Very, very delicious,
though pretty much any coffee is gonna taste great
and this it should be full of clarity, sweetness.
Should be a good time.
Ah.
Perfect.
Start the day on a hot, sunny day,
a refreshing drink halfway through
or a little pick-me-up before you hit the gym.
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Let's get into the recipe.
We're gonna start with the dose of coffee used
and this is where things get, for me,
a little bit tricky to explain.
I'm gonna talk about brewing water
as kind of the defining thing because we often talk
about a dose of coffee per liter of brewing water,
and if you're brewing a pour-over,
you might use 60 grams per liter of water.
So if you brew half a liter, you'd use 30 grams.
In case the maths is still a little bit confusing,
we'll leave some example recipes around say one typical cup
of coffee, two, three, four, so you can work with that
and hopefully get a bit more guidance that way.
This would brew what I think would be two cups
of coffee for people.
We're gonna do that, but we're gonna split our 500 grams
of brewing water up into brewing water and ice
but we're gonna change our dose quite dramatically.
We're not gonna use 30 grams, we're gonna use 37.5 grams,
which calculates out at 75 grams per liter.
There's two reasons for this.
One, I want a slightly heavier dose to compensate
for any dilution that happens of the finished cold coffee
in the glass while I'm drinking it.
And two, technical,
and I'll link a video that explains this,
but immersion brews produce, for a matching extraction,
slightly weaker coffee than pour-over brews
and so we need to compensate for that too.
As for the grind size itself, it is really pretty fine.
It's not espresso fine.
What I'll do is I'll show you espresso fine,
this grind setting
and then let's say a two-cup pour-over kind of setting.
So it's probably a little bit closer
to the pour-over than it is to espresso
but it is a notably finer grind setting
because we can use that
with an immersion brew without a worry about channeling.
Now, we're gonna use the Clever today for our brew method.
We'll talk about different techniques
and switch arounds with that.
The Clever is a great immersion brewer.
It's one of my favorites.
It's got a great deal of capacity, which I think is helpful.
It's easy to use and it's inexpensive.
It does benefit from putting water in first and then coffee.
Not all immersion brew methods work that way.
I'll touch on it in a second,
but that's what we're gonna do here.
Now our brew water.
We're gonna carve it up 2/3 hot, 1/3 cold.
With 500 grams of water,
that's not the neatest thing in the world,
so we'll call it about 330 grams of brew water
and then we'll have about 170 grams of ice
in this particular case.
You could go up or down five grams.
Nothing bad is going to happen.
You know, you can kind of be a little rough
with these measurements.
It's okay, but approximately 2/3 hot, 1/3 iced.
You can obviously preheat your brewer.
That's helpful because you're trying to brew as hot
as you can, get as much extraction as you can.
I'm gonna put 330 grams in here.
(Weber catch cup clinking)
You can obviously use a teaspoon to mix.
If you happen to have a needle distribution tool,
these are great.
But for this, let me be clear, not essential,
just kind of useful.
I'm gonna ask you to steep this for five minutes.
If you really can't wait, then four is okay.
If you miss that, if you go to six by mistake, seven,
it's gonna be okay.
It is still going to be very delicious,
so don't worry about that.
Pro tip, do not get your ice out
until you actually need it.
That means kind of when you get to four minutes,
go and get some ice at that point,
just so the ice is as cold as possible
and not gently melting in your carafe
while it's waiting for your coffee to brew.
(coffee pouring)
Again, it's a little slow.
Patience is required.
I promise, it will be rewarded.
There will be some ice left.
Do give it a stir.
(ice clinking)
Probably using the wrong spoon for this.
Hang on, something a bit more appropriate
just to make sure we chill it down as fast as possible.
And when pretty much all the ice is gone, we're ready to go.
Don't forget your saline, two, three drops
is plenty.
If you've got fancy ice,
feel free to ice your glass in a fancy way.
(coffee pouring)
And you will have a delicious little beverage.
(ice clinking)
Mmh!
Tastes like Kenyan Coffee, which it is,
juicy, fruity, nice kind of black fruits in there,
little acidity, lovely texture, lovely sweetness.
That's a very enjoyable drink and it's easy to make
if you're willing to invest a little bit
in terms of time.
I did say I'd touch on some other brewers along the way
and it seems worth mentioning a few bits
and pieces about them.
So first up is the Hario Switch.
It's another steep and release brewer.
It's one I really like.
Obviously, it's a kind of traditional cone shape
as opposed to the Melitta shape of the Clever.
Its capacity is a little bit smaller.
At these higher ratios,
I've had some success up to about 30 grams of coffee,
which would then mean 260 grams of water
and 140 grams of ice in there as well.
The good thing about this is there's loads
of paper options available.
You can get fast-flowing papers,
slower-flowing papers should you want that.
It means with say, a fast-flowing paper,
you could do coffee first, water second,
but in every other situation, I think hot water first,
coffee second is generally my preference
but it's a super versatile and wonderful little brewer
for making this kind of coffee with.
Next up, the AeroPress.
I know some people don't see it as a pure immersion brewer
because you are pressing water through coffee at one point
but because so much of the extraction is done in kind
of immersion conditions, I think it's an immersion brewer.
This is great.
Obviously, the capacity, again, a little bit limited
but there is the new AeroPress XL.
This is sort of comically large.
We're still testing and playing around with it.
This we've had success brewing 50 grams of coffee
to about 440 grams of water
with 220 grams of ice down below.
Hopefully these ratios are now making more and more sense.
But yeah, this has been good for a big, big brew,
bigger than anything else we've really tested.
You might think that this would be the solution
to a really big brew
but there's a downside when it comes to the Cafetiere.
Cafetieres, French presses, are great.
You know I love them.
I think they make delicious, delicious coffee
but when it comes to iced filtered coffee,
they have a significant downside.
They're metal filtered coffee, which means you have a lot
of suspended material, basically tiny little pieces
of coffee floating around in the beverage.
And while my recommended technique
reduces that quite dramatically, they're still there.
It's kind of unfiltered coffee,
and when you chill coffee down,
you experience a lot more bitterness
from those little tiny pieces.
If you're absolutely in a kind of pinch
and you have to use this, maybe go a little bit heavier
on the saline.
You can filter a French press brew
but I really don't recommend it.
It'll be very slow and very frustrating.
You pour this through a V60 filter,
it'll just clog and choke and take a really long time.
You can get good results filtering it through cloth.
I really like cloth brewers
but there's so much work to maintain that cloth,
keep it tasting good and clean and fresh
that I don't really recommend it.
So the coffee from this is very good, but when it comes
to a chilled finished drink,
I think you do need ideally a paper filter involved there
just to minimize the bitterness,
give you a bit more clarity.
I think it makes ultimately, a better drink.
And so whatever the weather, if you have an infusion brewer
at home, I hope you give this technique a try.
And if you do, well, let me know down in the comments below
and let me know
if you think I've missed out one particular infusion brewer
that should have been included here,
whether there's some tips or tricks that you wanna share
with your infusion brewing at home.
We'd love to hear from you.
Thank you again to CoPilot for sponsoring this video.
The link's in the description,
the QR code's on screen right now.
But for now, I wanna say thank you so much for watching
and I hope you have a great day.