My Perfect Drip Iced Coffee

I use the same grinder and coffee maker that I do the rest of the year. I am fastidious enough to grind whole beans fresh each morning, measured out from their vacuum sealed container on a scale in a precise ratio of water to beans, which I measure in grams. With my particular setup of equipment, the brands and models of which I note below, I long since calculated through experimentation what that ratio should be. And this recipe records those measures. In other words, your mileage, which is to say your weights and volumes may vary.

This iced coffee concoction using the same equipment as for hot coffee meant another round of trial and error. My knowledge of what likely approximate dilutions would occur with the addition of water in the form of ice, to cool off the hot brew, made it short work.

Please note that I deliberately repeated the phrase “hot brew.” I am well aware of the current very popular trend to concoct coffee as a “cold brew,” which is to say, to prepare coffee as an infusion of water that starts cold and remains cold. All this requires considerably more time than the few minutes that a coffee maker does, using water heated to near boiling to extract the same components from the same grounds to make coffee ready to serve as a hot beverage. Passionate advocates debate  the burning questions of variant levels, depending on the brewing process conditions, of the resulting caffeine, acid, and other salient properties of the product.

I’ve settled the question for myself by trying a number of different cold brew concoctions made under domestic and commercial conditions. None my own preparation. I’m fastidious and lazy enough to know that I just can’t face the mess to be put in order afterwards. It results, to start, from brewing grounds with cold water that then have to be filtered, usually twice. Then you must find the means to discard the result. I won’t mention cleaning the greater number of vessels required to brew, hold the filtrate, store the filtrate, the additional filtering apparatus, etc. In short, if it’s that much additional labor—and leave us not forget the fact that this labor begins the night before, and ends the morning of—it better be several standard deviations of improved coffee drinking experience to redeem the cost in time and effort.

It isn’t.

As with so many other categories of popular favorites among the standard repertoire of food and drink to the American taste I may simply lack the sophistication, never mind the physiological conformation of taste and associated sensory organs, to tell fine, never mind subtle distinctions. I include such, to me, esoteric categories as wine and beer, and now coffee, as it turns out. Since the so-called second wave of commercial coffee roasting-grinding-brewing establishments, there’s an alleged “third wave” which seems mainly to my cynical, if not alter kacker, sensibility to be a branding strategem designed to justify a price of $29 for a brewed cup in a coffee shop (calling a spade a shovel).

Even when scientific data is available—nothing like an actual laboratory analysis of the amount of acidity in a cup (or any measure) of a liquid—I understand the anticipated effects of one level of fineness vs. another on the act of ingestion, in terms of culinary experience. Again, I will not mention consequential somatic reactions (including heartburn, belching, dizziness, headache, etc. etc.). If I don’t have such reactions as a consequence, it’s not so much I’m not convinced as it doesn’t matter.

And with what I feel strongly is a common sense approach to these things (and to the ethos I try to evince in this blog about dining and food), I think the only and ultimate criterion is whether I am satisfied. Especially with a product I hope to consume day after day, for at least a whole season, if not longer. Summer is not the only time I drink iced coffee.

The only other note to be added is that, if you prefer it, or your guests do, this coffee will stand up to lighteners and sweeteners and so you should have these on hand. When the summer begins, I start off slow, using a lightener—my favorite is half-and-half—until I’m several days into the cycle of having iced coffee with my breakfast every single day, and I switch to black. No sweetener. As a beverage to cool off, say later in the day on a particularly sultry afternoon, I may tempt myself into sweetening the brew and my preferred sweetener is simple syrup, already chilled, at least to room temperature.

There are other choices.There was a product for the longest time from Domino Sugar (and probably from some of its competitors), they called “Superfine,” a form of “instant” dissolving sugar that doesn’t appear in the groceries I shop in, and just as well on the principle that if I don’t have it, I won’t use it. As for alternative sweeteners, including natural ones (and that includes what’s really really trendy these days, Stevia), they all taste unnatural to me, and the lab-concocted ones taste primarily of chemicals whose detection on my tongue I find suspicious and anxiety-provoking.

Black iced coffee, after all, is the least work. And that’s my standard after all.

The coffee maker I use is a Capresso MT900, which only six months ago replaced the magnificent MT600 from the same maker, which put in a good 20+ years of service before giving up the ghost by springing some leaks deemed not worth repairing. The MT900 is at least as reliable, offers a thermos-type carafe, and differs hardly at all in quantities required to produce the same results as the 600, and is, in my opinion, better engineered and easier to use. The coffee grinder is also a Capresso, a burr grinder model no longer offered, though they have a new model which appears to have similar specifications, in a model line they style “Infinity,” which comes in different configurations of features and price points.

For what it’s worth (because all these things, even if you use the exact same equipment, will require some personal trial and error to formulate the best results for your taste) I use the setting on the grinder that produces results that are a little finer in coarseness than the “medium” grind usually recommended as a starting point for drip coffee makers.

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