Japanese Iced Coffee

6 September 2022

It’s been really hot in the Bay Area recently. We’ve hit temps of high 80°F during the day, a rare departure from the consistent 60°F days. With hot weather, comes ways to escape the heat! This was a great great opportunity to make some cold drinks.

Today, we’re making Japanese iced coffee. It’s a pretty simple recipe of equal parts ice and water along with the regular ratio of coffee.

First things first, I need some ice, but there’s never any ice at home. I told my dad that I missed two things about apartment living in college.

1. There was always ice in the freezer.
2. There were never any pots or pans in the oven.

I’m not sure if the ice thing is an Asian thing but I think the pots and pans in the oven thing is definitely an Asian thing. I’d love to hear your opinion on this, just so I can verify that I’m not crazy. (Shoot me a ping on IG @uhhuhhuny.)

So first things first, lets make some ice cubes. I’ve got some neat-o ice cube trays from Ikea. Pretty sure we’ve had them since I was a kid.

Now, lets make the coffee. I’m using a Melitta but any pour over cone will work. My ratio is 400g of water to 24g of coffee. That means I’ll use about 200g of ice and then brew with 200g of water. Lately, I’ve been using a little less ice (140g) and a little more hot water (260g) because I just can’t get enough ice out of those ice trays.

First, I’ll grind all my coffee, rinse the filter, and put the ice in the cup. Put the coffee in the cone then start with an initial pour of about 30g - 40g. Bloom the coffee for about 30 seconds.

Next, I’ll do a few more incremental pours to reach my target amount of water. I’m never super consistent with my pours but I try to go for 1/3 of the water every 1 minute or so. I aim for a total brew time of around 3 minutes.

And we’re done! By the way, that’s a Starbucks cup but I’m not huge on Starbucks. My mom’s an Elementary school teacher and she gets a ton of Starbucks gift cards as gifts from her student’s parents. We don’t go to Starbucks that much so she uses the gift cards to buy cups. If you’re thinking about becoming an elementary school teacher, the gift cards are a pretty nice bonus. She’ll get around $300 in assorted gift cards at Christmas and again at the end of the school year.

Since it’s been consistently really hot for the past few days, here’s another photo of Japanese iced coffee in a glass. I’m not really sure why it’s Japanese in origin but I did first see it in a Worth It Buzz Feed video on Coffee in Tokyo. Ahhh, here I go again, getting nostalgic about 2016 - 2019 YouTube.