• The NFL draft
  • Portola Coffee Lab is almost open
  • Osama Bin Laden is finally taken care of!

There are so many awesome things going on right now, and it is feeling like summer here in Southern California.

Best way to enjoy all this? Iced Coffee.

Most times when you have iced coffee, it will probably taste bitter, like the Taliban feels right now.  But we can help with that. (the coffee not the extremest)

There are two main ways to make GOOD iced coffee.

pour-over and cold brew.

POUR-OVER

With pour-over, you are brewing the coffee hot, but having it drip directly over ice.
This sounds similar to just brewing coffee and then pouring it over ice, but no my friend it is not.  It is all in the timing.

When you brew hot coffee and let it sit – even for a bit – Quinic acid begins to build up. This plain and simply makes coffee bitter.  In order to avoid it, you want to “flash cool” the coffee so that the heat immediately drops to below room temperature as soon as it passes through the grounds.

So if you brew directly onto ice, the hot coffee doesn’t have a chance to develop that bitterness.

Easiest way to enjoy this method is by using the purpose-built Hario V60 Fretta. The Fretta makes iced coffee that is best described as rich and more nuanced than cold brewed.  This is due primarily from good acids extracted by the initial contact with hot water.


We have it, we use it, we love the coffee that comes out of it.

COLD BREW

With cold brew, hot water never touches the stuff!

Some of the most popular cold brew apparatuses are the Toddy systems. 

We personally have a Kyoto-style coffee maker… And man oh man does it look cool. (iced coffee pun).

Basic idea behind cold brewed iced coffee is that the cold water is left to sit with the coffee grounds for an extended period of time or set to slowly drip through the grounds at a snail’s pace – usually any time over 8 hours. During that time, the water and coffee mix to make a coffee extract which is best described as richer, sometimes sweeter, and less acidic (less nuanced) than the Fretta method. That results in something that goes great over ice.  Cold brew coffee is one smooth son of a b… Shut your mouth… Hey I am just talking about iced coffee.

Summer is here, Navy Seals are keeping us safe… Lets ice some coffee and God Bless America.