Espresso on the rocks?

So here on the east coast the heat index is in the upper nineties and even though I'm sitting at home in an air conditioned environment I really wanted something iced tonight. I came across this post on HB this morning about different versions of iced coffee. The Japanese iced coffee I do often and have recently written about but they also discuss pulling a shot of espresso over ice or room temperature water. My assumption is that the flavor achieved here are similar to with the iced drip. Not many details in terms of shot volume or how much ice to use but I thought I'd give it a go and see how I liked it. I just finished up the last of my Black Cat so I went back to my roughly two week old Ethiopia Kochere. To recap, I liked this coffee as an espresso but didn't love it. So lets see how it would taste over ice.




I went with my standard 14g dose pulled at 201F over 34g of ice. The pull looked and smelled right. It tasted… like intense grapefruit. So I was a little disappointed at the drink so I figured I'd see if it was the ice or the espresso itself. Pulled another shot as above but without ice and it tasted pretty much like intense grapefruit. So I'm thinking that this coffee doesn't do too well at this age as an espresso. This could really be a poor attempt on my part. I do think, however, this would taste really good with nice and dense chocolatey espresso. I plan on filing this one away for the next time I get one of those types of coffees. In my mind something along the lines of Redbird or Toscano would be fantastic.




Has anyone else tried this? If so, how'd it work out and with which coffees?



Leave a comment

Please note, comments must be approved before they are published

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.