My experiment with iced coffee

Recently on the Roaste Facebook page an article was posted about making iced coffee the "cold" way. This  intrigued me. The formula given is 1/3 cup ground coffee beans to 1 1/2 cups of water (can be doubled or tripled). This interested me because I love cold coffee. I made a pitcher of it last night and let it sit for fourteen hours before the temptation overtook me and I had to try it. I put the grounds in last and stirred (the grounds of course floated to the top). I used Armeno Coffee's India Mysore Nuggets. 

.

/files/u3/196048012_423d7bdbd1_m_1_.jpg" alt="Iced coffee (source: kanko)" title="Iced coffee (source: kanko)" align="right" height="180" hspace="10" vspace="10" width="240" />I was not sure how good this would taste when I brought the pitcher out of the fridge. I was not crazy about the smell. To me it smelled stale. A nice foam has formed overnight (I again could not resist the temptation so I tried it - yum!). I stirred and waited for the grounds to settle (the foam had reformed).

.

I then realized I did have a problem - I could not find my mesh strainer. To counter this I slowly poured the coffee  into a carafe (trying to keep as many grounds as possible in the original container). I then used the basket of my coffee maker as a strainer. I (slowly again) poured the coffee into the basket, waited for the coffee to drip into the carafe then added more. 

.

After what seemed like a long time (it probably went faster than I thought) I got to sample. During this time my father was going through his ritual to make his normal hot morning coffee (we have two coffee makers that we use - sometimes at the same time). Both the hot and iced coffees were ready around the same time. He used the same coffee for making hot coffee that I did for making cold. 

.

I was pleasantly surprised by the iced coffee. The "stale" smell was gone and instead I has the very appealing smell of fresh coffee (I really need a perfume that smells like that). It was very mellow and not as strong as I thought it would be. I tried it and my father's hot coffee side by side. I used more coffee to make the iced version but they tasted pretty close.

. 

I decided to take the experiment a bit farther. I warmed up some of the iced version.I wanted to see how heatingcold made coffee would compare to chilling hot made coffee. It tasted just as good hot. 

.

I am happy with the results of my experiment.  I am not sure how often I will do it - it takes more coffee than the  hot version but it is an option. If I had known about this the time I went camping I would have made coffee this way then. I will keep it in mind for the future.  I do want to experiment with other coffee types (and amounts of coffee used) to see if that will make a difference.