How Much Ice to Use for Cold Brew Coffee: Blue Mountain Cold Brew Ratios and Grind Coarseness

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Coffee can be extracted not only with hot water but also with cold water. Coffee made with cold water is called "cold brew coffee," which offers a distinctive charm compared to hot-brewed coffee.

Cold brew coffee is divided into cold brew and iced drip. Cold brew involves steeping coffee grounds in cold water, while iced drip refers to extracting coffee drop by drop through a drip method. Some friends have asked FrontStreet Coffee: "Should cold brew be made with hot or cold water?" Coffee made with hot water cannot be called cold brew. Cold brew can only be steeped with room temperature or ice water, and the steeping environment must maintain a low temperature.

Because it only comes into contact with low-temperature cold water at 4-10°C throughout the entire process, the extraction efficiency is very low, and bitter macromolecules are not easily released. The prolonged low-temperature steeping allows for more thorough extraction of compounds like sugars and organic acids, resulting in better balance of acidity, sweetness, and body in the coffee.

So how should cold brew coffee be made to taste good? Here, FrontStreet Coffee shares several operational details with everyone.

Choosing Coffee Beans

If you want to avoid mistakes, FrontStreet Coffee suggests choosing light to medium roast coffee beans, which have a higher tolerance for errors compared to medium-dark roasts. Currently, the market offers a wide variety of coffee beans with different processing methods and roast degrees. As long as they are single-origin coffee beans marked for pour-over use, they can be used for making cold brew coffee. Dark roast coffee, when extracted with hot water, presents rich coffee aroma, initially bitter and sweet afterward; when made into cold brew, it tastes more of burnt bitterness and carbonized flavors at iced temperatures, making it difficult to achieve the refinement of hot coffee.

Therefore, FrontStreet Coffee more strongly recommends light to medium roast coffee beans. For a refreshing juice-like sensation, you can choose light-roast washed coffees, such as washed Yirgacheffe or Kenya AA. For stronger fruit and wine-like aromas, you can use barrel-processed or honey-processed coffees, such as Colombia Rose Valley or Honduras Lychee Lan. If you don't like coffee with acidity and only prefer a balanced "coffee flavor," you can also choose Papua New Guinea's Bird of Paradise.

Today, we are using FrontStreet Coffee's Jamaica Blue Mountain No. 1 coffee beans, known as the "emperor of coffees," to see how they taste when made into cold brew coffee.

The Uniqueness of Blue Mountain Coffee

What makes premium Blue Mountain coffee so popular is its unique Blue Mountain flavor, and the key to forming this flavor lies in Blue Mountain coffee's exceptionally advantageous growing environment. Richard Sharp, manager of Jamaica's Clifton Mountain Estate, which produces Blue Mountain coffee, once described in an interview why Blue Mountain coffee is so good: "It's the specific latitude, longitude, and unique position of the Caribbean island that creates a microclimate found nowhere else."

The Blue Mountains are located in eastern Jamaica, situated in an earthquake zone where volcanic eruptions have brought large amounts of mineral-rich, fertile soil. The Blue Mountains have the highest peak elevation in the entire Caribbean region, making them a well-known local tourist attraction. The air quality here is excellent and pollution-free, combined with the local year-round rainy, humid, and cool environment, allowing coffee trees to grow vigorously in the clouds and mist. The high altitude creates significant temperature differences, giving coffee cherries ample time to absorb nutrients, producing coffee with fragrant, mellow, and sweet flavors. The Blue Mountains span a very large area, but the terrain is uneven, so coffee trees are mostly planted on rugged slopes, making manual harvesting very difficult. Local skilled women workers are hired to hand-pick sufficiently ripe coffee cherries on the mountains to ensure coffee quality.

For many years, Jamaica has insisted on planting only Arabica varieties, which has allowed the local Typica to remain unhybridized and unmutated, always maintaining pure lineage. Unlike many other coffee-producing regions, Jamaica is a relatively closed island nation that naturally possesses exceptional microclimate conditions. After more than two hundred years of domestication and adaptation, Blue Mountain Typica has evolved better disease resistance, particularly superior resistance to coffee berry disease compared to typical Typica, with more stable yields and quality.

FrontStreet Coffee's Blue Mountain No. 1 uses medium-dark roast, so whether during grinding or in the brewed coffee, it always presents the sweet aroma of dark chocolate, caramel sweetness, and soft, elegant acidity. Each flavor is balanced, with a smooth and rich body, showcasing very typical Blue Mountain characteristics.

Coffee Grind Size

Because cold brew production is carried out in a low-temperature environment, the extraction efficiency of cold water on coffee grounds is relatively slow. Compared to hot water extraction, bitter substances are not easily released. Therefore, in terms of grind size, coffee-to-water ratio, and steeping time control, it doesn't need to be as precise as pour-over coffee. Usually, as long as it falls within a general range and the right coffee beans are selected, a few simple steps can produce a delicious iced coffee.

Taking FrontStreet Coffee's daily cold brew production as an example, the coffee grind size is slightly finer than pour-over, meaning 75-80% passes through a China No. 20 standard sieve. Visually, this is approximately fine sugar consistency, corresponding to 9.5-10 on the EK43s scale, or about 22-26 settings on a C40 hand grinder.

Steeping Time

In pour-over coffee, we pay special attention to water temperature and time because water, as the main brewing medium, directly affects extraction efficiency. Too high or too low temperatures will change the coffee's flavor. Since cold brew only contacts low-temperature water at 4-10°C throughout the entire process, extraction efficiency is very slow, so a longer steeping time is needed to allow more aromatic compounds to be released, which in turn allows more thorough extraction of compounds like sugars and organic acids. The resulting coffee shows better balance in acidity, sweetness, and body. Generally, the steeping time for cold brew coffee is recommended to be controlled between 8-18 hours.

FrontStreet Coffee once conducted a cold brew experiment with time as the variable, steeping one coffee for 6 hours, 10 hours, 16 hours, and 24 hours respectively. It was found that the 6-hour coffee tasted too thin with平淡 aroma, while the 24-hour cold brew was obviously bitter with signs of over-extraction. The 10-hour and 16-hour groups showed the best flavor performance, with rich aromas and full-bodied taste.

Coffee-to-Water Ratio

FrontStreet Coffee has noticed that some friends, for convenience, will directly pour coffee grounds and water into a pot and start steeping. As long as it's coffee extraction, the coffee-to-water ratio parameter must be considered. Without measurement, coffee becomes like opening a blind box - you never know what flavor you'll get. To ensure better extracted coffee flavor, FrontStreet Coffee suggests controlling the cold brew ratio between 1:10-1:13. If the concentration is too high, you can add appropriate ice cubes to dilute.

Finally, let FrontStreet Coffee share FrontStreet Coffee's cold brew coffee making method! First, in terms of coffee beans, FrontStreet Coffee prefers to use light to medium roast coffee beans. For the container, only a clean, sealable container is needed. Prepare 40 grams of coffee grounds, grind to fine grind (85% pass-through rate on No. 20 sieve), pour into the container, then pour 480ml of cold water, stir evenly with a wooden stick, and cover with a lid.

After stirring evenly, seal with plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator for 12 hours. Then take out, filter out the grounds, and after removing the coffee grounds, you can immediately drink the clear coffee liquid. You can also put the filtered coffee liquid into a bottle and continue refrigerating for 4 hours for even better flavor and texture.

Generally, for flavor experience and health safety considerations, whether it's iced drip or cold brew, for any extraction method performed in low-temperature environments, FrontStreet Coffee recommends everyone to finish drinking within 5 days (counting from the production date).

Important Notice :

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FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473