What's the Ratio of Coffee to Water and Ice in Iced Pour-Over? How to Make Better Tasting Iced Brew Coffee?

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What Makes Iced Pour Over Delicious?

When discussing tips for making delicious iced pour over coffee, besides what coffee beans to choose, the question everyone cares about most is exactly how much ice to add. Today, let's talk about ice-related issues.

The Role of Ice in Iced Pour Over

Unlike regular hot pour over, iced pour over adds ice as a "supporting character," and it doesn't play the role of extracting coffee. That is, ice replaces the hot water that should have been poured into the coffee grounds, being separately "set aside," equivalent to By pass water. If you still follow hot pour over parameters, the coffee often becomes as weak as water. To ensure its proper concentration, you need to appropriately adjust the extraction framework.

In iced pour over, ice's primary task is cooling. Before all the ice melts completely, hot coffee can quickly cool down and become iced. Secondly, the ice in the serving pot also needs to "help" us dilute the coffee liquid, so when calculating total water volume, ice must be included in advance. Based on these two points, when determining ice amount, we need to see if it's sufficient to quickly bring the temperature down to an iced effect, while not diluting the concentration too much, causing a watery taste.

How Should the Ratio Be Distributed?

When selecting the coffee-to-water-to-ice ratio, we need to know: less water and more ice means too few flavor compounds are released, and coffee is easily under-extracted; more water and less ice means there isn't enough "space" in concentration for ice to work its magic, and the coffee becomes weak before cooling down. After summarizing iced brewing recipes for multiple coffee beans, FrontStreet Coffee believes that a 1:10 to 1:12 coffee-to-water ratio is easiest to control and less likely to fail due to ratio issues.

Referencing FrontStreet Coffee's shop preparations, a single cup uses 15 grams of coffee grounds with a coffee-to-water ratio of 1:10, meaning a total of 150 grams of hot water is poured, with the remainder made up by ice. Based on a 1:15 hot pour over coffee-to-water ratio, this means adding approximately 75 grams of ice.

What Makes for Quality Ice?

Friends who have had iced coffee at FrontStreet Coffee shop might have noticed that FrontStreet Coffee opens the freezer compartment to take out pre-prepared old ice cubes when making iced drinks, rather than using ice from an ice maker. Does using old ice versus new ice significantly affect extraction? For this reason, FrontStreet Coffee conducted a comparative ice experiment. Using the same parameters to extract the same coffee bean, we compared newly made soft ice with old ice that had been frozen for several days.

The old ice consists of homemade ice cubes from 25 cubic centimeter trays, with each single ice cube weighing approximately 30 grams, using 4 cubes each time, about 120 grams total. Soft ice is taken directly from the ice maker for immediate use, with volumes about the size of dice, mostly irregular shapes, also weighing 120 grams.

Coffee beans: 15 grams Hacienda La Esmeralda Geisha Green Label

Grind size: 85% pass rate through #20 standard sieve (EK43s setting 9.5)

Coffee-to-water-to-ice ratio: 1:10:8 - 150g hot water + 120g ice

Water temperature: 92°C

Dripper: Hario V60

After shaking and cooling, the two iced pour over batches showed almost no difference in flavor, both presenting a subtle green tea fragrance and gentle citrus notes, with some honey sweetness. At room temperature in an air-conditioned room, the ice maker batch melted completely after 9 minutes, while the old ice batch only finished melting 17 minutes after brewing. Both became somewhat watery after the ice melted completely. When the hot coffee cooled to 5-10°C, comparing the ice changes in both coffee pots, the old ice group had more complete fragmented ice remaining on the liquid surface, with significantly slower melting speed.

Use Old Ice When Possible

From this small experiment, we can understand that old ice that has been frozen for extended periods in low-temperature environments is clearly harder, and combined with its larger volume, melts more slowly than newly made ice particles, naturally maintaining the iced effect for longer.

Therefore, if the ice cubes made by our ice molds are on the smaller side, when planning to make iced pour over coffee, we might as well prepare enough old ice in advance. This way, during the actual brewing stage, the target amount of ice added can dilute the coffee to a moderate concentration while bringing just the right iced mouthfeel.

Important Notice :

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FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473