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Is Iced Pour-Over Coffee Made with Cold Water? What's the Extraction Principle of Japanese Iced Pour-Over vs Hot Pour-Over? How to Brew?

Published: 2026-01-27 Author: FrontStreet Coffee

Last Updated: 2026/01/27, FrontStreet Coffee often comes across interesting questions while browsing online, such as: Is iced pour-over coffee made with cold water? When you think about it carefully, this assumption might seem reasonable. For example, with another black coffee - Americano: hot Americano is made with hot water, while iced Americano is made with cold water. So! Hot

Is Iced Pour-Over Coffee Made with Ice Water?

FrontStreet Coffee often comes across some interesting questions while surfing the internet, such as: Is iced pour-over coffee made with ice water?

When you think about it carefully, this assumption doesn't seem unreasonable. For example, with Americano coffee, another type of black coffee: hot Americano is made with hot water, while iced Americano is made with iced water. So! Hot pour-over uses hot water for brewing, which means iced pour-over should be made with ice water!! Hmm! That makes sense! But assumptions are just assumptions. The extraction process for pour-over coffee isn't as simple as you might imagine~

The Essence of Extraction

In a coffee bean, there are 30% soluble substances, and what extraction does is use water to bring out these soluble substances from the coffee particles! However, we don't need to extract all 30% of these soluble substances. After all, if all 30% were extracted, the coffee would be unbearably bitter!

That being said, we also can't extract too little substance, as this would create some negative flavors. Therefore, we need to control the parameters within a reasonable range to achieve an appropriate extraction rate! The controllable extraction parameters include: time, grind, ratio, and water temperature. These factors complement each other - when you change one parameter, if you want to maintain an appropriate extraction rate, the other parameters need to be adjusted accordingly!

Using Ice Water for Extraction

So, if you want to use ice water to make iced pour-over, theoretically, it's certainly possible! You just need to adjust the parameters appropriately, and you can get a coffee with suitable concentration! Of course, the prerequisite is that your hand can hold out until the extraction is complete~

(Note: It would only have suitable concentration but would still lack many flavor compounds, since some substances require hot water to be extracted.) Water temperature determines extraction efficiency - the higher the temperature, the higher the extraction efficiency; the lower the temperature, the lower the extraction efficiency. This means that whether it's espresso or pour-over coffee, the essential core is to use high-temperature hot water to quickly extract the substances from the coffee!

The Reality of Ice Water Brewing

If you replace this 90+°C hot water with 0°C ice water, then to achieve suitable concentration, we would need to perform a drop-by-drop brewing for at least two hours for a 200ml pot of iced pour-over coffee, letting the ice water drip down drop by drop. Only through long-term soaking can the coffee reach a suitable concentration, and the flavor of this coffee still won't be outstanding (because many substances weren't extracted)! It's possible, but unnecessary (cold drip is so much better~), so generally, our iced pour-over still uses hot water for brewing, then achieves cooling through ice cubes!

How to Make Delicious Iced Pour-Over

So how should you brew a delicious pot of iced pour-over? To make good iced pour-over, we first need to understand hot pour-over brewing, since the most commonly used method for making iced pour-over is Japanese-style iced pour-over, which is derived from hot pour-over!

Regular hot pour-over has a relatively complete extraction model, so it can obtain more complete flavor compounds! Our iced pour-over achieves cooling by replacing some of the hot water used for extraction with ice cubes! But the remaining hot water obviously cannot completely extract the substances from the coffee, and direct brewing would result in under-extraction. Therefore, we need to increase extraction strength by adjusting other extraction parameters, so that each drop of liquid that falls contains a higher concentration. Combined with the dilution from ice cubes, the final coffee flavor can approach that of hot pour-over (just approaching)!

FrontStreet Coffee's Brewing Parameters

Hot brew parameters: 15g coffee powder, water ratio 1:15, grind setting for light roast beans is EK43 setting 10. For dark roast beans, it's EK43 setting 10.5 (75% and 70% pass-through rate on #20 sieve respectively), water temperature is 92°C for light roast beans and 88°C for dark roast beans, brewing method is three-stage pouring.

Iced brew parameters: 15g coffee powder, water-ice ratio 1:10:6, grind setting for light roast beans is EK43 setting 9.5. For dark roast beans, it's EK43 setting 10 (80% and 75% pass-through rate on #20 sieve respectively), water temperature is 92°C for light roast beans and 88°C for dark roast beans, brewing method is three-stage pouring. For those interested in the three-stage hot water distribution, you can check out this article - "Three-Stage Pouring: How to Reasonably Distribute Water Amount for Each Stage?"

Ice Water Brewing Experiment

Finally, FrontStreet Coffee conducted a brew using ice water, with the following parameters (don't try this at home): The coffee bean selected was the easily extractable dark roast coffee bean—Golden Mandheling, combined with espresso-fine grinding, 20g coffee amount, water ratio 1:15, water temperature 0°C, brewing method was three-stage pouring!