Cold brew vs iced pour-over

Both end up cold in a glass, so they get treated as the same drink. They aren’t. Cold brew swaps temperature for time — many hours of steeping that pull out chocolate and body while leaving most of the acidity behind. Iced pour-over brews hot and fast, straight onto ice, so the brightness and aroma survive the chill.

Neither is the better one. They’re built for different jobs, and the recipes take five minutes to learn.

Cold brew: time instead of temperature

Grind coarse — French press territory. Steep at 1:8: 100g of coffee in 800g of room-temperature water, covered, 14–16 hours in the fridge. Strain through your press or a sieve first, then once more through a paper filter if you want it glassy.

That makes a concentrate: cut it roughly one-to-one with water, milk or ice. Cold water never gets at the sharper acids and some of the aromatics, which is exactly the point — the cup lands smooth, chocolatey and heavy, and the bottle keeps in the fridge for about a week. One evening of steeping buys five days of coffee.

Iced pour-over: the same V60, hotter and colder

This is our house V60 recipe with part of the water moved into the server as ice. Keep 15g of coffee, grind a touch finer than usual, put 100g of ice where the carafe catches the brew, and pour 150g of hot water on the usual schedule — bloom, then two pours. Total is still 250g, so the strength lands where it always does.

The coffee brews at full temperature — full extraction, full aroma — and chills the instant it hits the ice. What survives is everything cold brew leaves behind: the acidity, the perfume, the fruit. Drink it within the hour; that brightness is not a keeper.

Which coffee goes where

Cold brew flattens brightness, so don’t spend a bright coffee on it. Give it lots that were already headed toward chocolate and nuts: Timor Leste Full Washed makes a smooth, cocoa-heavy bottle, and Full Arabica — our clean 100% arabica espresso — turns into an excellent fridge staple that takes milk without flinching.

Iced pour-over is where the expressive lots earn their price. Bener Meriah 300H tastes like chilled fresh fruit, and Lampung Washed Mosto’s strawberry gets louder cold. If a coffee’s label brags about the ferment, flash-brew it — don’t drown it in a jar overnight.

Pick by job, not by hype

Want a bottle in the fridge that carries a working week and plays well with milk? Cold brew. Want one glass, now, that still smells like the coffee you paid for? Iced pour-over.

The most useful experiment costs one bag: run the same coffee through both methods on the same day. Once you’ve tasted what each one keeps and what each one throws away, you’ll never have to ask again.