What's the best iced coffee? | Life and style | guardian.co.uk

Mocha iced coffee. Photograph: John Kelly/Getty Images/StockFood

The Hario Cold Water Dripper captivates coffee geeks one hypnotically slow cold drip at a time. You could fly to Rome and nurse a cappuccino in the time it takes to fill its carafe. Yet baristas at the new London coffee shops Prufrock and St. Ali, accustomed though they are to an espresso pace, are happy to wait hours for a batch of iced coffee that won't make their customers wince. Bad things happen when hot coffee goes cold. Ice melts in hot coffee and dilutes it, upsetting its balance. Gradual chilling elicits staleness. With cold brewing baristas can bypass the hazardous journey across a coffee's temperature range.

Back when baristas were just the dudes who made your coffee they found a novel way to neutralise the bitter taste of iced coffee. It was called sugar. (Some stirred the sugar with hot water to create a sugar syrup that dissolved more easily in cold liquid). Coffee merchants from vastly different cultures also observed the milkshake effect: the more their cold coffees took after creamy milkshakes (ice cream, cold milk, syrup) the more people liked them. Starbucks, with its now world-famous Frappuccino, achieved a true breakthrough: an ice-cream-free coffee milkshake that didn't taste too much like a milkshake. Or coffee.

Thai iced coffee at Addie's Thai Cafe in London. Photograph: Daniel Young, from his book Coffee Love. Click for the recipe

I want my iced coffee to have a real coffee kick. With Vietnamese, Thai and New Orleans ice coffees the added pungency of chicory, historically a coffee substitute, helps the already strong coffee brews cut through the milk and sugar. All three have the added benefit of sliding down like melted coffee ice cream, never a bad thing.

Vietnamese c? ph? (pronounced ka-FEY) drips down from a tiny, filter-bottomed pot over sweetened condensed milk. It is stirred, initiating a groovy marbling effect, and poured over ice. To make Thai iced coffee, oliang, a blend of dark-roasted coffee, chicory and grains (soybean, ground corn, sesame) is combined in a muslin sack and steeped in hot water. The filtered brew is poured over ice and topped with a layer of sweetened condensed milk. White streaks descend into the coffee in free-form exchanges of flavour and colour. New Orleans iced coffee is a treacle-thick concentrate of cold-brewed coffee stirred with sugar syrup, whole milk and ice.

Greek frapp?, Hydra, Greece. Photograph: Daniel Young, from his book Coffee Love

Evaporated milk (unsweetened condensed milk) lends a faux milkshake effect to Greek frapp?, a corruption of the French milkshake classic caf? frapp?, from the French verb frapper - "iced" in a beverage context. With its thick head, Greek frapp? takes advantage of air-dried instant coffee's foaming properties while associating its processed taste with something cool and frothy. In Italy a frapp? al caff? is a shake of espresso, milk, sugar, vanilla and crushed ice ? something like Frappuccino without any additives. (Bottled Frappuccinos may contain pectin, a thickener, and maltodextrin, a sweetener).

For reasons of culture, geography or economics many of these milky iced coffees tend to be made with inferior robusta beans redolent of rubber or tar. It's a serious drawback. But even if prepared with the most aromatic arabicas they would still lack the clarity of an unadulterated brew. The plain black iced coffee Prufrock barista David Robson recently brewed in the Hario with Agogo Goroka, a coffee from Papua New Guinea, hit me with bright berry flavours. It proved to me that iced coffee can be, if not necessarily superior to hot filter coffee or espresso, then something different. And special.

A French caf? frapp?, Paris. Photograph: Daniel Young, from his book Coffee Love. Click for the recipe

I wonder, though, if others will prefer unadulterated iced coffee, either this one or those made with other coffees by other methods, to jazzier ones. Do you think milks and syrups merely provide cover for mediocre beans? Are you philosophically opposed to sugar on the grounds it masks a coffee's character? Or are you a mock-milkshake flavour freak who, if given a choice between caramel, mocha coconut, Tazo chai or plain coffee Frappuccino, zeroes in on the unflavoured coffee one as the first to eliminate from consideration?

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2011/may/16/best-iced-coffee-frappuccino

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