With the heat of summer, there is nothing more refreshing than a cup of iced coffee. Unfortunately, iced coffee can be easy to make bitter if you brew it improperly or use low quality beans. There are two schools of thought on how to make delicious iced coffee. The first one is brewing it hot over ice or brewing it cold from the start. When it comes to iced coffee, you need to start with high quality beans and top quality filtered water. As much as possible, it is important to fresh-grind your beans just before brewing them in order to get their maximum flavor.

Brew it Hot

The basic idea behind brewing hot to cold iced coffee is to start with a hot double strength coffee concentrate and dilute it over ice to instantly cool it. While this may seem like an easy “brew coffee, pour over ice” method, it is a little more complex than that. For the best cup of hot to cold iced coffee, you want science to be on your side. Use a scale to weigh the ice that you will use. For one total cup of iced coffee, you will want four ounces of ice and scale up from there per cup. From there, you will want to brew your hot coffee at double strength from what you would normally like. Switch your scale to grams and use around 1.8 grams of your freshly ground beans for every ounce of iced coffee you will want. Use the rest of the water you want for the final volume to brew the coffee. If you can, brew the coffee directly over the ice. However, it won’t hurt the final product to take brewed double strength coffee and pour over ice. Sweetened if desired and served.

Brew it Cold

If you have more time to let your coffee brew before you will want to drink it, a cold brewing might yield the results you crave. Use a container like a French press or Mason jar to steep the coffee in. Once you have the technique down, feel free to adjust this ratio to your preferences. Put both the coffee grounds and water in your chosen container and gently shake or stir until all of the grounds are wet. Let this mixture sit for 12 or more hours on the counter or in your fridge. This will let the coffee steep without having to use heat, which often can burn the delicate coffee and destroy some of its complex flavors. Once time is up, filter your steeped coffee through cheesecloth or a pepper filter into another container. To serve, pour this filtered coffee over ice and sweeten if desired.

If you want to try something new, you can create a coffee dessert by chilling your much loved brew in your ice pop mould. If ice pop mould is not available in your kitchen, the best thing you can do is to freeze the plastic spoons in your ice cube tray. When the coffee pops are completely frozen solid, this is the time you need to get rid of them from your tray. Don’t consume your chilled treats too quickly since it can cause brain freeze.