Can ice water be used to make coffee? What degree of water is the most suitable for making coffee by hand? How fine should I use to grind hand-brewed coffee?

There are often guests and friends who ask the following question when making ice cream on the front street: "Why don't you use ice water to make coffee with ice water? Do I have to use hot water? "

It's not surprising to ask such a question, because for friends who have never come into contact with coffee rings or who have just come into contact with them, it is indeed easy to have such an understanding of making coffee by ice, and bloggers often share how to use ice water to make a cup of delicious coffee. So the question arises: Can you really use ice water to make a good cup of coffee?

To be reasonable, ice water can be used to make coffee! But if the premise of "delicious" is to be added, then based on Qianjie's taste preference, Qianjie believes that using ice water alone cannot make a cup of delicious coffee! Why? Everyone can see by looking at the cup of coffee washed out with ice water under the front street. Water temperature, grinding, time, stirring intensity, and ratio are several of the main factors affecting the extraction efficiency in hand-brewed coffee. Qianjie often said that to make a cup of delicious coffee, a reasonable combination of different parameters is needed. The extraction efficiency of ice water is very, very low. If we want to use ice water to wash out the taste of coffee, then logically speaking, we need to improve the extraction efficiency of other parameters. For example, use the finest grinding, stronger agitation, and longer extraction times. So next, Qianjie will use this extreme combination to make a pot of hand-brewed coffee with ice water!

The coffee beans used in this brewing of Qianjie are Qianjie Boundary Estate·Xizhao in the bean list. When washed down with regular ice, they have full grape juice, passion fruit, apricot peaches, and some red wine flavors. The taste is sweet and sour, and it tastes like a glass of grape juice with wine aroma. And what kind of taste will it show during this unconventional ice rush? Let us wait and see! The extraction parameters are as follows: powder amount used: 15g, boiling water temperature: 4°C, powder water ratio: 1:10, grinding degree: 1 scale grinding of Italian bean grinder Q18, flour powder particles brewing method: Stirring method Because it is not recommended for everyone to try it and it is unnecessary, so here we directly skip the complex steps. To simply summarize the process, we will divide the water into three sections and inject it equally, and each section will be mixed manually throughout the process.

The total time is 5 minutes. The right side of the picture below is the manual brew obtained from regular brewing, while the left side of the picture is the manual brew made with ice water.

We can see from the brightness of the color that the concentration of the cup of coffee on the left will not be too high. Then the taste is indeed the case. Just like the "Cold Extraction with Ice Water for One Minute" shared by Qianjie some time ago, it only has a faint aroma of coffee and a widowed coffee flavor. The overall taste feels like a cup of coffee. water. As you can see from the above experiments, even if Qianjie has used the finest grinding, and stirring is added throughout the process, and the extraction time is as long as five minutes, the flavor substances in the coffee cannot be dissolved.

This is also a matter of course, because the extraction efficiency of ice water is too low, it cannot quickly soften the coffee fibers and penetrate into the interior, and naturally it cannot quickly dissolve the flavor substances in the coffee. Even if Qianjie used a pressurized type with higher extraction efficiency, it still could not extract the taste of coffee in a short time. Therefore, Qianjie does not recommend that people use lower-temperature water for short-term coffee extraction, such as hand-brewed and Italian style, because the efficiency of ice water extraction is too low and it is impossible to quickly dissolve a large amount of flavor substances like hot water.

If we only have ice water at present, we can make coffee by cold extraction or ice drops. Because these extraction methods take long enough for ice water to penetrate into the coffee beans and bring out the flavor substances hidden in them.

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