If You Don't Have Time For Cold Brew, Try Using Instant Coffee

Cold brew gets a lot of points in our book. Not only is it ice-cold from sitting overnight in the fridge, but some even find it more delicious and easier on the stomach because it's less acidic than iced coffee. However, there's no denying that making a cold brew at home can be a bit of a tedious process. 

Typically, the coffee grounds need to steep in the water for at least 12 hours, so if you wake up in the morning craving an instant caffeine fix, you're not going to get it from cold brew unless you've prepared it the night before. And while you can make it in a large mason jar, you often need to buy specific containers just for preparing it.

So if you're staring bleary-eyed at a bag of dry coffee grounds, you may want to turn to another method to get your morning buzz. But maybe it's the middle of a sweltering hot summer, or you simply have a strong preference for a cold cup of joe. In that case, try instant coffee instead for making iced coffee without steeping or gearing up a coffee machine.

If you have instant coffee in your pantry, you have all you need to whip up a cup of impromptu iced coffee. This may sound counterintuitive — after all, isn't the instant stuff usually mixed into hot water? It's true that most people use their instant coffee that way because the crystals will dissolve more quickly in hot water, but you don't necessarily have to. Instant coffee is just dried, ground coffee that has been extracted with water. When it gets mixed into water, it dissolves — hot or cold.

And the best part? It only takes a few seconds more to make cold coffee this way. All you have to do is stir instant coffee into cold water the same way you would with hot. To speed up the process a little, you can use hot water to heat a spoon, which may make the crystals dissolve faster. But it's not necessary — the most important part is that you stir continuously until the coffee fully dissolves. No one likes brown sludge at the bottom of their cup, after all.

And to up your instant cold coffee game even more, test out an instant cold brew made explicitly for this purpose. For example, Trader Joe's sells an instant cold brew powder that comes from cold-brewed, freeze-dried coffee. It's so simple to incorporate into your morning coffee routine we can bet you'll never go back to traditional cold brewing methods again.