The Quick Brewing Technique That Makes Iced Coffee More Indulgent

In the dog days of summer, it's delightful to be able to get your morning (or afternoon) shot of caffeine on the rocks. Sure, you can throw down the dough to hit the Dunkin' or Starbucks — drive-thru, of course, so you can stay in the air-conditioned car. But it's not difficult to brew your own coffee to serve chilled, and it can save you some serious money. Making cold brew coffee at home is easy, but it does take plenty of one thing: time. Experts agree that a properly made batch of cold brew coffee should steep for around 18 hours. You could expire from the lack of caffeine in that time!

Of course, you could just brew a pot of coffee and chill it, but as Ross Yoder for BuzzFeed explained, "I'm famously unfussy about my coffee...but that cloudy, bitter, leftover coffee was never gonna cut it." So cold brew is delicious but requires patience. And regular brewed coffee that cools down in the refrigerator is just nasty. So what's a coffee drinker to do in the summertime?

As it turns out, it gets hot and humid in Japan in the summers, and coffee drinkers there have been using a technique for decades that produces great iced coffee in no time flat, via Buzzfeed. Knoxville Brew explains the method is called flash-brewed or Japanese-style iced coffee, and it's pretty darn simple: Coffee is brewed by your preferred method directly over ice. That may sound like a watery mess, but it's not. If you're doing a pour-over brew, use about half the water you would for a hot cup, but pour it very slowly, so the brew itself takes about the same amount of time.

Using hot water just off the boil means you'll get better, fuller extraction than you would with cold brew coffee, and brewing that super strong coffee directly over ice cubes means your refreshing iced coffee is ready right away, at just the right strength. Flash-brewed coffee also broadens your coffee choices. Most people agree that dark roast coffee makes the best cold brew, since the steeping process is more gentle than ones using hot water. Flash-brewed coffee means you can choose beans of any roast level and still get a perfect cup of iced coffee.