How To Make Delicious Iced Pour Over Coffee: Step-by-Step

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Craving a delicious iced pour over but not sure how to make it or can’t get it quite right? Here is how you make great iced coffee. 

To make good iced pour over coffee replace 1/3rd of the brew water with ice you put in the carafe. Also grind slightly finer and/or use more grounds to compensate for the lower amount of brew water. This brews cold, regular strength coffee that can then be served over ice. 

Let’s get into the details of what you need and how you make tasty iced pour over step-by-step.

What Do You Need To Make Iced Pour Over? 

• Water: Tap water is fine if you can drink it.
• Kettle: A gooseneck kettle like this Bodum one (Amazon) actually makes an annoyingly big difference in taste. You’ll get less bitterness and more sweetness.
• Pour over cone: Any cone will do. If you don’t have one, get this V60 starter set (Amazon). It has everything you need.
• Coffee:I personally like to use light or medium roasted coffees to make iced pour overs. This is because these coffees tend to have less bitterness but more fruitiness and sweetness. This works well for iced coffee since these tastes work well cold. However, if you like the bitter, dark taste of dark roasted coffee that works perfectly fine too. 
• Ice: Ice cubes in any shape are fine.
• Scale: A scale is optional but very useful for making good iced pour over coffee. There are some ratios you have to get right that are very difficult to get right by eye. This Timemore one (Amazon) is very good and will last a long time.

Suggested: What type of beans is good for iced coffee?

How To Make Delicious Iced Pour Over

Here are the exact steps to take to make good iced pour over. It’s a little different than making normal pour over coffee so make sure to read the steps carefully. 

Suggested: Is it healthy to drink iced coffee daily?

1. Decide how much coffee you want to make

To start off with, it’s important to decide how much coffee you want to make. You have to decide this before doing anything else because it dictates how much water you have to boil, how much ice you need and how many beans you have to grind. 

For iced coffee you need to replace 1/3rd of the water with ice. Let’s say you want to brew 300 ml of iced coffee. To do this, you need 200 ml of boiling water and 100 ml (gram) of ice. It’s a good idea to be accurate with this so a scale helps quite a bit. 

Also, iced coffee tastes a little weaker than it actually is because the cold numbs the taste buds on your tongue a little. For that reason you might want to increase the amount of grounds a little over what you would otherwise use for a certain amount of coffee. Also, at the end it’s served over ice which dilutes the coffee a little so starting a bit stronger is a good idea. 

Suggested: 5 Reasons Homemade Iced Coffee Tastes Different

2. Boil Some Water

Now start by boiling enough water. Even though we’re making iced coffee, we’re going to use hot water to extract the grounds. Brewing coffee with cold water is called cold brew which is something different. You can find more about making cold brew here. 

Iced coffee is brewed with hot water and then cooled down and served over ice. Using hot water gives coffee a deeper and fuller taste than with cold brew. 

Don’t worry too much about the water temperature. Especially with light and medium roasts you can use boiling water. When you pour it, the water will cool down by the time it hits the grounds anyways. 

3. Weigh/Grind your Coffee

Grind slightly finer than you would for a normal pour over. There is a good reason for this. Because you use less hot water to extract these grounds, you need to increase the extraction rate. The best way to do this is to grind finer and so increase the surface area on the grounds which makes for faster extraction. 

How much grounds you need obviously depends on how much coffee you want to make. For a normal pour over, I use a 1:17 ratio. This means 10 grams of grounds for every 170 ml of water. However, for iced pour over I like to go a little stronger so 1:16 or even 1:15 works well in my opinion. 

So if you want to make 300 ml of iced coffee, using 18.7 grams of coffee will get you a 1:16 ratio. (Just to be clear, this is 300 ml in the end so 200 ml of water and 100 grams of ice). 

4. Prepare the cone and filter

Now it’s time to prepare your filter and cone. 

Pour enough hot water through and on the filter to heat it up. You can do this by pouring boiling water over it or using hot tap water. Pre heating the cone means that the brew water stays hotter which helps to brew stronger coffee. 

Once the cone is hot, put the filter in and pour some hot water on the filter to rinse it and get rid of any paper taste. 

5. Put The Carafe on a Scale

Now is where a coffee scale comes in handy. Coffee scales can easily be reset to zero which makes keeping track of the amounts of water and ice easily as well as time. 

Put an empty carafe on the scale and set it to zero. Just make sure it’s clean. By using a scale, you can see exactly how much ice and water you’re using. Getting the ratio right is important and will help dramatically with making better coffee.

6. Put Ice In The Carafe

Get ice from the freezer and put enough ice in the carafe until you’ve got 1/3rd of the intended final amount of coffee. Since ice cubes are a certain weight, it can be difficult to get exactly 1/3rd but just try to get as close as possible. A few grams difference isn’t the end of the world here. 

7. Place filter on the carafe

Once the ice is in, place the filter on the carafe. No tricks here. 

8. Put grounds in the filter

Now put the grounds you made or weighed out earlier into the filter. Once everything is in the filter, tap the cone a few times to flatten out the coffee bed. There is no need to make a perfectly flat surface, a few taps is enough. 

After all the grounds are in the filter, reset the scale to zero.

9. Bloom the coffee

Now you’re ready to start pouring water into the cone. First pour a little bit of water to bloom the coffee. This means pouring twice the weight of the grounds in water (30 grams of water on 15 grams of grounds). Make sure to pour on all the grounds so they are equally wet. Now wait 45 seconds. 

You’ll see the grounds swell up and probably bubble a little. Blooming helps the grounds to get wet which is like pre-soaking the laundry. It helps to extract all the taste faster later. It also helps to get rid of excess Co2 in the grounds which means better extraction. 

10. Pour water 

After 45 seconds of bloom time, slowly pour the rest of the water on the grounds. 

You want to give the water all the chances to extract the grounds so pour a little slower than you would for a normal pour over. Also keep the water level in the filter a little lower than usually. Both pouring slower and keeping the water level low means the water flows a bit slower. This increases the contact time between the water with the grounds which helps extraction. Also swirl the cone a little after the last pour. 

We’re trying to increase extraction because we’re using less hot water. Less hot water means less water to extract the grounds. But if you don’t extract enough, the coffee will be weak and sour. By increasing the extraction, you’ll get much stronger coffee but that’s balanced out by the ice in the carafe. 

Don’t want to deal with all this? Read this article: 5 Iced coffee makers that work

11. Swirl to melt all the ice

If you really got the amount of ice right, it should just melt after finishing brewing. If there is still a little bit of ice left after brewing, carefully swirl the coffee in the carafe until all the ice is melted. 

Once all the ice is melted you’ve got cold coffee that is the same strength as if you’d just use all the water to pour over the grounds. 

12. Serve over ice

Once all the ice is melted in the carafe, the coffee should be cold and is ready to be served over ice. Cooling the coffee down first helps stop the new ice you serve the coffee over to stay cold longer. If you’d serve hot coffee over ice, you just get cold coffee but all the ice will be gone. Using a thermal cup will help to keep everything cold even longer. 

Fill up a glass with ice and then pour enough coffee in to fill the glass. At this point you can also add anything else you might want in there like milk or sugar.

Enjoy!