Going cold with iced coffee at The Social Roasting Company
As the summer temperatures heat up, cold coffee becomes an increasingly attractive alternative to a steaming cup. Alex Forsyth, from The Social Roasting Company, takes us through the basics and more on how to make the best chilled caffeine.
With Australia’s soaring temperatures, it seems almost strange that cold coffees haven’t taken a more prominent position on the country’s coffee scene.
While iced coffee is served in most cafés, there’s a brilliant range of delectable cold coffees ideal for experimenting with to create your own signature drink and point of difference for customers. Some baristas may not be well versed in how to translate hot quality into a chilled treat.
The first great cold offering is a standard affogato. Served in a small glass, this is a basic scoop of ice cream served with a double espresso shot. The espresso helps melt the ice cream. At the Social Roasting Company, we’ve been playing around with gelato to try and come up with something a little different.
The second is, of course, a traditional iced coffee. This is always served in a tall glass with a double espresso shot, ice, milk and ice cream.
The third, which is a fantastic alternative for someone looking to drink cold coffee without the ice cream, is cold brew. While this has been around for a long time, it is really taking off at the moment. Essentially, instead of extracting the coffee using hot water, you do it using cold water.
While there are a few ways to do it, and some pretty cool tools out there to play around with, we do it very simply in any large container we can get our hands on, like a jug.
You set the weight of your coffee to a set weight of water and just pour both in a container. At Social Roasting Company, we usually put in 30 per cent of the weight of the water in coffee.
Because we’re using cold water it naturally takes a lot longer and you just leave the container to sit anywhere from two to 12 hours. You can prepare the brew the day before and just leave it in the fridge. To get the coffee grounds out, you’ll need some kind of strainer and we normally use that conical version known as a chinois.
Because it is a cold extraction, the coffee stays fresher longer and you can keep it around for a day or two. If you just try putting espresso coffee in a container and stick it in the fridge, you’ll get a day out of it, maximum.
While these are the absolute basics of serving up cold coffee, they should be used as a base for the barista to adapt and play around with. Coffee has a certain acidity, sweetness and dry distillates. With acidity and sweetness, you need to use flavours that work with those, something like sweet mango or lime that’s both sweet and tart. Remember to use flavours that complement the coffee rather than trying to disguise it. Your barista goes to so much trouble to get that perfect shot, you don’t want to hide that.
In this way, working with cold coffee is a great way to expand your skill base, taking on the skills of a barman to playing around with flavours. While baristas are more typically seen as coffee technicians, by bringing in these cocktail-making skills we are lending a whole new dimension to the trade.
One thing to look out for in the next stage of cold coffee is Coffee Beer. The Social Roasting Company has been working with some local breweries on this. There are already a few coffee brews in England and Denmark, and we’re looking to bring it over here.
