Why does hot coffee that goes cold taste bad, but iced coffee or cold brew taste fine?

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Why does hot coffee that goes cold taste bad, but iced coffee or cold brew taste fine?

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20 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Hello. Professional coffee roaster here. There is some useful and interesting information posted here, but another explanation is that you are drinking low quality coffee. One reason why people like hot coffee is that burning your tongue a little bit prevents you from fully appreciating the negative aspects of what you’re drinking. When evaluating coffees, we always taste them at a range of different temperatures, and all of the best coffees I’ve ever had have tasted best between body temperature (or just above) and room temperature.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Coffee just tastes bad, when its hot you cant taste it as much imo. I hate the taste of black coffee, so I usually just let it cool down to room temperature anyway so i can just chug it and get it out of the way.Unless its cold outside, ill drink hot coffee to warm up. I do like iced coffee with cream and sugar though

Anonymous 0 Comments

fwiw i love cooled down coffee, it has intense chocolatey flavours, to these taste buds anyway.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It doesn’t always taste bad though. I think it’s mostly to do with the raw product.

The Folgers brewed in a drip coffer maker I used to chug just to keep going back in the day tasted like motor oil when it got cold.

The decent quality whole bean Sumatran (or a few other varieties of Indo coffee) is another story. A lot of different flavors are more noticeable when it cools down and I’ve never considered it unpleasant.

Anonymous 0 Comments

If your coffee tastes bad when it goes cold, you need to buy better coffee.

Buying better beans and grinding them yourself will result in better coffee all around, and can be MUCH cheaper than stuff like St@rb*cks.

Do your own due diligence, but if you are getting bad tasting coffee after it goes cold, it is generally bad coffee.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I hope this comment can stay up. To add onto the reply about aromatics: you can preserve them and easily make delicious iced coffee quickly at home by brewing your coffee regularly, stirring it (a little aeration really helps coffee taste better according to blind taste tests), pouring it into a good mason jar all the way up and lidding it tightly (scary I know), putting that jar into an ice + water bucket so it’s covered completely, putting that whole bucket arrangement into the freezer for ~15 minutes, you end up with coffee that is ice cold; uses your trusted recipe; and tastes the same but cold. I work in an award winning espresso bar and this is the way we do it when we want to make a special batch.

Otherwise using more ground coffee and brewing directly over ice (about half of the normal water by weight) is standard but you really gotta fine tune the grind settings and amounts of water and beans (by weight). It’s easier small scale to not change your recipe and use the double ice sarcophagus method.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I think it comes down to expectations of what your drinking. I’ve never thought cold coffee tastes bad

Anonymous 0 Comments

You know what we call Iced coffee here in Australia?

Ice coffee

Anonymous 0 Comments

I was wondering if it’s considered a cold brew if you use instant coffee and cold water and then add ice?

Anonymous 0 Comments

I get so upset when people try to dump out the old coffee. SAVE it for MEEEE. I am gross and have no taste, and prefer any coffee that is not hot. Obviously iced and cold brew are slightly better than day old, but I will drink the hell out of that shit.

The science here made me finally understand (a little) why people are so grossed out that I insist they save me the old coffee.

Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold,
Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old;
Some like it hot, some like it cold,
Some like it in the pot, nine days old.

This is my theme song when it comes to coffee.