Why does hot coffee that goes cold taste bad, but iced coffee or cold brew taste fine?
In: Other
long time specialty coffee barista here. “specialty coffee” is used to denote high-quality beans that are sourced directly from farms, not bought on the commodity markets. the roasters we worked with were extremely dedicated, and the product was often very different than what most people are accustomed to. a light-roasted high quality coffee should have a color like tea, a clean body (not thick!!!!!!!!), and a juicy, flavorful, sweet flavor. good coffee is truly more like tea than the coffee you’d get at starbucks or dunkin donuts, to the point that those latter drinks are almost unrecognizable as coffee to me.
here’s my point.
if you’re drinking GOOD coffee, it tests *best* at lower temperatures, somewhere between hot and room temperature when the flavors have had time to develop and it reaches a temperature that won’t scald your taste buds. it will continue to taste good as it turns lukewarm and cool. so if your coffee tastes bad when it’s cooler, it was never good coffee to begin with. as such, i cannot really answer your question, as the premise of the question (“hot coffee that goes cold taste[s] bad”) is itself flawed. but i’ll try to answer somewhat.
iced coffee that you get at many shops is simply yesterday’s brewed coffee poured over ice. if that tastes good to you, then that’s great, i’m jealous! at best, it’s tolerable to me. i make no apologies for being a snob so save your breath if you want to call me out on it. cold brew makes good coffee because for whatever reason the low temperatures never extract some of the harsher notes from even low-quality coffee. i suspect that most places are doing a better job at filtering cold brew, because partly why warm coffee that goes cold tastes bad is due to unfiltered solids continuing to brew, leaving bitter/sour tastes.
Latest Answers