Why does hot coffee that goes cold taste bad, but iced coffee or cold brew taste fine?
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In general, when food or drink is hot, the flavor is mellowed out, and when it’s cold, it’s intensified – and that’s especially true with bitter flavors. With hot coffee, since we want it to be served hot, we brew it to an intensity that tastes good at that temperature. When it cools down, it ends up tasting too strong and bitter, because those flavors are intensified past where we wanted them.
When we make iced coffee or cold brew, we brew it to an intensity that tastes right when it’s cold *and* diluted with ice. So we engineered it to have a good flavor at that temperature – if you took an iced coffee and heated it up, it would actually taste *too* mellow and diluted, compared to what you’d expect from a regular hot cup of coffee.
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