Drink · Campfire Blend
Cold brew and coffee ice
Iced coffee that gets stronger as it melts.
Plus 16 hours steeping, and 4 hours to freeze the cubes.
There are two problems with iced coffee at home. It is either weak, because it was brewed hot and poured over ice that immediately melted into it, or it is bitter, because someone tried to compensate by making it double strength.
Both problems are the same problem: water arriving where it was not invited.
This fixes it twice over. Brew cold so you never had the harshness to hide, and freeze the coffee into the ice so the melt works for you instead of against you. No machine, no filter papers, no gadget — a jar and a tea towel.
What you need
- 100g Western Tamp Campfire Blend, ground coarse — as coarse as sea salt
- 800ml cold filtered water
- A large jar or jug, and a clean tea towel or a square of muslin
- An ice cube tray
The roast for this Campfire Blend From £11.95 How to make it
-
Grind coarse and combine
Grounds and cold water into the jar, stir once so nothing is left floating dry. Coarse is not a suggestion — fine grounds over sixteen hours extract far too much and give you something bitter and muddy that no amount of milk will fix.
-
Sixteen hours in the fridge
Lid on, into the fridge, and forget about it. Twelve hours is the floor and twenty is the ceiling. Do the fridge rather than the worktop: room-temperature steeping is faster but noticeably harsher.
-
Strain it twice
Pour through a sieve first to catch the bulk of the grounds, then through a clean tea towel or muslin laid in the sieve to catch the silt. Let it drip. Wringing the cloth pushes the fine particles straight through and clouds the whole batch.
-
Freeze half into cubes
Take about 300ml of the concentrate, dilute it 1:1 with water, and fill an ice tray. Four hours or overnight. Diluting before freezing matters — neat concentrate freezes into cubes so strong they overpower the drink as they melt.
-
Build the glass
Fill a glass with your coffee cubes. Pour over 100ml of concentrate and 100ml of cold water or milk. Adjust from there — this is a 1:1 starting point, not a rule.
Why it works
Two things are going on. The first is the cold water: most of the compounds that make coffee taste sharp and bitter are far more soluble hot than cold, so a sixteen-hour cold steep pulls out the sugars and the body while leaving a good deal of the acidity behind. That is why cold brew tastes smooth and round even from a blend that tastes bright when you brew it hot. The second is the ice, and it is the part everyone skips. Ordinary ice is a dilution timer — the drink you take the first sip of is not the drink you finish. Freeze the coffee itself and melting adds more coffee. The last mouthful is as strong as the first.
Worth knowing
- The concentrate keeps in a sealed bottle in the fridge for two weeks. It is at its best in the first week.
- 1:8 coffee to water gives you a concentrate to dilute. For something you can drink straight from the fridge, go 1:12 and skip the topping up.
- Campfire Blend is the pick here because a medium roast has the body to survive dilution. Try it with Whiskey Creek if you take yours with milk and want it to punch through.
- Do not throw the spent grounds away — they go straight on the compost, or round the base of anything acid-loving in the garden.
More like this
Get it right