Japanese Iced Coffee

Japanese-style iced coffee is brewed hot and chilled instantly. Instead of pouring hot coffee over ice afterwards, part of the brewing water is replaced by ice that sits in the jug or carafe below the dripper. The coffee drips straight onto it, cools as it is extracted and ends up at drinking strength once the ice has melted.

Because the coffee is extracted hot, it keeps the aromatic, bright and often fruity notes that slow cold brew tends to lose, and it has a lighter body. Because it is chilled at once, it avoids the stale, sour taste of coffee that has cooled slowly. And it takes only as long as a normal pour-over – a few minutes rather than the 12–24 hours of cold brew.

Iced coffee has been on the menu in Japanese cafés since the 1920s and became widespread after the Second World War. In English-speaking speciality coffee the hot-onto-ice technique is known as “Japanese iced coffee” or “flash brew”, and it is now a summer staple of pour-over bars around the world.

Cold coffee drinks go back at least to the 1840s, when French soldiers in Algeria drank mazagran, coffee syrup mixed with cold water. Japan adopted iced coffee early: fashionable cafés were serving it by the 1920s, and it became a widespread café drink after the Second World War.

Japanese coffee culture developed several ways of making cold coffee, from slow cold-drip towers to mizudashi cold brew and brewing hot coffee directly onto ice. The last method is often described as having been used in Japan since the 1920s, though no single inventor is recorded.

The name “Japanese iced coffee” appears to have been coined outside Japan, as speciality coffee bars in North America and Europe embraced pour-over brewing and Japanese equipment such as Hario drippers. Today it is often marketed simply as “flash brew”.