Iced coffee experiments

Have not blogged in a while. Time to start again!

I did a variation of an experiment I did last year. This time I used different types of water to make iced coffee in a “slow” method. I used rain water from one of our recent storms, bottled water, well water from my tap and water from my brother’s house (he lives about a half hour away).

From my experiments last year I know that the coffee can taste weak if not enough is used in this method so I increased the amount of coffee for the experiment. I have tried this with milder coffees (such as Hawaiian) and know it would take too much much coffee to make it to the strength that I like. For this I used I used Iron Brew's French Roast.  http://www.roaste.com/product/ironbrew/French-Roast .  Normally for a full pot I would use 7 scoops of coffee – for this I used 15 (I would have used more but I would not have had enough coffee). I put the coffee and a full pot of water in a Ziplock bag, sealed it and put it in the refrigerator for 24 hours.

The coffee was weaker than I usually like but still drinkable. Putting extra ice in it would not be a good idea though. The best taste was from the bottled water. It had a nice flavor to it (close to the way it tastes when hot). The rain water coffee was second. It tasted “softer” and seemed weaker than the bottled water but still nice. The bottom of the four would be the well water from my tap (not going through a water softener). It was harsher. Just something about it was not as good as the others. Would I have liked this coffee had I only tasted it from the well water? Probably not as much.  Will I use this method again? Probably (I havea few more experiments to try with it). It does bring up something interesting though – if someone blogs that they do not like the way a certain coffee tastes could it be the water and not the coffee?

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