Eight tips for making iced coffee at home

If you love coffee but don’t always want to drink the hot stuff, try changing things up with a delicious iced coffee at home. Follow these eight easy tips from Beanbag Coffee, makers of South East Asian style iced coffee in a bag, and you’ll soon be sipping on a creamy, icy cold, caffeine-laced beverage and wondering why you ever bothered with the hot version:

1. Choose quality beans

When preparing your coffee, always use premium quality coffee beans. Those from Vietnam or India are ideal: they’re high in caffeine, have a nice chocolatey flavour, lots of body and pack a strong punch, which you’ll need if adding ice or other strong flavours to your drink.

2. Brew using a muslin cloth filter

Those who’ve holidayed in Thailand might recall drinking coffee from a plastic bag. Those coffees are brewed using a muslin cloth filter. Quality muslin cloth filters allow even the smallest coffee particles to drip through, providing you with a bolder and more flavourful coffee experience … remember the longer you leave the beans to soak, the stronger the coffee becomes

3. Brew the night before

Brew your coffee the night before, then leave it in the fridge to chill. This is the ideal time to add extra flavours and spices so your brew has time to bind together and concentrate overnight. The next day, just add ice and enjoy.

4. Use the right water

Use good clean water to brew your coffee. If your water at home is ‘hard’ or has a high salt content, then it can affect the flavour, so make sure you filter it before using.

5. Add condensed milk to sweeten

Add a little condensed milk to your brewed coffee. This makes the drink super indulgent and binds perfectly well with the brew to offer a new level of flavour.

6. Experiment with different flavourings

Using a blender, you can add dark chocolate, banana or coconut to your cold iced coffee brew to enhance the flavour. If you want to experiment further, try adding spices, such as cinnamon, cardamom and ginger.

7. Change up your ice

Instead of just flavouring your brew, you could try making flavoured ice to add at the end. Why not make coconut ice, mint ice or even dark chocolate ice, or a mixture of all three?

8. Blend until smooth

You can make a huge variety of delicious coffee smoothies using natural ingredients including avocado, almond butter, peanut butter or banana. Blend with your coffee brew, leave overnight to allow everything to fuse together, add ice in the morning and enjoy.