Coffee
During school summer holidays, my sister and I were often dispatched to an aunt's house for the day. Her house had a high soaring ceiling that made it cool even at in Chennai's searing summer, and she also had another trick to dealing with overheated kids. Her fridge always had a steel jar full of sweet milky cold coffee that we could drink anytime.
Doesn’t caffeine and sugar over-stimulate kids? The answer is in the milk, which my aunt believed had to be of the very best quality. For years she kept a cow in a shed behind the house, and even after that always made sure to get good rich milk. Her cold coffee was really about the milk and one glass of its creamy sweetness, with just enough coffee to give it an alluring adult kick.
Claudia Roden, in her short book on coffee, says that the original iced coffee was called Mazagran "probably after the Algerian fortress where the drink is said to have first become popular among French colonial troops in the North African deserts. It was made from coffee syrup and cold water." But in India dairy is essential to cold coffee, whether in the luxurious Viennois, the cream laden coffee famously served at the Sea Lounge in Mumbai’s Taj Hotel, or the ice cooled or blended milky coffees at chains like Barista and Cafe Coffee Day, or just the simple frappé that anyone can make by mixing milk, ice cubes, sugar and coffee into a blender.
Frappés are usually made with instant coffee instead of properly brewed coffee, but this seems to matter less when it is drowned in milk. But recently I’ve changed my mind after encountering a coffee making method that was supposed to make particularly good coffee for drinking cold, but which sounded too improbable to be true. It was called, appropriately, cold-brewed coffee, and all you had to do was steep ground coffee in water at room temperature overnight and by the next morning you had excellent coffee.
This went against all I knew about making coffee. Where was the steam and drama of espresso, the frenzied boiling up of Turkish coffee, the burned fingers of South Indian coffee served in a tumbler and katori for you to pour between to whip up froth, or even just the explosion of aroma as hot water hit instant coffee? How could cold water compare? And when I finally tried it, mixing about four times the volume of water to coffee, leaving it overnight, repeatedly straining it to get a clear dark liquid and then drinking this on ice-cubes, it didn’t seem to. There was none of the intoxicating aroma, the bitter burst on the palate, the palate numbing power of the hot and freshly brewed beverage.
My first thought was: this isn’t coffee. But my second was: it’s still pretty good. Instead of the bitter onrush there was a mellow wave which registered not in the front of the mouth and up the nose, but lingeringly down the back of the throat and the palate, lasting long after the sip. The cold-brew lacked the strong aroma of coffee but it substituted a strong taste of roasted beans, echoing all sorts of sweet, caramel notes.
Harold McGee, the food science writer, explains that this difference lies in what happens when water meets ground coffee, dissolving or displacing hundreds of different substances: “If the water is hot, it extracts more rapidly and completely. Hot water also cooks as it extracts, forcing chemical reactions that transform some of the extracted substances into others things.” Cold lets more natural flavours percolate out over time, changing less and leaving them gentle. In particular, fewer tannic acids are forced into the brew, making it easier to drink and far less harsh on the stomach than acidity-provoking hot-brew coffee.
It needs time and also requires more coffee, which is one reason why cafes abroad aren’t too keen on cold-brew. On the other hand, you don’t need fancy gadgets to make it — of course, coffee junkies have invented gadgets for cold-brewing, and the usual arcane rules for the perfect coldbrew, but all these can be safely ignored in favour of the procedure given above. It can also be made well in advance, and it doesn’t lose flavour the way hot-brew coffee does over time, simply because much of that flavour escapes with the aroma molecules, but cold-brew doesn’t have these in the first place, delivering instead a steady strong coffee flavour. You can keep a large batch of brew in the fridge and just make it by adding ice or cold-water.
Because it isn’t bitter cold-brew coffee doesn’t really need milk or sugar but there is one reason to add them — when you drink the brew Vietnamese-style, mixed with sweetened condensed milk and poured over ice-cubes. The Vietnamese evolved this due to a shortage of fresh milk and it quickly became popular in itself for the intensely syrupy-milky kick it delivers, with the coffee preventing it becoming too cloying.
Most Indians love condensed milk, so I have always wondered why Vietnamese coffee hasn’t taken off here, and now that I’ve tried it with cold-brew coffee, I am hoping again it will. It really delivers an all-round winning combination of real coffee taste that isn’t bitter, the milkysweet intensity of condensed milk and the refreshment of having both cold. Childhood memories seem best, but this time I’ll admit, cold coffee made with cold-brew and condensed milk is better than what my aunt used to make all those years ago.
Vikram Doctor ET120420
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