A glass of cold brew, ready to drink.

Matt Roney | Contributor

Well, Ann Arbor, we made it. After an extremely long and dark winter, it’s finally summer. In fact, yesterday was outright hot.

And while a lot of us coffee drinkers will stick doggedly to our hot brew, others prefer to switch to nice refreshing iced coffee.

To my knowledge, the best, most accessible method for preparing iced coffee is cold brewing, which entails allowing your grounds to steep in cool water. It’s spectacularly easy, even if you don’t want to go out and buy a dedicated cold brewer.

The resulting coffee is very smooth and less acidic than drip brew, though, as former World Barista Champion James Hoffman notes, some subtlety is lost.

You will need:

1 pound coffee
A large, covered container, opaque if possible. Blue Bottle Coffee recommends a four-quart stock pot
A fine metal sieve
A wooden spoon
2.5 quarts water, filtered for best results
A 1.5 quart mason jar

To begin, grind your coffee as coarse as possible. This is best accomplished using a nice burr grinder to ensure an even grind. Put the full pound of ground coffee into the stock pot, then add 2.5 quarts of water. Stir briefly with the wooden spoon, then cover. Recommended steeping times vary, with most people sticking to 8-12 hours. Others suggest that as long as 24 hours is acceptable.

When enough time has elapsed, strain the coffee through the sieve into the mason jar. Arbor Brewing Co. growlers have also been proven to work nicely.

Don’t drink your concoction yet, though — what you have now is a concentrate, with roughly twice the caffeine as typical drip coffee. It can be diluted with water, milk, or a combination of the two. The refrigerated concentrate should be good for about a week.

There are other variations on cold brew. San Francisco’s Blue Bottle Coffee offers a New Orleans-style iced coffee that’s slowly gaining national renown. The recipe is very similar to this one but with a few more ingredients, most notably dried chicory. Best of all, the recipe is available for free on their web site.

Finally, before you begin, let me make one thing clear: There is a common misconception that cold brew should be steeped in the refrigerator. In fact, though the finished product should most definitely be stored in the fridge, it should be steeped at room temperature.

Now, get to it!

Matt Roney is a barista at lab cafe and a contributor to Radio Free Chicago. He can be reached by email here.