The Best Iced Coffee Ever

It's currently very late in the night. And yet I feel as energetic as a certain pink bunny playing drums. The secret to my vaults of stored energy? Every student's best friend and worst enemy; coffee.

However, I have this weird quirk in which I don't like hot drinks. I prefer cold, even in the dead of winter.  If I do happen to have a hot drink, I usually wait until it cools considerably. This is a weird because both my parents like to chug down their tea while its scalding hot and I'm exact opposite.

Anyway, I am currently addicted to iced coffee. The fact that McDonald's included iced coffee in their $1 drinks special for the summer didn't help one bit. $1.13 gets me a large and that sucker would be good all afternoon.

Now that the dollar drink specials are coming to an end, my frugal (read cheap) self decided to explore other avenues in which I could get my usual hit.

I came across a recipe on The Pioneer Woman which seemed pretty simple and had a lot of good reviews.  I did alter the proportions a bit though because I didn't have a pound of coffee.

I also didn't have all the tools for the job so I improvised.

I used:

227 g of ground coffee. I don't remember the brand but just go with a nice rich roast.
16 cups of cold water
a very big pot (or 2 big pots)
a strainer
cheesecloth or paper towels

Method:

Dump the coffee into the cold water. I had two large pots so I filled each pot with 8 cups of water and divided the ground coffee into 2 batches.

Let the coffee soak for at least 8 hours. I soaked for about 14 hours because I wasn't getting up at 5 am to strain it.

Using the strainer and cheesecloth or paper towel, strain the coffee mixture to get rid of the grounds. You can just not use cheesecloth or PT but then you would be drinking AND eating coffee...which is gross.

I had to use a tiny little strainer with paper towels and it was not fun. Not one bit. Get a large strainer. Have a lot of paper towels handy.

Refrigerate the coffee concentrate for a few hours. Make sure you also have ice cubes.

To make coffee, pour some into a glass, add cream or milk (I used half and half) and add sugar.

And that's it. It tastes amazing. It's flexible because you can add fancy stuff like flavour shots and also tweak the sweetness to your liking, unlike the store bought stuff. And you also know what goes in it, and how it was made which is always a bonus. It's a long process and it was time consuming for me because of the tiny strainer but it made a big batch that will last me many weeks....although living in a house with 4 other girls might make reduce that time....by a lot.

Give it a try! It's cheap, easy, and super yummy. And no I don't have pictures because I was too busy gulping it down. But The Pioneer Woman has better pictures than I ever will, so get over there and check out her site...she has tonnes of cool recipes, cool tips and other .... cool stuff.

But make sure to come back here too!