Iced.

Enjoying the heat in our new city I realized that I can now drink iced coffee on the regular without contracting hypothermia; woot. So I took a page out of Bec's book and made my own batch earlier this week.
My biggest hurdle to achieving the finished product was finagling containers big enough for THIS recipe. I could've halved it but I knew I'd be happy with a large output so I went for it and I'm glad I did; I've been averaging two glasses a morning.
I scrounged and used my most voluminous pot and an old Brita that was laying around. The double bonus for me, beyond that I was able to find these things in our apartment, was that it's a Brita that has a spigot so I can now just dispense iced coffee with the easy press of a handle.

This is a super easy and rewarding recipe and I'll let you look it up {see link above} if you want accuracy but I'll also give you my own version, mostly as a personal test - if I can recreate a recipe without looking at the original then I feel like I've mastered it. And that doesn't happen often.

Ingredients:

1 pound of ground coffee {16 ounces}.
8 quarts of cold water {one quart to each ounce of ground coffee, more or less}.

 Steps:

1. Mix the coffee and water and let it steep eight hours or overnight or however long you can manage. I let it sit at room temperature.
2. Using cheesecloth or paper towels placed inside a fine-mesh sieve, drain the coffee mixture so that the liquid is caught below in a container of some sort. I placed my sieve/strainer directly on top of the empty Brita thing and then slowly and carefully poured my coffee stuff into it so that the coffee grounds-free-liquid would fall into the Brita below.

3. Get rid of the grounds; compost for some, garbage for others.
4. Chill the coffee mixture and drink it however you might please.

I like a bit of half & half to a tall glass with a few ice cubes.

Yea!
The benefit of this over just putting ice into a cup of coffee is that it's not diluted {hot coffee turns ice into water} and...there's more I think but that's one reason.
Do you have any hot weather drinks you enjoy? I love actually having a summer, one that is really and truly hot, rather than just the warmish weather we get in San Jose. I do admit there's not much that can/should be done in the middle of the day during the heat and humidity here, which can get old, but I feel like I'm getting a real season and all of the accoutrements that go with it. I'll probably be eating my words after a few more weeks but I'm digging it right now while I can.
On that note, Happy Friday!
xoxo, natty ♥