NOLA-style cold drip

“THE BEST ICED COFFEE YOU’LL EVER HAVE."

When I send people this recipe, which involves steeping coffee grounds in cold water overnight to make a coffee concentrate, I do so with this disclaimer: “THE BEST ICED COFFEE YOU’LL EVER HAVE.” And really, it is. The way I like to describe it is THICK. It’s like, voluptuous. Voluptuous coffee. Not thin or watery or—god forbid!—runny like the kind you’d get from an airport Starbucks (or, tbh, any Starbucks). No. This coffee is full-bodied. Rich. Silky.

Like most things in my life, I learned how to make this coffee from my mom, who first encountered it in college at Tulane. When she lived in New Orleans, my mom used to go to PJ’s Coffee on Maple Street. “They had these crispy cookies and this iced coffee and they’d put a little cinnamon on it and it was really fucking good,” she told me. Fast forward to May 2007. My mom was reading The New York Times and saw a recipe for “New Orleans Cold Drip Coffee.”

“When I saw it, I knew this was it,” she said. “I was like, oh my god, this is the shit.”

In the article—which, as you can see above, my mom cut out pasted into her giant scrapbook of recipes—a writer named Oliver Schwaner-Albright shares more background on NOLA-style cold drip. “Unless you’re familiar with coffee concentrate, New Orleans iced coffee is a puzzling ritual. The first time I had it, I watched skeptically as a friend’s mother filled a plastic Mardi Gras cup with ice, poured in an inch of inky coffee from a mayonnaise jar, then topped it off with milk.”

I’ve encountered similarly curious expressions when making my version of this coffee. I even used to stash a water bottle full of the concentrate in the fridge at work, and would offer it to coworkers and friends who looked at me like I was crazy. But then they’d taste it. And, like Schwaner-Albright, they’d instantly become obsessed. “It was as smooth as a milkshake but had a rich coffee flavor and packed a caffeinated punch,” he writes. “It was easily the best iced coffee I’d ever had.”

Another perk to this coffee? It’s easy to batch and makes for a great beverage option at a party. You can add milk or leave out a jug of the concentrate for people to do their own mixing. If you’re feeling feisty, have a bottle of vodka nearby for a cold drip take on an espresso ‘tini.

Even though this cold drip is a little bit of a pain in the ass to make because it requires—gasp!—four strains, it’s also incredibly easy and, please believe me, it’s worth the hassle. It blows regular old iced coffee out of the water. And it might just change your whole morning routine.

NOLA-style cold drip iced coffee