weB LOG: greg matusic

It’s ICED coffee, people. Not ICE coffee. And if anyone tells you different, they’re fullacrap. So iced coffee is my favorite drink during the Summer months. It’s cool (iced) and refreshing (due to the additions of cream and sugar, or sugar-type substitutes) and you get to drink them through a straw (fun!). Now Dunkin Donuts makes a fine iced coffee. The small is plenty big enough to quench your thirst. The medium looks like a large. And the large is obscene. I usually get the large. Unlike a common hot coffee, you can let the iced coffee sit at your desk for quite a while, and it won’t lose it’s temperature level. While a hot coffee will cool, an iced coffee holds its coldness - probably because of the plastic cups they’re served in. Plastic… is there anything it can’t do? Starbucks makes a really good iced coffee as well. I’m not referring to a Frappacino. Those are very tasty drinks in their own right, but we’re discussing iced coffees here. The nice thing about the Starbucks’ iced coffee is that you can enjoy one without the aid of cream and sugar. Well, YOU may not enjoy them, but I do. The coffee flavor is bold and rich. I like to think of it as a “cigar in a cup”. Starbucks’ coffee is normally strong, but this is super frigging strong because they (the Starbuck’s folks - I refuse to call them “Baristas”) brew the coffee at double strength so that it retains that bold and rich flavor that I referred to earlier even after the ice starts to melt and waters it down a bit. But the watering down isn’t ever much of a problem because of those amazing plastic cups. Sometimes I’ll add a bit of cream and sugar to my Starbucks’ iced coffee for an added treat. And for even more of a treat I sometimes add a pack of “Sugar In The Raw” - comes in a tan/browinsh pack at the Starbucks “fixins” area. Sure it adds sweetness, but it also adds a nice sugary crunch. The key is to not stir it in. Just allow it to float to the bottom of your plastic cup where it patiently waits until it gets sucked up in your straw’s jet stream and into your mouth where you get to munch on its sugary goodness. I’ve tried brewing double strength coffee at home, adding it to a plastic drink bottle (not like an old milk carton - more like the kind you can buy at Target or Lampston’s - HA! Lampston’s… that’s old school shopping if you’re originally from the Boogie-Down Bronx) with a ton of ice and some cream and some sugar-substitute, but man… it’s just not the same. And if you get yourself a tasty iced coffee, make sure you grab a bunch of napkins, because the plastic cups get a bit damp. Opening a napkin half-way and then wrapping it around the bottom half of the cup does the trick. Kind of like a plastic iced coffee cup diaper.

Enjoy your iced coffees, folks. And don’t forget the straw. Sipping an iced coffee from the edge of the plastic cup just isn’t the same.

Ciao!

-G