To kick off the summer iced coffee season (check your local listings here ), frequent Bon Appetit contributor (you can find his recipes for excellent Mexican food in our June issue) and New York Times coffee hero Oliver Strand jumped into the cold brew vs. ice brew debate that he's seen emerge among coffee heads.

"Ice brew" is drip coffee brewed into a glass that has a bunch of ice in it, so it cools down fast. Cold brew coffee, on the other hand, involves no heat at all--you put the coffee in some cold water, let it sit overnight in the fridge, and time does the work for you.

If you're at all interested in the nitty-gritty of making iced coffee, you should read Strand's whole post . But if you just want a takeaway, it's that ice brew is better. Or, as Strand put it:

"Cold brew without the milk didn't measure up to ice brew. I don't care if some say it jumped the shark. It was drab in comparison, like listening to the in-flight movie through the airline's headphones."

And it might have been a joke, but Strand dropped this link about making coffee in an Aeropress directly over some ice as a possible "next big thing." Aeropress over ice is pretty much what's gotten this blogger through the past five summers. Who knows if it'll ever trend anywhere (there's something emphatically un-glamorous about making your coffee in a plastic syringe), but it's definitely worth trying out yourself .

[via NYT ]