When I was a kid, my uncle Bob always drank cold coffee. I recall at family gatherings that there would always be a cup of coffee set aside and put into the refrigerator for him. As a kid, this was unusual to see – everyone else I knew at the time preferred a piping hot cup of java.

Nowadays, though, iced coffee is pretty popular all over the U.S. Technically, to make the best iced coffee, it’s not just a matter of brewing some hot coffee and dumping it over a cup of ice, or even refrigerating a hot brewed cup like my uncle did.  Apparently, starting with a hot brewed cup gives you a cup that just gets too watered down when you dump ice in it.

No, to make a proper iced coffee you’re supposed to let ground coffee soak for hours in cold water to extract the flavor of the coffee into a strong liquid extract. You then strain it and refrigerate it, and then pour that over ice, adding milk and sugar if you want; the resulting drink is then not as watered down, since the water merely dilutes by design the strong liquid coffee extract.

I’m not sure if places like Starbucks actually do all that, or if they are just dumping hot coffee over cups of ice. But whatever the method, certainly iced coffee drinks are now found in most every coffee place I’ve been to in the U.S.

But here in Germany it’s a different story. I have never seen iced coffee on the menus anywhere in Germany, even though Germans do drink a lot of hot brewed coffee. Most often what they drink is something called  Milchkaffee, which is a small bit of brewed coffee served in an oversized coffee cup with a lot of milk added to it. I think of it as milk flavored coffee, rather than a real coffee drink, actually, but that’s just me. Anyway,  it’s always served hot — as I’ve said, I’ve never seen any coffee drinks offered cold in this country.

BTW, a Milchkaffee should not be confused with a Latte beverage, which is a hot coffee drink that combines Italian espresso coffee (not regular brewed coffee) with a large amount of milk. A Latte is the same idea as a Milchkaffee, but crucially the coffee part is different, since it has espresso, not brewed coffee.

Now, there is a common summer coffee drink on a lot of menus here in Germany, called an Eiskaffee. While Eis in German is the word for “ice”, it is also the word for “ice cream” in German, and that usage is far more common, and is what it means in the name of this coffee drink. I.e.,  an Eiskaffee is a coffee drink that contains scoops of ice cream. It’s typically served in a tall glass, with balls of vanilla ice cream sitting drowned in coffee.  You eat it with a long-handled spoon and a straw. It’s kind of like an American root beer float drink, but with coffee instead of root beer.

There are similarly no iced coffee drinks on the menus in Italy, either. But they do have a coffee drink with ice cream, called an affogato. It’s usually presented to you with the scoops of vanilla ice cream sitting in a small, shallow bowl, with a cup of hot espresso on the side. Often the waiter will drizzle the hot espresso over of the top of the ice cream in front of you when he serves it; rarely, you have to do that yourself. You then eat it with a normal spoon. No straw required.

Since I had first had the vanilla ice cream + coffee combination in Italy, I tended to think of the Eiskaffees in Germany as the equivalent of the affogado drinks in Italy. So when I recently saw them both on a menu at an ice cream place in Tübingen, I had to ask what the difference was. After all, both are basically the thing in my mind, so I was surprised to see both side-by-side on the menu.

But from the look I got from the friendly waitress it was clear that for most people in Germany, the difference is obvious. An affogado is a drink with espresso, while an Eiskaffe is made with German brewed Kaffee.

True. And I’m the first to agree that the difference between espresso and German brewed Kaffee is substantial (personally, I’m an Italian coffee fan from way back, and can’t drink the German stuff).

But oddly enough, her answer revealed a puzzling extra bit of information. As she described it, the other key difference is that an affogado is made with hot espresso, while the Eiskaffee is made with cold brewed coffee.

Really? They actually make cold coffee in Germany? But only to use in a drink with ice cream? Does this make sense? I mean, they don’t otherwise offer cold coffee in restaurants in Germany – but they make the cold stuff just to use with the ice cream drink?

Someone needs to write a memo to cafes around here: they could sell just the cold coffee as a drink. How has that never caught on?

Well, of course, they would need large quantities of ice cubes, and, as I’ve previously mentioned, ice-cube technology has its challenges here in Germany. Until that’s solved, I guess Eiskaffee will rule in place of Iced Kaffee.