CityMag's guide to the best icy caffeine hits for warm work mornings.

Maybe it’s a little too early in the year, but the sun is shining and the warm cup of milk that constitutes the majority of our morning coffee is already beginning to feel a little heavy in the hand.

This is CityMag’s quick guide to the best places to get some cold caffeine comfort on those warm work mornings when you’d rather be heading to the beach.

Mischief Brew
Various venues

 There’s been tell that this will be the summer of cold brew, but of course for those in the coffee game cold brew has been a part of life for some time now. Scott Giles uses locally roasted beans and fluoride-free water in a slow overnight process to make brew by the flagon-full for his business Mischief Brew. Delivering ready-to-drink black gold to cafes and businesses, or to your home if you’re feeling especially in need of large amounts of cold coffee, Scott is basically providing a community service. Currently serving at Cafè Troppo, the brew can also often be found in a heap of other places including Rigoni’s, Flinders Street Project and occasionally at RHD.

Exchange Specialty Coffee
Shaken iced latte and iced long black

The East End café is well-known for its dedication to the coffee bean, and ability to present it in a seemingly endless number of formats. These two cold coffee recommendations are sophisticated takes on classic options. The iced long black is made with an espresso shot extracted from single origin beans (the current pour is Market Lane’s Clarinero Espresso from El Salvador, but it changes) built over ice and ice water. The shaken iced latte is a little more complicated – a blended roast (today’s was Market Lane’s 50/50 mix of La Perla from Guatemala and the Clarinero) is used for an espresso shot which is then shaken with cold milk, ice and sugar syrup to create a frothy and sweet caffeine refreshment.

Nano
Iced Coffee (and iced chocolate for fun)

Nano’s Iced Coffee walks the delicate and wonderful line between being real coffee and being a delicious dessert. It is definitely made with espresso straight from the machine, but it also contains ice cream, milk and crushed ice that are blended together into something that is definitely more thickshake than milkshake. There’s enough coffee kick to give you the familiar taste, but enough other stuff to keep a latte-drinker on side and we can’t think of anything better to make a work day feel a little less long.

Please Say Please
Cold brew

Please Say Please owner Daniel Freer’s cold brew is made with the Proud Mary beans the café  uses in its daily coffees, steeped for up to 16 hours in cool water. Importantly for those of us who like novelty things, it is served over a giant ice cube, which has the added benefit of melting more slowly and diluting your coffee less. A very approachable rendition of cold brew, this version is subtle and sweet but gave us an almighty caffeine boost that propelled us right through to evening beer time.