San Francisco Blog

J. Birdsall

Taste the chicory, not the sugar.

This isn't the town for iced coffee, except when it is. Sure, cities like Chicago, New Orleans, and Manhattan have the kind of suffocatingly humid summers that turn the hollow of your back into an uncontrollable sweat sluice, soaking the waistband of your undies the way drip irrigation moistens humus.

What we've got that those other towns don't? Coffee fetishists like John Quintos, who owns the kiosks Cento (360 Ritch at Townsend) and Vega at Langton (1246 Folsom at Ninth St.). He sources beans from Blue Bottle, and learned to make chicory-steeped New Orleans-style iced coffee from BB's James Freeman. But Quintos departs from Freeman in one key respect: instead of pre-sweetening, he serves up his iced naked. "I just want you to taste the whole coffee experience," Quintos said. Considering a cup costs $3.50, you'd better.

niallkennedy/Flickr

The Cento kiosk on Ritch Street.

Here's how he does it (instructions are essentially identical to ones at the Blue Bottle Web site, where -- if you're DIY deficient -- you can buy a homebrew kit). The key? A ratio of 80 percent ground coffee to 20 percent roasted chicory, which has a tobacco-leaf sweetness (buy it in bulk at Rainbow). Add it to room-temp tap water, and let the coffee-chicory mix float on the surface like a raft for 8 to 12 hours. "The water extracts flavor from the bottom down," Quintos said. If no more than 20 percent of the mixture sinks to the bottom, he knows he's had a successful brew.

Quintos cracks the crust and pours the resulting mixture through a fine strainer, then serves it over ice with milk or half-and-half. Purists sip as is, full chicory sweetness unobscured (Quintos calls it "the wood"). The rest of us might choose to sweeten with simple syrup, obscuring the wood at the risk of sullying our fetishist cred.