Prevent Watery Homemade Iced Lattes With A Genius Spoon Trick

It's an ineffable fact of life: Iced coffee made at home just doesn't taste as good as it does from a coffee shop. There's probably some magic in the atmosphere of the shop and in the excitement of treating yourself to a drink that helps it placebo-effect its way into tasting so much better. But odds are it's also because your at-home iced latte is way too watery.

Coffee is generally brewed hot and then poured over ice to make it cold. The issue is that while the coffee loses some of its heat to the ice, the heat that the ice cubes absorb causes them to melt, diluting your caffeinated beverage with plain old water. 

But if you're a diehard iced coffee lover, don't give up just yet. The good news is that the internet has a plethora of solutions to this, from keeping ice cubes made of coffee in the freezer to pouring milk over the ice before adding a shot of espresso, if you're creating an espresso drink.

Recently, TikTok's Hanna Watkins shared a new hack using thermodynamics to her advantage to make her ice, stay ice. Turns out, if you put a metal spoon in your cup with the ice and pour your hot coffee onto the spoon as it goes into the cup, the spoon will absorb most of the heat, sparing your ice cubes and saving you from a watery latte.

Essentially, this hack works because of something called conduction — or the transfer of heat through physical contact. When something is hot, its molecules are moving around quickly. For something cold, they're more sluggish. But through physical contact — aka pouring coffee on top of ice — the fast-moving coffee molecules bump into the cold ice ones, which in turn bump into others, creating a whole bumper cars situation that heats up whatever was previously cold and melts your ice. But here's the catch: Different materials are better than others at transferring heat. And metal spoons happen to be very good at it.

The spoon trick isn't magic. It won't entirely stop your ice cubes from melting. But stainless steel does trap heat more readily than water in any form, and it will certainly help your ice stay frozen a little longer. So stick a spoon in with your ice, take it out once you've felt it heat up, and enjoy feeling mildly superior to others for having made your coffee at home.

If the coffee still isn't strong enough for your liking, you might want to try making double-brewed coffee by — you guessed it — doubling the amount of grounds you use to brew. This way, you're planning for the dilution and will be fully, maybe even excessively, caffeinated for your morning meeting.

Once you've mastered the basic iced latte? Step it up a notch and try making an iced version of this at-home pumpkin spice latte.