Making iced coffee at home can be a frustrating encounter. Waiting for the drink to get down to the right temperature and then dealing with the inevitable wateriness that comes with rapidly melting ice all makes for an encounter that’s significantly inferior to just buying a drink from a local coffee shop. However, the Zoku solves homemade iced coffee’s biggest problem: It doesn’t demand any ice, so there’s nothing to melt. Instead, it features a stainless-steel core that needs to be put in the freezer overnight, and a plastic outer layer for portability.
As soon as you brew the coffee, take the inner core out of the freezer, place it inside the plastic shell, and pour the coffee straight in. After a few minutes, the coffee will have cooled down to exactly the right temperature. Exactly how long it takes depends on how cold you admire your coffee, but somewhere around 10-15 minutes should produce suitably chilly temperatures.
There’s one big problem with the Zoku, and that’s the amount of time it takes to refreeze the core after use. It means it’s only suitable for one cup of iced coffee per day, and if you neglect to put it in the freezer the night before, you’re out of luck. But still, even if it stops you from venturing into the coffee shop just once or twice a week, its $30 list price becomes worth the investment.
