Mackenzie Shields:

Black coffee can be the perfect vessel for enjoying the flavors of a quality coffee. When visiting a local shop and picking up a small bag of their special roasts with a paragraph-long description, drinking that coffee hot and undiluted is the best possible way to truly taste everything described in that paragraph.

An acceptable instance of drinking coffee black has two qualifiers: it must be high quality coffee, and it must be consumed hot. Leave either of those out, and drinking that coffee black becomes a last resort.

Drinking hot coffee of any variety (black, expensive or not) is alright. Though my personal choice would be to add a creamer, there is no real issue with leaving it be.

The issue comes when you take that cheap coffee, throw it in the fridge and consume it the next day.

Typically, when people drink day-old cold coffee, they turn it into a flavored iced beverage. I often enjoy a peppermint mocha or caramel coffee with my day-old drip coffee that would have otherwise been wasted. This, also, is totally acceptable.

But drinking day-old black coffee is absolutely insane. No matter the original quality of the flavor, all of it has dissipated after a day in the fridge. There are no flavor notes to enjoy; it is simply vaguely coffee-flavored liquid.

When coffee is cold, some of the flavor is lost anyway. Even the most wonderful, high-quality coffee, when put in the fridge, loses its touch. So drinking cheap coffee chilled? Insane.

The only exception to this no-iced-black-coffee rule is cold brew. Since cold brew is specifically brewed over a long period of time with cold water, the flavor is maintained, unlike in formerly hot coffee.

There are many acceptable ways to drink coffee, and truly, the best way is however you enjoy it. But actively choosing black iced coffee is a crazy choice given the abundance of much better options.

Ethan Semeraro:

The beginning of October heralds the high-water mark of pumpkin spice latte season, highlighting that the most sincere form of coffee is underappreciated and deserving of praise: ice-cold black coffee. 

While a counterargument to cold black coffee is that coffee is meant to be served hot, coffee itself has turned away from always being served hot, and the popularity of other non-hot coffee proves this. The thermal proclivities of today’s coffee drinkers are clear through the widespread popularity of iced and frozen coffees, and those who enjoy coffee but do not prefer hot coffee should consider that black coffee can be refrigerated to perfection and enjoyed chilled. 

Black coffee as a whole is underappreciated; modern coffee shop chains advertise beverages that cannot be considered coffee, but rather drinks that contain coffee, due wholly to the excess amount of milk, sweeteners, flavorings and toppings they consist of. It is this that raises the question whether pumpkin spice latte enjoyers like coffee or the added flavoring.

Those who do not like coffee without the trappings of modern coffee chains may not be swayed to ice-cold black coffee, but those who take their coffee black and also enjoy the iced sugary concoctions from big-name chains have nothing to lose by keeping an open mind. For those adamant on pumpkin spice, there are pumpkin-flavored coffee grinds that are technically black coffee due to the lack of milk, sugar and other flavorings but retain a hint of the ever-popular flavor. 

This brings up further questions on popular coffee trends: why is black coffee so vilified when there are immeasurable different coffee grinds that provide countless different tastes?  Those who claim to hate black coffee likely have not tasted even a remote selection of the different kinds available. 

Black coffee haters should open their minds and hearts to the endless possibilities, and enjoy an ice-cold black coffee before the weather becomes prohibitive. 

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