Mazagran: The Algerian-French Iced Coffee With Lemon

A mazagran is strong coffee, sweetened and poured over ice in a tall glass, often with a slice of lemon — and in some countries a shot of rum. To make one, stir a teaspoon or two of sugar into a hot double espresso or 100 ml of strong coffee, pour it over a tall glass of ice with a slice or strip of lemon, and stir.

It is one of the oldest cold coffees in Europe, with a history that runs from a besieged fortress in Algeria to the cafés of Paris, Lisbon and Vienna.

The recipe

1. Sweeten the coffee while it is hot. Sugar barely dissolves once coffee is cold.
2. Fill a tall glass with ice and add the lemon.
3. Pour the coffee over the ice, adding the rum now if you are using it.
4. Stir, garnish with mint if you like, and serve.

Go easy with the lemon. A strip of peel or a single slice adds a bright, fragrant edge to sweetened coffee; a lot of juice turns it sour. The espresso guide covers the shot, or use strong coffee from a moka pot.

Why it works

The coffee has to be strong, because the ice will melt. Ice melts by absorbing heat — 334 joules per gram — and hot coffee has plenty to give. A double espresso of about 36 g, landing at around 70 °C, can melt at most about 31 g of ice on its way to freezing, so it ends up roughly half coffee and half meltwater: still about 5% dissolved coffee, far stronger than filter coffee. A 100 ml cup of ordinary filter coffee at about 80 °C, by contrast, can melt up to about 100 g of ice and finish at roughly half its strength. That is why the recipe calls for espresso or double-strength coffee.

The lemon works through its peel. The fragrance of a lemon is in its peel oil, which is mostly limonene, a compound with a fresh, sweet citrus aroma. Twisting a strip of peel over the glass sprays those oils across the surface, adding scent without much sourness. The juice adds citric acid, and coffee is already mildly acidic, so a little goes a long way — the coffee acidity guide has the figures.

The sugar matters more cold than hot. Cold dulls sweetness, as the iced latte guide explains, so a cold coffee needs a little more sugar than a hot one to taste equally sweet — and it must be dissolved while the coffee is still hot.

Where it came from

The name comes from Mazagran, a fortress near the coastal town of Mostaganem in north-western Algeria, which passed to France under the Treaty of Tafna in 1837. In early February 1840, during the French conquest of Algeria, a garrison of 123 French light infantrymen held the fort against a far larger force of Abdelkader's troops — an episode later commemorated in paintings of "the defence of Mazagran" and in the name of a Paris street, the rue de Mazagran.

Two closely related stories connect the place to the drink. In one, French colonial troops at the fortress drank a beverage of coffee syrup and cold water. In the other, soldiers during the 1840 siege had no milk or brandy for their coffee, cut it with water instead, and drank it cold against the heat. Either way, according to the account Wikipedia draws from William Ukers' 1922 history All About Coffee, returning soldiers asked Paris cafés for coffee served the same way, in tall glasses, and the drink became known as café mazagran. It has been called "the original iced coffee".

Mazagran around the world

The drink travelled and changed:

• Portugal — strong coffee or espresso over ice with lemon, often sweetened with sugar syrup, sometimes with mint and rum. Wikipedia describes it as Portuguese iced coffee.
• Austria — served with an ice cube and laced with rum or maraschino, and traditionally downed in one gulp.
• Catalonia and Valencia — café del temps (Catalan) or café del tiempo (Spanish), "weather coffee": coffee poured over ice with a strip of lemon peel.
• France — the original: sweet, strong coffee topped up with cold water, served in a tall glass. A type of Algerian cup used for coffee also carries the name mazagran.

With rum: what is in the glass

The rum version is a gentle cocktail. With a 40% rum, a 25 ml measure contains about 10 ml of pure alcohol — exactly one UK unit, which the NHS defines as 10 ml. That is about 7.9 g of alcohol, or a little over half a US standard drink, which the NIAAA sets at 14 g.

The coffee brings the caffeine: about 76 mg in a 36 g double espresso at the USDA's average of 212 mg per 100 g. Caffeine does not reduce the effects of alcohol; the espresso martini guide explains why the combination can be misleading.

A Starbucks footnote

In the mid-1990s, Starbucks and PepsiCo developed a line of flavoured, carbonated coffee drinks called Mazagran. After a short trial in California in 1994 it was dropped, having failed to catch on. It was not a total loss: the coffee extract developed for it was later used in Starbucks' bottled Frappuccino drinks. The blended iced coffee guide tells the rest of that story.

For other ways to drink coffee cold, see the iced coffee guide, the espresso tonic and the shaken espresso.