Not Your Average Ice Cubes

Before moving to San Francisco, my sweetie and I lived in a charming little part of Oakland, California known as Piedmont.
One of the first things that impressed me about Piedmont was that there is an always-full coffee independent house called Gaylord's on one corner, and right on the opposite corner is a nearly-always empty Starbucks. We took a break from unpacking our belongings on a hot September day and wandered down to this Gaylord's for an iced coffee.
"Ice cubes or coffee cubes?" the woman working there asked.
"Can you repeat that?" I said, startled.
She gestured toward the ice cream freezer, in which there was an empty ice cream bucket half-full of dark brown ice cubes - cubes of frozen coffee.
"Oh my GOD!" I exclaimed. "I'll have the coffee cubes, please!"

GENIUS!!!

Since we've moved away from Gaylord's and their coffee cubes, and discovered the joy of Blue Bottle coffee, we now make our own coffee cubes at home. (I could also wax poetic about Blue Bottle's New Orleans-style iced coffee, and I will... another time.) If you like iced coffee, I highly recommend making yourself some coffee cubes. Instead of your iced coffee getting weak and watered-down as the ice melts, it gets stronger! Once you use your ice trays for coffee, though, they become stained and you cannot use them for plain water again - the ice will taste like coffee. So get two separate ones and dedicate them to your coffee cubes. Brew the coffee and let it cool a little, but don't let it sit around and get cold and stale. Pour it into your ice trays (leave a little room for expansion at the top) and refrigerate the rest of the coffee. Drink the cold coffee soon; don't let it sit around in your fridge for days. Add whatever sugar and milk you're going to add, and enjoy!