How to Make a Mazagran: Sweet Iced Coffee with Water and Lemon

What goes into a mazagran?

Five things, one glass of roughly 250 ml. The proportions are a working recipe rather than a canonical one: no authoritative version exists, and published quantities differ a good deal from one writer to the next.

• 2 espressos (about 60 ml, one double), freshly pulled
• 1 to 2 teaspoons of sugar (5 to 10 g)
• 60 ml cold water
• 15 ml fresh lemon juice (one tablespoon), plus a slice or twist of peel
• 5 or 6 ice cubes
• Optional: a mint leaf, or 1 to 2 cl of rum or maraschino for the Austrian style (alcoholic, adults only)

Any way of producing concentrated coffee will do, whether an espresso machine, a moka pot or a strong filter brew. Ice and water will thin the drink out, so a timid cup of coffee simply vanishes.

How do you make a mazagran, step by step?

There is no shaker and no foam to build, which sets it apart from a freddo. Order and temperature carry the whole recipe.

1. Fill a tall glass with ice. Add 5 or 6 ice cubes to a tall, narrow glass until it is about two thirds full. Squeeze the lemon only when you need it.
2. Pull the espresso. Extract roughly 60 ml in 25 to 30 seconds. Strong moka pot coffee or a concentrated filter brew are fair substitutes.
3. Sweeten while hot. Stir in 1 to 2 teaspoons of sugar (5 to 10 g) while the coffee is still steaming. Cold coffee will not take sugar properly.
4. Stretch with cold water. Add 60 ml of cold water and stir. The coffee softens, cools a little and keeps the ice from collapsing too soon.
5. Pour onto the ice. Pour the coffee over the cubes, not onto bare glass. It cools immediately and the glass is not shocked.
6. Add the lemon. Stir in 15 ml of fresh juice and taste. Nudge it up or down by 5 ml at a time.
7. Dress and drink. Add a slice or twist of lemon peel, a mint leaf if you fancy one, a straw, and drink it while it is cold.

Why lemon in coffee, and how much is too much?

It sounds odd until you taste it. Lemon sharpens the coffee's own acidity and hides some of its bitterness, while sugar softens both. The three pull against one another, and the glass is balanced when none of them wins. Begin with 15 ml. If the drink turns sour, you went too far; if it tastes flat, add 5 ml.

A medium to dark roast usually stands up to the lemon. A very pale, fruity coffee can tip into sharpness, in which case drop to 10 ml. That is a tasting suggestion rather than a law. Ice cannot repair a cup that was already too bitter or too sour, so read our guides to bitter coffee and sour coffee first, and think about your water, which makes up half of what you drink.

Is the mazagran really the original iced coffee? The Algerian story weighed

Mazagran is a locality in Mostaganem Province, north-western Algeria. In early February 1840, 123 French light infantrymen under Captain Lelièvre held a small fort there for three or four days against a force made up mostly of cavalry. French estimates of the attackers at the time ran from ten to twenty thousand; later analysis puts the number far lower. French losses are given as three killed and sixteen wounded. That much is military history.

The coffee comes in through a tradition: the besieged, short of supplies, supposedly could no longer take their coffee strong and laced with brandy, and drank it watered down; the phrase "café comme à Mazagran" then shrank to one word. Two rival accounts exist. One ties the name to the fortress itself, ceded to France by the Treaty of Tafna in 1837, with no siege involved. The other says French troops stationed in the town in the 1840s drank watered coffee cold against the heat. We found no source quoting an account from the period that describes the coffee, so the label "original iced coffee" stays a label.

What the record does show is a change of meaning. French Wikipedia traces the earliest press uses to the early 1860s, for cold coffee mixed with soda water in waiters' slang, and the Académie française lists the drink as an old sense ("café servi dans un verre, et non dans une tasse") beside the modern one, a tall stemmed cup in porcelain or earthenware.

Which drinks share the name, from Lisbon to Vienna?

Portugal writes it mazagrã: espresso over ice with lemon, sometimes mint, sometimes rum. Austria's Mazagran is closer to a short drink for adults, with an ice cube, rum or maraschino and no lemon, and is drunk in one go; one specialist reference lists sweetened, cooled black coffee with 10 to 20 ml of cognac or maraschino. In Catalonia and Valencia the café del temps (café del tiempo in Spanish) combines coffee, ice and lemon peel. A footnote from the business world: Starbucks and PepsiCo brought out a carbonated Mazagran in 1994 and dropped it for lack of buyers.

If cold coffee is your theme, move on to the freddo espresso, iced espresso at home, the espresso tonic, or our comparison of cold brew and iced coffee.

What goes wrong most often?

• Sugar stirred in last. It sinks and the first sip is bitter, the last one syrup.
• A timid coffee. After water and ice nothing is left. Use a proper double.
• Heavy-handed lemon. More than 20 ml per glass drowns the coffee.
• Boiling coffee onto dry cold glass. Risky for thin glass. Pour over the ice.
• Small wet ice. It melts quickly and waters everything down. Go for thick cubes.

Frequently asked questions about the mazagran

Sources

Origin, timeline and variants checked against the following sources (accessed 5 October 2026):

• Wikipedia, Mazagran (drink)
• Wikipedia, Battle of Mazagran
• Wikipédia, Mazagran (boisson)
• Wikipédia, Mazagran (récipient)
• Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, entry "mazagran"
• Wikipédia em português, Mazagran
• Lebensmittellexikon, Mazagran (Kaffeezubereitungen)