Hyderabad’s baristas are turning iced coffee into cocktail-style drinks

The mazagran getting its final look at Toops Coffee | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement Before Hyderabad’s bartenders take over with shaken or stirred drinks, another set of hands has already been at work behind a different kind of counter: the city’s baristas. The drinks now emerging from Hyderabad’s cafés make it tempting to think of them as daytime mixologists. Coffee shops have become playgrounds for flavour, cold brews and clarified concoctions marked by creativity.Iced coffees are the city’s new pick-me-ups. With the summer heat refusing to relent, coffee drinkers are gravitating towards beverages that are cold, fruity, playful and sweet, while still allowing coffee to remain the hero ingredient. These are not overloaded dessert drinks layered with ice cream, chocolate or cookies. Instead, flavoured iced coffees are essentially flavoured black coffees, pushed into more experimental territory. Iced coffees are the new pick-me ups of Hyderabad. Spiced apple brew at Karafa | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement At Toops, in Jubillee Hills, when a clarified milk iced coffee arrived at my table, I briefly thought I had been served a glass of bourbon by mistake. The first sip was teasingly salty, followed by a rounded mouthfeel with lingering notes of apple and cinnamon. It turned out to be a clarified milk apple-cinnamon iced coffee. “I still want to fine-tune it for a lighter mouthfeel,” says Sooraj Toopali, roaster, founder at Toops. “I want to present it as a daytime Old Fashioned — a caffeine version.” Mosambi Americano | Photo Credit: Prabalika M Borah The idea, he says, came from wanting to move away from the juice-and-tonic format popular in cold coffee menus. “We already have a bestseller in that category — the mazagran, a cocktail of orange juice, tonic water and cold brew, which is refreshing. I wanted to try something different.”Toops is far from alone. Across the city, cafés are proudly displaying their flavoured iced coffees, often served in whisky tumblers, stemware or layered glasses designed as much for Instagram as for consumption. But beneath the visual drama lies technique. Baristas are balancing temperature, sweetness, acidity and texture with the precision of bartenders. Their vocabulary now includes terms like “maceration”, “fat-washing” and “flavour bridging”.Consider Starbucks’s summer tamarind shikanji-inspired cold brew, or the now widely imitated cranberry coffee by Roastery Coffee House. Founder Nishant Sinha traces the drink back to experimentation. “We wanted to showcase the versatility of Indian specialty coffee,” he says. “We tried several fresh Indian juices, but the combinations didn’t work. After multiple trials, we settled on cranberry.” Valencia Orange, True Black | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement The drink began as a cold brew mixed with cranberry juice before evolving into its current format: espresso, cranberry juice and sparkling water. “As customers kept suggesting changes, we kept refining it,” Nishant adds. The coffee has since become influential enough for many cafés to introduce their own cranberry variants. Apple cinnamon cold brew at Ci Gusta | Photo Credit: Dinesh Kakollu What is happening in Hyderabad’s cafés is a renegotiation of what coffee can be. At True Black, at Jubilee Hills, founder Rohit Rao introduced Valencia orange coffee in 2022: thick orange juice layered beneath espresso.“I wanted a drink built on contrast — the brightness of orange against the earthiness of coffee,” he says. “Orange juice and coffee are favourites individually, but rarely together.” He chose Valencia oranges for their sweetness and softer acidity. “They lift the cup without overpowering it, allowing a medium roast to come through cleanly while adding balance.” Mazagran at Toops Coffee | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement Among the newer entrants gaining popularity this year are mosambi iced coffee at Coffee Sangam, ice long black at Feranoz, apple cinnamon at Ci Gusta, spiced apple brew at Karafa and the spiced cinnamon iced apple brew at Conçu.The price of flavoured iced coffee range between ₹280 and ₹350 which makes them hot sellers at coffee shops for those looking to cool off on a hot day. Some of these coffees (dairy free ice coffees) are the go-to drinks of Hyderabad’s growing vegan community.And for those looking for heat with their caffeine, Karafa’s picante-style Mandarin devil has enough spice to suggest that the real devil enjoys a shot of espresso and comes to your table with two red horns. Published - May 08, 2026 06:30 am IST