Mazagran

A mazagran is one of the oldest iced coffees with a name: cold, sweetened coffee, diluted with water or poured over ice, served in a tall glass. It’s named after Mazagran, a French fortress in Algeria, and for decades it was a fixture of Paris cafés. Today it lives on mostly in Portugal, where it’s made with coffee, ice, sugar and lemon, sometimes with a splash of rum. Barista Magazine calls it “one of the first iced coffees ever invented”. Here’s how to make it, and what’s legend in its story.

The short version

• Cold, sweet coffee with water or ice, in a tall glass.
• In Portugal: coffee, ice, sugar, lemon, maybe rum.
• Named after a fort in French Algeria, near Mostaganem.
• Popular in Paris cafés in the 19th century.
• The siege story is legend: nobody knows what the soldiers drank.

How do you make a mazagran?

Barista Magazine’s Portuguese-style recipe:

1. Fill a glass with ice.
2. Top it with black coffee, a long espresso or filter coffee, usually sweetened.
3. Add the juice of a freshly squeezed lemon, and garnish with a slice.
4. Add a splash of rum “if it’s late in the day”.

The older French versions were simpler. William Ukers, in All About Coffee (1922), describes the mazagran as “sweetened cold coffee to which water or ice has been added”, served in tall glasses, with variants of coffee syrup with seltzer or with hot water. In Paris, he writes, it was served in a tall glass “with water to dilute it to one’s taste”, and in the south of France it meant seltzer water and cold coffee, “what Americans might call a coffee highball”.

Where does the mazagran come from?

French Algeria. Mazagran was a small fort near Mostaganem, in north-west Algeria. In February 1840, Wikipedia says, Captain Lelièvre and 122 men held it for several days against the forces of Abd al-Qadir, and the French press made it a national sensation: a copy of the fort went up on the Champs-Élysées. The drink’s connection to the fort is told in several ways:

Story	Source
French colonial troops were first served coffee syrup and cold water on marches near Mazagran, and brought the idea, in tall glasses, back to their Paris cafés	Ukers, All About Coffee (1922)
The besieged soldiers supposedly held out thanks to scalding coffee with sugar and brandy (“dit-on”, so it’s said)	Wiktionnaire
An older account quoted by Wiktionnaire: the brandy ran out, so the soldiers drank black coffee, slightly sweet and heavily diluted with water	Wiktionnaire
Unable to cut their coffee with brandy as usual, the soldiers mixed it with cold water and lemon juice	Barista Magazine, telling it as a legend

Barista Magazine says the real origin “is lost to time”, and its version, with the soldiers captured and held prisoner, doesn’t match the record of a garrison that held out. Treat all of them as legend. What’s clear is that café mazagran became fashionable in Paris: the French Wiktionary quotes 19th-century writers ordering one, and Marcel Proust in 1921 already calling it an old-fashioned drink. Wiktionnaire adds that a French manufacturer made a conical, handleless porcelain cup for it.

Why Portugal?

Barista Magazine says the mazagran eventually almost disappeared from French cafés and, “surprisingly”, began to appear in Portuguese pastry shops and cafés, with a recipe reminiscent of the original. Wikipedia describes Portuguese versions with espresso, lemon, mint and rum.

Mazagran vs other iced coffees

• Espresso tonic: espresso poured over iced tonic water.
• Caffè shakerato: espresso shaken with ice and sugar.
• Oliang: Thailand’s sweet black iced coffee.
• Greek frappé: instant coffee shaken into a foam.

Explore every drink in the iced and blended chapter.