My coffee is cold
A brewing heat proves it’s a contender when it comes to taste - By Jon Bonné
- MSNBC
1/18/2006
The notion of cold-brewed coffee sounded to us, frankly, weird.
After all, heat seems intrinsic to the coffee process.
Why would you possibly want to leave grounds soaking for half a day in an ugly
plastic pitcher, like so much Kool-Aid? There's only one possible reason we
were willing to try the Toddy coffee system, one of a handful of cold-brew
options available: It works.
Really, really well.
The more you think about it, the
more clear it becomes that hot-brewed coffee is by no means
a culinary dictate. I personally gave up drip coffee
for espresso years ago, finding that filtration brought too
little flavor and too much caffeine into the mix.
Others find regular coffee too acidic.
Of the estimated 54 million Americans who suffer heartburn,
according to the National Heartburn Alliance, three-quarters
say it can be caused by beverages.
Cold-brew systems largely solve
these problems, which may be why Toddy claims 20 to 30 percent
of its customers are coffee lovers who find regular brews too
much to stomach.
No heat, no plug
It's not an immediately comfortable transition. The technology
is profoundly low-tech: a plastic pitcher with a fabric filter,
sitting atop a carafe that catches the finished product.
No electricity needed, just gravity, a pound of ground beans
and nine cups of cold water. That and 10 to 12 hours steeping
time.
"We live in a culture that
almost demands something be complicated," says Brett Holmes,
a partner in Houston-based Toddy Products. "It's got to
have a plug."
The resulting concentrate is strong
stuff. Toddy recommends three parts of either hot or cold water
to one part concentrate, depending on how you like your coffee,
not unlike an Americano.
During a two-week test in the MSNBC.com
newsroom, the 3-to-1 ratio was rarely used, given our preference
for maximum coffee in minimum time. My own fave was 1-to-1
with cold nonfat milk.
As it turns out, cold brew is familiar
to the caffeinated elite. Many die-hard coffee fiends
swear by systems like Toddy, which retails for $35, or the
similar Filtron. Seattle's Best Coffee fessed up earlier this
month that they have for years used industrial-sized Toddys
to brew concentrate for cold coffee drinks, and will now sell
Toddy systems in their stores.
None other than Seattle's Best founder
Jim Stewart brought Toddys into the chain's back rooms because
they could turn out flavorful coffee without astringent or
chemical qualities. Even after the coffee chain was bought
by java megalith Starbucks, it opted to keep its own brewing
traditions, including the Toddy.
"We're not just trying to make
up another of what everybody else is doing," says Shannon
Jones, Seattle's Best's director of field marketing.
Breaking the rules
The more you think about cold brew's weirdness, the less weird
it seems. After all, coffee has been around since before
1000 A.D., depending on whose version of history you believe,
yet it was initially thought to have been eaten as a berry,
not brewed.
Who decided on the drip method anyway? Prior to the early 1700s,
when the Europeans developed a rudimentary coffee filter known
as a biggins, coffee grounds were usually left in the brew. It
wasn't until 1908 that a German housewife named Melitta Bentz
devised a paper filter for drip.
Even the precise espresso process
-- now a backbone of coffee consumption -- wasn't engineered
until 1901. So why should the world be governed by the laws
of Mr. Coffee?
"I can serve hot or cold coffee
at the same time, and I can serve a large group without standing
in the kitchen for a good 30 minutes pouring hot water through
a drip filter," says Toddy fan Kristin Yamaguchi, who
first bought one to conserve space in her tiny Yokohama, Japan,
kitchen.
Yamaguchi became an instant convert.
While she prefers coffee cold, she not only enjoys hot Toddy
but unlike regular coffee, can drink it later in the day and
without food.
Four decades ago, a similar rethinking
of coffee norms prompted the creation of the Toddy, due to
sell its one millionth unit this fall.
In 1964, a newly graduated chemical
engineer named Todd Simpson, ordered coffee in a small cafe
in Guatemala. He received a small carafe of cool concentrate
and some boiling water, which set him wondering whether his
mother -- who couldn't otherwise stomach coffee -- might be
able to enjoy the cold stuff. She could, he devised a formal
brewing device and the Toddy business was born.
Smoother on the
stomach
Though coffee aficionados have murmured about it for the past
30 years, Holmes and his former college roommate, Strother
Simpson -- Todd's son -- now hope to take their contraption
to the big leagues, including a marketing campaign, a redesign
of the plastic pitcher and a line of ready-to-mix bottled coffee
and tea concentrates. (As many Southerners will attest, tea
can be cold-brewed, too.)
Where cold brew truly comes from is a total mystery.
The Simpsons believe it may be an ancient Peruvian
method, and coffee concentrates first showed up in
19th-century America. Another theory traces it back
to Java. The trail seems to stop there.
What's apparent, though, in Toddy's
independent lab tests and in our own less scientific tastings,
is that cold concentrate contains far less acid and a good
bit less caffeine.
Toddy claims to brew up two-thirds
less caffeine than regular coffee; in a side-by side test using
Starbucks' regular blend, the Toddy version had a pH of 6.31
and 40 mg of caffeine per 100 grams of coffee, while Starbucks
store-brewed clocked in at a pH of 5.48 and 61 mg of caffeine.
(Lower numbers on the pH scale, which is measured logarithmically,
denote more acid.)
In a beverage near
you
Not all our newsroom testers were convinced.
One enjoyed the taste but thought the mechanics of cold brewing
were a bit much. (He compared it to a fondue pot.) Another
suggested coffee fans who cherish a full dose of acid and caffeine
might be turned off. There were inevitable comparisons to instant
coffee.
Still, a carafe of concentrate remained fresh over a week, with
no dulling of flavor. It even avoided absorbing the tastes of
the newsroom refrigerator's other contents -- possibly the first
beverage ever to avoid that fate.
Potential uses kept emerging. Camping
trips. Coffee ice cubes for undiluted iced lattes.
Seattle's Best recently announced
it will take over café operations at more than 400 Borders
locations, so Toddy concentrate could soon appear across the
nation -- though you might not know you're drinking some. (Seattle's
Best's Naughty Toddy and JavaKula iced drinks, among others,
feature it.)
I'm likely to stick to my espresso
machine at home. But cold-brewed coffee may just become a regular
work habit, and not just because the always-overheated communal
coffee pot fills me with dread.
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