What Is Summer’s Most Addictive Caffeine Fix?
Here are two rules to live by: (1) Never trust anyone who wears socks to bed, and (2) Always remain at least 10 feet away from an individual who doesn’t drink coffee.
Okay, we’re mostly joking about the first one, but we’re dead serious about the second. We take our coffee libations very seriously here, and when summer rolls around, all we dream about are new, inventive ways to enjoy chilled coffee beverages.
Regular iced coffee is okay, but our palates have become accustomed to something a little more nuanced. Drumroll please…Enter cold brew coffee, a wonderfully-balanced, thirst-quenching, caffeine-heavy concoction that should be your go-to, body-cooling liquid this summer.
So what exactly is cold brew? The main difference between iced coffee and cold brew is that in the latter, the ground coffee is steeped in cold water for 12-24 hours to extract that addictive coffee flavor. The ultimate takeaway is that it results in a less bitter and more textured taste than just pouring hot coffee over ice.
“The ultimate takeaway is that it results in a less bitter and more textured taste”
Our current favorite cold brew dealers are the good folks over at Birch Coffee. We reached out to Birch co-founder, Paul Schlader, and he explained how his coffee shop makes the tastiest cold brew this side of the Mason-Dixon.
Birch Coffee’s 5 Cold Brew Commandments
1. First and foremost, sourcing. Selecting a region that you know is going to perform consistently, while giving you the flavors you’re looking for is critical to a perfect cold brew.
2. The Roast, roasting for a specific brewing method is referred to as profiling. We profile all our coffees based on how we plan on brewing them. In this instance, we use a slightly more developed roast for cold brew as we want it to have a certain heaviness to the cup.
3. Brewing, our brewing partner is Broken Bow in the Hudson Valley. Their facility has been fit with tanks specifically for cold brew. We give them our brewing parameters and they use sterile water for the brewing process. Using sterile water as a baseline allows us to add certain minerals if we feel anything is missing from the cup.
4. Quality analysis. Every batch of cold brew is run though a rigorous test ensuring that it meets our quality standards. If it doesn’t, it wont be sent out to our stores and we look at why the batch fell short.
5. Never Stop Refining. We know that without our customers we’d have no-one to serve our great coffee to. So, if someone notices something is off, or doesn’t like a new recipe, we take that very seriously and are always looking for ways to improve our product.
We serve Birch Coffee at the O.N.S 71 Greene Flagship. Stop by for a cup.
Follow Birch on IG here.
If you liked this story, check out more in our Urban Transplants issue.
