Cold brew. It's all the rage. It is beloved, especially on warm days, by many a coffee-toting hip kid and soccer mom, but it necessarily leads to the question of whether coffee really ought to be brewed cold, what the process does to coffee, and why do people now prefer and demand this when the world got by just fine with icing hot-brewed coffee for a century or more?
SFist spoke to several professionals in the local coffee sphere to extract their thoughts and opinions on the matter. But first, I begin with Nick Cho of Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters in Cow Hollow, who let it all spill out about cold brew in an interview with San Francisco Magazine this month. Cho says cold brew, which is often made by letting coffee steep in room temperature water for lengthy periods of time and then filtering out the grounds, has an astringent "old coffee" taste. "I’m not saying people shouldn’t drink cold brew coffee. I’m just saying it’s not good," he says.
Sidebar: Cho and partner (in business and in life) Trish Rothgeb are opening a second cafe on Mission Street this fall (exact location TBA), and they are both cult figures and heroes in the national coffee industry. Cho is well known as a contrarian, and Rothgeb is famous for having coined the term "third-wave coffee," the moniker that is now attached to all the artisanal roasteries and coffee shops that arose after the "second wave" of US coffee consumption that came with the rise of companies like Starbucks and Peet's the first wave being Maxwell House and Hills Bros. and the like.
Cho argues further to SF Mag that for all the acidity-loving third-wave roasters who roast things so lightly these days that "it's going to knock your teeth out," cold brew should be antithetical. He explains that "by its very nature, the drawn-out process of making cold brew means that certain acids in the coffee wind up breaking down," leaving the final product too bitter, and necessitating milk and sugar to cover it up.
To counter that, Ritual Roasters founder Eileen Hassi Rinaldi says she was "VERY skeptical" about cold brew when she first heard about it over a decade ago, but she found when her team first started doing cold brew (way ahead of the curve in 2005) that it can have "a super clean, crisp flavor," in contrast to the "funky" flavor she finds in hot-brewed coffee that's been chilled. "That crispness is what won me over," she says. "It’s what you want on a day that’s too hot for hot coffee." She says they've tweaked the recipe for their cold brew over the years, and notes that they've added the slightly carbonated nitro cold brew on tap at two of their locations, Valencia Street and Napa. And Rinaldi adds that as she was heading off to Burning Man this week she was packing a couple of growlers of Ritual cold brew for the playa.
Rinaldi acknowledges, though, that as cold brew has exploded in popularity, "there’s a huge range of quality" out there, and that could account for some of the backlash from people like Cho.
Shannon Amitin, formerly a roaster at Blue Bottle who now works as Lead Beverage Trainer for La Boulangerie de San Francisco, tells SFist "I love cold brew," and echoes Rinaldi's thoughts on its clean and crisp flavor.
SFist also spoke to Four Barrel barista Bobby Sanchez who says "I'm not a cold coffee drinker," but he says that "people who love it go crazy." Four Barrel makes a point of marketing their "Not-Cold Brew" which is extracted hot and then immediately cooled "way down without the intrusion of oxygen and other funky stuff."
"I think no one puts a lot of love into cold brew," says Sanchez. "As a barista it's always been a gross process. Toddies. Wool filters. Cloth bags. [It] Never seemed super appealing." Obviously this is not how Four Barrel does it, and Sanchez adds that other coffee shops seem to use lower quality or "aged-out" beans to make cold brew, which results in a lesser quality product.
So, whether you're on Cho's side of this debate, or whether you want to try a few of these methods out for yourself, we can chalk this up to yet another first-world argument that can be left up to the coffee cognoscenti to sort out.
As he tells SF Mag, "Coffee is so amazing a thing that you can fuck it up 12,000 different ways, and people will line up every morning. Even if we mess it up, there’s something that people still like about it."
Previously: Blue Bottle Blocked From Opening In The Lower Haight Amid Neighborhood Revolt
