Chilled coffee makes it possible to drink a cuppa any day of the year regardless of the season. Even on the hottest day in Australia, you can stay caffeinated without worrying about breaking into a sweat. There are two main ways to get chilled coffee: iced coffee and cold brew. While they might seem similar, the processes to make them are completely different. Iced coffee is prepared with hot water like a normal coffee and then instantly chilled over ice. Cold brew is traditionally prepared by immersion in cold or room temperature water. It takes much longer to make a cold brew coffee this way as it needs to steep for up to 24 hours. Luckily there are cold brew coffee machines on the market today that speed up the process without sacrificing flavour.
Another difference is that iced coffee doesn’t stay fresh for as long and is usually drunk immediately while cold brew coffee can be stored in the fridge undiluted for up to a week. Iced coffee has the bold and acidic taste of regular hot coffee while cold brew has more muted and softer flavours. This makes it a perfect base to jazz up with different flavours and ingredients. For example, here’s a recipe for a spiced cold brew drink. Whip out your cold brew coffee maker and give it a try!
There are a handful of different ways to make cold brew coffee. The easiest (but by no means quickest) way is by putting coarsely ground coffee beans into a container and filling it with cold or room temperature water. Leave it for eight to 24 hours so the coffee beans infuse into the water. From there, you’ll use a filter such as a cloth or paper filter to separate the water and coffee beans. Since cold brew takes so long to make, it’s usually made in bulk batches and as a concentrate to store for a couple days. Having a high ratio of beans to water when making the cold brew concentrate allows you to add the final water or milk (right before serving) without making it too diluted.
A quicker way to make cold brew is by using a commercial cold brew coffee maker. As the interest and demand for cold brew has grown, it’s becoming more common to find these machines in pubs, hotels and restaurants. Nescafe offers the Nitro Cold Brew System that makes a cup of super smooth and velvety nitrogen-infused cold brew coffee in no time.
While hot coffee and chilled cocktails might have seemed like a weird mix a few years ago – you’d be hard pressed to find a drinks menu in Sydney without an espresso martini on it these days. To get around the temperature difference, pubs use cold brew coffee. Cold brew coffee also has a more subtle and muted flavour than hot coffee, which works perfectly in a drink. It provides some caffeine and hints of coffee while allowing the bartender to mix in other complementary ingredients.
Traditional methods of cold brewing coffee take hours to make, creating a bit of a disaster if you were to run out. Restaurants, hotels, and pubs are turning to cold brew coffee machines to help them better keep up with demand. Commercial machines have a simple plug-and-play design that lets you serve a spectacularly smooth cascading cold brew straight from the tap. It makes it possible to craft your own world of cocktails and mocktails with ease.
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