When you wake up in the morning in the height of summer, and you need a hit of caffeine, the last thing you want is a hot drink. Cold coffee comes to the rescue. Not only do you get the energy boost that you need in the morning, but you also get an incredibly refreshing cold drink to wake you up and start your day off right.
While it’s possible to make a cold brew coffee with regular coffee, it’s not specifically designed for this. Whenever possible, you want to use ingredients how they were designed, especially if you want the best results possible.
Therefore, it’s important to find a specialized cold brew coffee which has been developed to give you the perfect flavor even without the addition of heat. Doing this can be challenging because boiling coffee can reduce some of the acidity and help to make even bad coffee taste great, with a cold brew the true flavor of the beans comes through.
Read on to learn about the best coffee for cold brew.
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What to Look for When Purchasing Coffee for Cold Brew
When you’re searching for a coffee to use for making a cold brew you need to pick a quality brand first and foremost. If you pick a bad brand, you’re going to get a bad product because they’ll pick inferior beans from low-quality farms.
Once you’ve identified a company that you can trust, you need to look for great packaging. Even the best coffee beans will taste terrible once they’ve been ground and then left to dry out. Great packaging is resealable, it’s thick, and it ensures that your coffee is still fresh after traveling from the other side of the world.
Typically, when you buy coffee for a cold brew, it will come already ground. To get the best coffee for cold brews, you’ll need to ensure that it has the right flavor profile for you. We all have slightly different preferences and tastes, but there are also similarities across all of us which is why great food and drink is somewhat universal.
With cold brews, the number one thing to avoid is acidity, which is typical when you use a standard coffee when you’re trying to make a cold brew.
The best coffee for cold brews will be slightly sweet, with a silky and rich flavor that still tastes like coffee even without boiling it. To ensure this flavor profile, you’ll also need to ensure that you get the right roast for you.
Most cold brews are medium to medium dark roasted to ensure that you get plenty of that rich coffee flavor. However, you can also get light and blonde cold brews although the majority of people are likely to agree that a medium or dark roast tastes far superior when prepared cold.
Finally, you might also consider the environmental impact of the coffee and whether it was grown organically or using pesticides and other chemicals. This isn’t always important to everybody, but if it is for you, then you should keep an eye on the product labels.
Best Coffee For Cold Brew: Reviews
Stone Street Cold Brew
Stone Street is one of the leaders in the cold brew market and therefore you can be confident that you’re getting a high-quality product. It also comes sealed in a 3-layer natural Kraft bag that is foil resealable to ensure that you have the freshest coffee possible even though it’s already ground.
This coffee was specially developed for making cold brew coffee and was artfully crafted to give you that coffee flavor but with minimal acidic and a balanced taste profile. With a slight sweetness but a smooth and rich taste, this is a middle-market coffee that’s going to appeal to a huge range of people.
The coffee itself is 100% Arabica, which is one of the most popular types of coffee. It’s a single origin Colombian Supremo, some of the best coffee in the world and as we mentioned at the beginning, great ingredients make a fantastic final product.
Although there are other factors to consider, the most important thing when you’re looking at a coffee is whether it tastes good or not. Stone Street Cold Brew Reserve is one of the most highly rated in the world with reviewers noting how beautiful the aroma of the beans was and how fantastic the coffee tasted.
Stone Street is a specialized roaster in Brooklyn which has been roasting coffee for a decade. They take pride in the ethical sourcing of their coffee so that you can be confident that the families who grew the beans are making a fair wage.
The experts at Stone Street have taken these beautiful beans which are grown in one of the world’s most exclusive coffee regions, and they have roasted it for a long time. The result is a dark roast, which is the absolute best type for cold brewing because it imparts the maximum flavor with minimal acidity.
Pros
- Beautiful and rich tasting coffee
- Fantastic packaging to keep the ground coffee fresh
- Beans are sourced from a quality source to create an incredible product
Cons
- More expensive than some of the competition
- Not available in different roasts
Tiny Footprint Organic Cold Brew
If the name wasn’t obvious enough, Tiny Footprint is an ecologically and environmentally friendly company that makes coffee with as little impact to the Earth as possible. In fact, their coffee is carbon negative and Earth positive. Through their work they can fun the reforestation of the cloud forests in Ecuador, to ensure that nature can thrive.
However, they do more than just save the planet. They also make an incredible coffee, sourced from Ecuador where some of the richest and most flavorful beans are found.
With this incredible product, they can heavily roast it in their German-built Probat drum roaster for that classic feeling and a perfect cold brew every time. Unlike some of the competition, you’ll find that this brew is a little sweeter with floral tones and some fruit flavor instead of a heavy coffee taste.
That’s not to say that it doesn’t have a rich coffee and cocoa kick, it’s just that it has a little more complex because of the floral and flavor tones which make it particularly interesting. While the price is slightly higher than some brands that you might come across, that’s the price that you pay for an environmentally positive product.
It should be noted that this coffee does have some factors that might make it a miss for some consumers. Notably, it’s more bitter than you might be accustomed to if you typically drink a coffee like Stone Street’s cold brew. The beans are slightly more acidic and bitter, which gives you that sharp taste that some of us love while others wince at it.
Pros
- Ecologically and environmentally friendly
- Floral and fruity notes make it interesting
- Easy to make
Cons
- Bitter and acidic taste to some
- Expensive when compared to other brands
Bizzy Organic Cold Brew
As one of the more highly recommended products, despite being relatively new when compared to other brands, it’s impossible to ignore this cold brew by Bizzy. It’s specially engineered for cold brewing by creating a coarse ground coffee that can give you a consistent and smooth taste as opposed to the bittiness you get with other brands.
You’ll also note that you can select a variety of different roasts and tastes which gives customers far more flexibility to find the flavor that they like. This includes dark and bold, smooth and sweet and light and bright.
While other brands only offer a single brew, Bizzy essentially offers three separate products, and for that reason alone they are a brand to keep an eye on. Plus, all of their beans are USDA organic, sourced ethically from Peru and Nicaragua where much of the worlds best coffee comes from.
Bizzy is similarly priced to the other two products we mentioned and therefore not the cheapest cold brew on the market, but you pay for this level of quality.
Consistently reviewers loved the flavor of the coffee because it still has a rich cocoa and coffee flavor that you look for in a cold brew but without the acidity and complexity of some coffees. Overall, Bizzy has something for everybody, and by sourcing amazing ingredients they have been able to develop not one but three tremendous coffees.
Pros
- Multiple flavor options for more flexibility
- Delicious coffee with no acidity
- Mixes smoothly for a consistent taste and feel
Cons
- Some reviewers preferred Stone Street coffee
- Inferior packaging to other brands
Conclusion: What Is The Best Coffee For Cold Brew?
All three of these coffees are amazing in their way, and because taste is so subjective, it can be hard to decide which is the best coffee for cold brews. However, we have to pick one and to do that it’s important to consider the universality of the coffee as well as the quality of the packaging and the final product.
As a result, for most people, the best coffee for making cold brews is Stone Street Cold Brew. Not only is it considered by many to be the world’s best coffee for making iced coffees, but many reviewers had also tried the other brands and came back to Stone Street.
While they don’t offer three varieties like Bizzy, the one that they do sell is superior, and because it’s so universal, it’s ideal for almost everybody. With fantastic packaging that keeps the coffee fresh, you get to experience the quality Colombian beans as if you were there and for that reason, it’s our number one pick.
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