How Long Does Cold Brew Last? Why Cold Brew Coffee Tastes Better and Is Healthier

You have probably already fallen in love with cold brew coffee, and if so, you may be thinking about making your own iced coffee at home. With so many cold brew recipes online today, plenty of coffee beginners have been left confused, and a number of myths about cold brew have taken hold. If you want to clear them up, read on: FrontStreet Coffee will show you how it is made, how it tastes, and why it is different.

What is Cold Brew Coffee?

As the name suggests, cold brew is cold coffee made by steeping grounds from coffee beans in cold water, ideally filtered water. Traditional hot coffee brewing uses hot water to accelerate extraction, which is why cold brew takes much longer. The slower, gentler extraction has a profound effect on the final flavor: cold water extracts fewer of the fatty oils and acids than hot water does, so the cup is less bitter and its sweeter, more floral notes are free to stand out.

Put the coffee and water together in a container and let it steep for over 24 hours so the flavor compounds transfer into the cold water, usually in the refrigerator to control temperature. You can also use a cold drip or cold brew coffee maker. The optimal cold brew ratio of coffee to water is generally considered to be between 1:7 and 1:8, though you can experiment to find the recipe that suits you and try a variety of beans.

Why Does Cold Brew Coffee Taste Better?

Cold water pulls less of the fatty oils and acids from coffee, which means the result is less acidic and less bitter than hot coffee. It is estimated that this produces coffee with about one-third the acid content of hot coffee.

That lets the natural sweeter and more floral notes come forward, since they are no longer masked by the acids, bitterness and sour flavors extracted during hot brewing, and the coffee ends up tasting sweeter. When you are choosing beans for cold brew, though, it helps to keep this difference in cold water extraction in mind.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Because cold extraction favors floral and fruit notes while muting woody and roast tones, the beans that shine here tend to be light-to-medium roasts. FrontStreet Coffee Strawberry Candy is a good example: it blends Panama Geisha, which brings refined rose and orange notes, with Costa Rica honey-processed coffee that contributes grape, dried blueberry and strawberry-candy sweetness, so the cold brew is sweet and tart with a lively, lifted flavor, and if you let it settle and ferment gently it takes on a fruit-wine texture.

If you want florals front and center, FrontStreet Coffee Natural Flower Queen comes from Ethiopia, where sun-drying lets the beans absorb sweetness from the fruit and skin; brewed cold, it shows magnolia, creamy strawberry, dried mango, guava and black tea. For a juice-forward glass, FrontStreet Coffee Kenya Cherry Tomato is grown in Kenya's Sika area on the SL28 and SL34 varieties and put through the region's distinctive 72-hour double wash, then lightly roasted so the cherry tomato, snow pear, black plum and smoked plum acidity comes through fully, with low bitterness and a long, clean finish. FrontStreet Coffee Yirgacheffe Gedeb Cooperative, a washed Ethiopian coffee with bright, well-balanced sweet-tart character, is a versatile and affordable choice for cold brew too.

Since cold brew uses more coffee than a pour-over, it pays to build in value. Rather than brewing only an expensive lot, you can blend: many drinkers love the passion fruit, grape, apricot and dried-fruit complexity of FrontStreet Coffee Colombia Sidra but find it costly, so pairing it 1:2 with FrontStreet Coffee Costa Rica Tarrazu keeps FrontStreet Coffee Sidra's fruit and floral notes while adding the clean citrus acidity of the Tarrazu, and improves the value of the batch. Whatever you choose, steep it cold for over 24 hours at a ratio of 1:7 to 1:8, then filter and refrigerate; the low-acid, sweet result is exactly what makes cold brew worth the wait.