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takyon writes:

Artisanal coffee, anyone?

Cold brew was still a relatively niche market until 2015, when Starbucks introduced the drink in a number of stores; it is now available at every one of its more than 13,000 locations in the United States, 800 of which also offer nitro. It's a coffee with both mass-market appeal and indie credibility. Today, you can find cold brew at a coffee shop where everything is meticulously crafted by hand, and at a Dunkin' Donuts.

The drink's range is expanding even more rapidly when you count canned, bottled and packaged coffees, called "ready to drink" within the industry. You can get that New Orleans-style iced coffee in a school-lunch-size milk carton, or that nitro cold brew in what looks like a beer can. Ready-to-drink, which has long been available in Whole Foods and other upscale markets, is now appearing everywhere. As of last month, you could find bottles of Slingshot Coffee, made by a small-batch company in Raleigh, N.C., at nearly 250 Target stores in the South.

What is cold brew? Essentially, it is a preparation. You steep coffee grounds in room-temperature water (which isn't "cold," strictly speaking) for six to 20 hours (depending on the recipe) to make a concentrate that can be diluted with water and served over ice. By giving up heat, you have to add time.

Cold brew is more than a slowed-down version of hot coffee; it's a noticeably different product. Hot water will bring out the acids in coffee, a characteristic that professional tasters call "brightness." Cold water doesn't but still gets the full range of mouthfeel and sweetness. The absence of acidity in cold brew is even more pronounced when compared with the iced coffee from the dark ages (of a few years ago), when it was almost always made with hot coffee that was chilled in the refrigerator. When hot coffee cools, even more acids develop, many of them unpleasantly harsh.

Cold brew coffee, and nitro.

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