Caffeination Cascadia is a weekly column by Brett Konen featuring the coffees, cafés, products and people that make Northwest coffee what it is today. Grab a mug, pour a cup, and start your Monday off with a review of what’s new in – quite possibly – the greatest coffee region in the world.
The Coolest Coffees: Summer Brews from Cold to Iced
The debate comes up every summer, and the question is how best to brew iced coffee. Shall we do it hot, cascading straight onto ice cubes? Let it steep overnight in cold water, or string it in droplets through a towering foreign contraption?
As reported by T Magazine, coffee industry powerhouses divide themselves into two camps, and such trailblazers as Intelligentsia (Chicago) and Blue Bottle (New York) would pit their cold brews against ice brews from the likes of Counter Culture (Durham, N.C.) and Ritual (San Francisco). But where do PNW coffee players fall on the scale?
Leading the Northwest cold brew (cold press, toddy) charge is arguably the foremost force in the iced coffee industry: Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Portland’s prodigious dealers of darkly sweet and intense bottled cold brew “stubbies.” Steeping the coffee grounds in cool water for 12 to 24 hours extracts chocolatey, earthy flavors without drawing the acidity that hot water brings out—the result is a rich, smooth brew, which you should hurry out and grab if you haven’t tried it already.
In Stumptown’s cold-brew footsteps follows the vast majority of the Portlandian guard: Courier, Coava and Extracto all exclusively offer cold-brewed coffee. So do Seattle cafés Victrola, Fuel and Analog, and Tacoma roaster Bluebeard. Seattle-based Caffe Vita, besides its standard cold brewed coffee, offers Kyoto-style cold-brew drawn from a meticulous brew tower at an approximate rate of a drop per second. Over in Idaho, The Crux offers its house-made cold brew as well as the Stumptown stubbies.
Meanwhile, Japanese-style ice brew—not to be confused with Kyoto, and designed to capture the bright acidity in many specialty coffees – is more elusive: at least one barista in Portland requested a definition of the term, and met the explanation (brewing hot coffee directly onto ice) with a candid “that’s just gross.”
But as you travel north, from Boise to Portland and up through Seattle, the ice brew mentality begins to change. And by the time you reach Vancouver, ice is no longer an exception. Respected cafés Revolver and Elysian brew fine coffees over ice: Revolver uses an Aeropress, Elysian brews drip coffee, and both gush directly into an ice-filled receptacle. Elysian is one of few Northwest cafés not offering cold brew at all.
Perhaps the North-South regional shift in preference has to do with the Seattle/Portland contingent’s historic appreciation for darker roasts, which feature many of the flavors underlined in cold brew. Or maybe coffee houses serving these particularly caffeine-crazed cities meet greater iced coffee demand with the low-maintenance cold brew. In the end, as with most discrepancies, the debate over how to get the perfect iced coffee boils down to a matter of personal preference, and the only way you’ll decide what’s best is to search them out and try both. Why wait? That’s what summer’s for.
