A Drink Best Served Cold
While coffee’s origins were hot, black, and bitter; its cold counterpart is the superior version of this magic elixir.
I wax poetic about coffee… a lot. Its become my new obsession. So much so that I even started a journal chronicling each new coffee I try. (We can revisit this unique version of my obsessive-compulsive disorder another time.) I just really enjoy talking about coffee: what’s good, what’s bad, and how and why it came to be that way. But it wasn’t always like this. For a long time, coffee was one of the most vile and disgusting things mankind had ever invented. I’m talking about the hot, bitter, pond scum you find in most gas stations and convenience stores. It was a desperate drink for desperate people pulling an all-nighter in college or a second-year med student on his 25th hour of a 48-hour shift. But why?
Why did we drink it this way for so long? Why was it so bad and yet so popular? After all, over 9 million tons of coffee beans are grown and harvested each year, sustaining over 100 million people as their primary source of income. But what started out as both a communal and life-sustaining drink all over the world for over four centuries had somehow de-evolved into a cup of black sludge that was being sold for fifty cents at your local 7–Eleven.
You know the stuff: cheap grounds from a big red tub, an almost unrecognizable burnt sludge on the bottom of the glass decanter, water straight from the tap in the bathroom, a machine that hasn’t been cleaned since the Clinton Administration. Unfortunately, this is the way a vast majority of people like me got their first taste of that unholy elixir. Suffice it to say, I was not a coffee lover from the first sip. In fact, it took me a rather long time to come around to the potential of coffee but could you blame me? I grew up in a small town in rural Michigan. My options were very limited. But by some miracle, one day, my family and I decided to check out the newest chain that came to our neck of the woods. It was called STARBUCKS and they served iced coffee. ICED COFFEE?!
Coffee could be cold?! *echoes into infinity as birds fly off in the distance* I’m talking iced coffee! Cold brew! Nitro cold brew! Cold-pressed espresso! It was like a lightning bolt had struck me. What genius came up with such a thing? What merciful God granted us poor, wretched mortals this treasure? At it turns out it was the Japanese with a little help from the Dutch sometime in the 1600s. Dutch Traders would boil down coffee into a concentrate and store it aboard ships in vats: no heating required. As flames inside wooden ships were generally frowned upon, this premade coffee concoction could be enjoyed sans fire. Though I’m sure it wasn’t the tastiest stuff in the world and could probably double as an engine degreaser. However, the Japanese got hooked on this Dutch coffee and would soon put their own spin on the heatless brewing methods thus ‘Kyoto Style’ iced coffee was born (but more on this later). For over 300 years, cold coffees spread across the globe in hundreds of different variations and permutations from the Cuban Cafe Con Leche to Brazil’s Mocha Cola to the Vietnamese Iced Coffee to Czechia’s Ledova Kava and the list goes on and on. It wasn’t until the mid-90s that cold coffees really took off in the U.S. and as in my case as well, Starbucks was to blame.
Or perhaps thank? Say what you will about the coffee conglomerate but Starbucks transformed coffee culture in America forever. While they certainly didn’t invent the iced coffee, they did make it more accessible to more people than any chain that had come before it. There’s a joke about a Starbucks being on every street corner but when my podunk town has a Starbucks then you know those things were everywhere. Suddenly, for the first time, the cool, refreshing smooth alternative to the “hot cup of joe” transcended the rare locally-owned cafe or hipster coffee bar and into the cup holders of rural Americans. My gateway drug so to speak was those Frappa-sugar-abominations that were more milkshake than coffee drink. But it taught me that coffee could be smooth, sweet, refreshing… and even beautiful. I mean, just look at how those pure white ribbons of cream dance and mix in the cold, pure blackness of the cold brew. It’s simply magical.
So let this be my love letter to cold coffee, the first of many to come. There is so much left to experience and explore and talk about when it comes to cold coffees. This is not the end, it is only the beginning.
Sip well my friends,
Jacob
