Cold brew changed the coffee business

Demand expected to rise in summer months as temperatures soar.

Summer officially starts this year on June 21, but that’s only the solstice, the day when the sun reaches its highest position in the sky. Down on street level, summer really begins on the first humid, sun-streaked day, when even the thought of sipping a hot cup of coffee is too much to bear. It’s as if, just as birds know instinctively when to migrate, we wake up one bright morning and agree that it’s iced coffee season.

Gregory Zamfotis, the owner of Gregorys Coffee in New York City, which is about to open its 24th location, starts tracking the temperature in early May. “I literally look at the weather forecast and send emails to my store leaders,” he said. Zamfotis estimated that 75 percent of the coffee he sells is hot and 25 percent is iced for most of the year. With the start of iced coffee season, those numbers flip, and 65 percent of the coffee he sells is iced.

That change can happen overnight. “You don’t want to get caught and run out by 9 a.m.,” he said.

The danger of running out is real. All of the iced coffee at Gregorys Coffee is cold-brewed, a process that takes 12 hours and yields a drink often described as smooth, round and lush. Zamfotis estimates that he sells 10,000 servings per day at the peak of the season.

There’s no way to rush cold brew. If you’re running a coffee shop, you need to anticipate demand. Every year, that demand is increasing: The United States is becoming a cold-brew nation.

In the past, coffee sales lagged during the summer and rose sharply during the holiday season. But cold brew now drives a surge in demand during warmer months, too, far more so than other iced coffee drinks. Coffee sales spike when the mercury rises. Cold brew is also attracting an entirely new audience for coffee: millennials, many of whom are making it their drink of choice.

“It’s pheromonal,” said James Freeman, the founder of Blue Bottle Coffee. “And the feedback loop encourages more iced orders — watching other people order iced coffee inculcates the desire.” It’s the coffee version of “I’ll have

what she’s having.”

What was once a regional curiosity largely limited to New Orleans and the South is now found throughout the country. The shift started about 10 years ago, when cold brew was adopted by innovative coffee shops like Blue Bottle (which sells what it calls New Orleans-style iced coffee, a milky cold brew flavored with chicory) and Stumptown Coffee Roasters (which sells nitro cold brew, a coffee infused with nitrogen so that it’s slightly fizzy, with the thick, creamy head of a good stout).

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-lunchsize 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 smallbatch company in Raleigh, North Carolina, 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 tapped like beer. The kegs have a shelf life of 90 days.

Perhaps more important for the everyday drinker, cold brew is a perfect companion for milk. Rather than battling the aggressive acids in chilled hot coffee, the dairy tastes full and rich. Cold brew “is a sweet, round coffee milkshake without the sugar,” said Andrew Linnemann, a vice president on the Starbucks global coffee team. “Especially if you add a splash of milk.”

The pastry chef Dominique Ansel was captivated by the combination of cold brew and dairy, so much so that he developed a cold-brew soft-serve ice cream that he now sells at Dominique Ansel Kitchen in Manhattan. “You have all the floral notes of coffee without any of acidity,” Ansel said, noting that it’s similar to the cold tea immersions he made when he worked at the famed Fauchon bakery in Paris.

But cold brew has a poor reputation in some coffee circles. According to those critics, cold brew’s selling point — its absence of acidity — is a flaw. The best coffees in the world, the ones grown at high altitudes, command higher prices specifically because of their complex acidity: Brightness is a virtue. Why give up one of the defining characteristics of a great coffee?

In addition, detractors say, the long exposure to air during the steeping process can leave cold-brewed coffees tasting flat and oxidized. Some coffee shops treat cold brew as a dumping ground for lesser coffees — old beans that are losing their flavor or uninteresting beans that couldn’t stand up to conventional brewing.

“The main argument is the lack of acidity, that it’s very one-note,” said Jenny Bonchak, who started Slingshot Coffee Co. with her husband, Jonathan. “But that’s not how we want to drink coffee. We wanted something that was balanced, and that was going to be juicy.”

Bonchak uses high-quality beans from Counter Culture Coffee, a roaster based in Durham, North Carolina, and Slingshot Coffee is praised by the kind of coffee nerds who usually wouldn’t touch cold brew with a 10-foot straw.

At All Day, a coffee shop in Miami that’s on the must-visit list of coffee fanatics, cold brew is the foundation of the menu. Camila Ramos, one of the owners, uses beans from Ruby Coffee Roasters in Nelsonville, Wisconsin, for standard cold brew, and beans from Toby’s Estate in Brooklyn for nitro. There’s cold brew in the shop’s milky Thai-style iced coffee, and in the fizzy and tart drink called Our Sweetheart #4, an exquisite mixture of coffee and rosemary limeade.

Ramos wasn’t always convinced by cold brew. Her conversion began when she was a competitive barista vying for a national championship, and she started experimenting with the process. “I often describe it as a ‘yellow’ flavor, weird, underextracted,” she said. “I had to challenge myself.”

She has since developed an exacting procedure for making cold-brew concentrate at All Day. The essential structure is the same as other recipes — coffee, water and time — but she details how long the beans should rest after roasting (21 to 28 days), how to agitate the coffee grounds in the water (with a wide spoon for five minutes), and which filter to use (the paper filter bags manufactured by Toddy).

During Miami’s ninemonth summer, it’s her best seller — remarkable for a town that loves its cafecito-style espresso. “From a logistical standpoint, we can get cold brew out the door in 10 seconds,” Ramos said. “If you want a coffee and you want it quick, cold brew is the answer.”

One of the first major projects, construction of massive canopies over the domestic terminal curbside areas, requires the temporary relocation of Delta Air Lines’ curbside check-in and soon, the recently added Uber and Lyft rideshare pickup areas.

The biggest challenge with the canopy project is making room for massive piers that will hold up the structures, said Frank Rucker, assistant general manager for planning and development at Hartsfield-Jackson.

Parts of the garage must be sawed off to make room instead of being demolished with a wrecking ball, to avoid damaging the existing parking garages until they are ready to be torn down and rebuilt in phases.

All of the work must be done with tens of thousands of passengers moving through the area on a daily basis. That means much of the work is done in phases, with some completed at night when operations are less busy.

“It’s quite a sequence,” Rucker said.

Another upcoming big project, developing a hotel and commercial development next to the terminal, calls for relocation of some parking, limo and shuttle

“Given that there’s no available room there, we have to start moving things,” Hartsfield-Jackson planning director Tom Nissalke said.

The Concourse T extension will also take up space used by a Delta ground handling equipment shop, which will have to be relocated to where the current park-ride reserve lot is.

That and the construction of a new end-around taxiway will require the closure of the park-ride reserve lot and another park-ride lot.

The end-around taxiway on the south side of the airfield will require about 5,300 parking spots to be demolished, and will also require FAA equipment to be relocated and airport roads to be closed or relocated.

The closure of the parkride reserve lot due to the end-around taxiway, the closure of the West economy parking lot due to the InterContinental hotel, and closure of the North economy parking due to the Concourse T extension means the airport will lose thousands of parking spaces.

In a budget briefing to the Atlanta city council, airport officials described how that is expected to drive a decrease in parking revenue. The airport is building an ATL West parking deck to help make up

The airport had considered during a 1999 master plan expanding beyond its borders to add a sixth runway, but that plan has been nixed in favor of squeezing the additional runway onto the existing airfield.

That option is more politically palatable but also depends on the advent of more precise air traffic control technology that will enable planes to be closer to each other as they take off and depart.

“Using condemnation powers is never easy to do,” Letwin said, referring to the challenge of expanding the airport’s boundaries. Doing so would “meet some stiff resistance.”

Sometimes, clearing space to build a new project requires two phases of moves — demolitions to clear space in one area of the airport, which will house relocated operations demolished to clear space for the new project.

“We have to create real estate to relocate facilities,” Nissalke said.

With the airport’s master plan extending until 2030, will there be any room left for further expansion on the airport’s increasingly crowded 4,700 acres?

“Too early to tell,” Council said.