Nearly 500 years of tradition makes for a great tasting coffee

If you come to the Coffee Company regularly, you might well have seen a strange sort of contraption sitting off to the right of the pastry case. If you don’t know it, it seems a bit like something one might expect to find ensconced in some sort of super secret sci-fi lab. It’s a kind of crazy-looking contraption, an array of glass beakers and pipes all set into a wooden frame that’s about four and a half feet high. In fact, it’s what we use to make our Kyoto Cold Brew.

Kyoto Cold Brew is a method that dates to the early years of coffee making outside of its Ethiopian homeland. While the name would understandably lead to the conclusion that it was created in Japan, it was likely developed by 17th-century Dutch sailors! They needed a way to prepare coffee on months-long voyages. As the most common creation story goes, someone figured out that pouring cold water slowly over ground coffee beans would do the trick.

The Kyoto brewer comes with three sections: a bigger water chamber up at the top, a tube that holds coffee grounds and a filter in the middle, and last but not least, the carafe at the base where the finished coffee is collected. The brew is indeed made using cold water that’s allowed to fall, one drip at a time, over ground coffee. The low temperature and super slow extraction mean that there’s almost no oxidation of the coffee during the brewing, making for a super smooth cup that enhances a coffee’s natural fruit, takes out a lot of the bean’s bitterness, and leaves in lots of lovely caramelly notes. I drink it straight as it is, but you can add milks, syrups, and sweeteners as you do to any coffee!

Place an order for pick-up at the Coffee Company.

P.S. The Coffee Company’s decaf done in the Kyoto Cold Brew is remarkably tasty, too!

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