STiR coffee and tea magazine

30 STiR coffee and tea / Issue 4, 2018 (August / September) W By Dan Shryock Warming Up to Cold Brew American consumers have discovered cold brew coffee and are showing their excitement with significant sales growth hen a local water emergency in Salem, Ore., recently made it impossible for baristas to serve coffee hot they turned to the only item available – cold brew coffee. Fresh batches of cold coffee were steeped daily using bottled water. The result: Independent shops and eight Starbucks outlets introduced this city of 167,000 people to a new way to drink coffee. Coffee drinkers loved it. Customers were experiencing cold brew for the first time, the manager at one local Starbucks said, adding that many who discovered the drink early in the water crisis regularly returned for more. A water shortage is not a textbook marketing strategy for introducing new prod- ucts, but the incident in Oregon illustrates a US phenomenon: Consumers are willing to try and continue to buy cold brew coffee. "People are definitely changing their taste for coffee and willing to accept a bev- erage they would not have had otherwise," said John McClafferty, president of Cof- feeWorks, Inc., a manufacturer of cold brewed coffee equipment. "Preferences are changing. Now that they've been exposed to it and understand the better flavor profile that can be presented in cold brew, there's going to be a continuing shift. "We're still in the infancy of cold brew." By the numbers Sales numbers support McClafferty's view. A 2018 report by the National Coffee As- sociation (NCA) looked at coffee drinking trends across the United States. That study showed an 11% increase in cold brew consumption. One in 10 people surveyed drank a cold brew coffee in the past week, the study showed. Overall, nearly a quarter of all surveyed consumed a cold brew in the past year. (Cold brew is defined in this study as a drink "made by steeping coffee in cold water for several hours." Traditional iced coffee was not included.) illycaffé air system pours flat cold brew or air-infused cold brew from the same tap utilizing a single cold brew formula based on its well-known blend Royal Cup cold brew bottle filling line

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