STiR coffee and tea magazine

48 STiR coffee and tea / Issue 5, 2017 (October / November) H By Dan Bolton eartland Food Group chairman and c.e.o. Ted Gelov and innovation director Ricardo Reyes knew they were onto something when their recipe for cold brew concentrate revealed the distinctive flavor notes of a good kitchen table batch brew. Cold brew is low in acid, naturally sweet and smooth without sweetener. Instead of binding with the citric, malic, acetic, and 25 other organic acids prominent in iced cof- fee, consumers adding dairy products find the taste full and rich. Hot coffee is volatile, changing flavor at different temperatures. Cold brew is stable. This makes it a perfect beverage concentrate that can be reconstituted to a full-flavored drink, ideal for cafés and foodservice. "Java House is authentic coffee brewed in small (less than 1,000 gallon) batches like craft brew," explains Gelov. "We hold true to the authentic process and make it like you would in your kitchen with a generous amount of coffee at ambient temperature," adds Reyes, v.p. global quality, research, and innovation. The 4:1 concentrate yields 20 servings per 32-oz bottle. The new brand comes in four flavors, Colombian black, frappe, vanilla frappe, and mocha frappe in either concentrate or ready-to-drink. Reyes says "establishing a close relationship with an outstanding specialty coffee roaster is key to making au- thentic cold brew coffee but it's just one part of the extensive process we follow when creating each batch. We slowly steep the coffee to perfection and do not use coffee additives or preservatives." Cold brew is one of those overnight success stories 50 years in the making. National Coffee Association (NCA) spokesman Joe De Rupo says "cold brew could be the biggest new product since single-serve in terms of its transformative im- pact on the industry." He explained that while NCA's data is not extensive "we only started tracking two years ago, penetration has grown from 8% the general public to 11% in 2017." Respondents were asked to recall what they drank in the previous week. There is a visible generational effect, he observes: "Penetration among adults aged 18-24 and those 25-39 is 16%. This falls to 8% among those aged 40-49 and is under 5% for those who are 60+" he said, citing results from the annual National Coffee Drinking Trends (NCDT) survey. The beginning of commercial cold brew in the US can be traced to the 1960s when chemist Todd Simpson invented the toddy cold brew system still in wide use. Popular in the southern U.S., it has been a regional favorite for decades but consumer accep- tance never accelerated like in Japan where Ueshima Coffee Co., Ltd. has profited since the 1970s selling canned cold brew. Commercial Cold Brew Cold brew in cartons and bottles Ted Gelov, Heartland Food c.e.o.

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