Chilling warm brewed coffee is definitely faking it. And I presume all places selling "cold brew" is faking it so this guy is losing money by not showing off doing real cold brew with his apparatus.
I’m not talking about chilling warm brewed coffee. All you need to make cold brew coffee is soak coffee grounds in cold water. Whether that is in a mason jar or through a thousand dollar complex laboratory setup is entirely an aesthetic choice.
Put a week's worth of grounds in the bottle, screw on the filter, pour in some cold water, steep for 24h, and transfer to another bottle. If somebody wants "drip" strength they can cut it with water, hot or cold.
The way I've seen it done is with one of those massive plastic commercial kitchen lidded containers, and a softball sized teabag of coffee sold by the restaurant supply company specifically for cold brewing like this. Then they put it in the walk in for a while to steep and sell it after a certain number of hours.
It’s a market for lemons at this point. Unless you can see an expensive apparatus or observe them soaking the coffee, there’s no way to know if it’s correct, and as a customer it means it’s risky to buy if you care about the difference between refrigerated hot coffee and cold brew.
Risky to buy? It's not real estate it's a cup of coffee. And if you're worried about people faking it, just buy a $2 mason jar and make some in the fridge while you sleep.
I don't get the fascination with paying exorbitant prices and constantly complaining when it's next to zero effort to make it at home, cold or hot. And the best part is you get to choose where your beans come from, you don't have to worry about the political slant du jour of the coffee shop, and you can do it all for a fraction of the price even when using the most expensive beans.
> It’s a market for lemons at this point. Unless you can see an expensive apparatus or observe them soaking the coffee, there’s no way to know if it’s correct
Presumably the taste should tell you whether it's correct. Otherwise why care if they fake it?
Unless I'm a visiting tourist I'm likely to go back to a good coffee shop many times. Being surprised my cold brew isn't cold brew - both the caffeine content and taste are tells IMO - for one visit isn't life or death here. I just don't get it again.
Caffeine content in the cup is not a good metric. It is one of the most easily extracted compounds and is roughly equivalent across brew types. The beans themselves are a bigger variable in this regard. Even if you are using a roaster's signature blend, the bean composition of that is going to change month to month and year to year. Even beans from the same physical trees will have varying caffeine content depending on agronomic factors.
In the same cafe on the same day, the reason different drinks have noticeably different caffeine content comes down to the different doses and concentrations they end up using. E.g. 20g coffee would normally produce either a 40mL espresso or 12oz drip. So putting that 40mL espresso in a 5oz cappuccino is much more concentrated than a 8oz filter.
