Cold brew coffee

Cold brew is coffee made without heat. Coarse-ground coffee sits in water at room temperature — or colder — for 12 to 24 hours, and then the grounds are filtered out.¹ Wikipedia’s own definition names it three ways that all mean the same thing: cold brew coffee, cold water extraction, or cold pressing.¹

The thing to hold onto is that cold brew is defined by temperature, not by ice. A cold brew served steaming hot is still cold brew, because the word describes how the coffee was extracted, not how it was poured. That is exactly why it is a different thing from iced coffee, which is brewed hot and then chilled.²

How it is actually made

Step	What happens
Grind	Coarse — around 1000–1200+ microns, the grind you would use for a French press or coarser1
Water	Room temperature; chilled water also works1
Time	12 to 24 hours of steeping1
Filtering	Paper filters, fine metal sieves (French-press style), or felt1
Result	A concentrate, diluted with water or milk before serving1

Everything about that list is a trade of time against heat. Hot water dissolves coffee in minutes because heat speeds up the chemistry; cold water needs a day to get to a comparable place. The coarse grind is the compensation in the other direction — over twelve-plus hours, a fine grind would keep giving up the harsh, late-arriving compounds long after you wanted it to stop. See Extraction yield for what “how much dissolved” actually means and Total dissolved solids for the strength you taste at the end.

Because the output is a concentrate rather than a finished drink, cold brew is one of the few methods where the Brew ratio is applied twice: once at brew time to make a strong base, and again at service when it gets cut with water or milk. That two-step structure is why cold brew caffeine comparisons are so slippery — the number depends entirely on how far down the café dilutes it.

It is an immersion method

Cold brew belongs to the same family as the French press and the cupping bowl: the coffee sits in the water for the whole brew and is separated at the end. That is immersion, and it is the opposite of pour-over, where water moves through the bed and leaves.

The practical consequence, which the Brew ratio note records for immersion brewing generally, is that ratio does most of the work. There is no pour to steer, no flow rate to adjust, no bloom to time. You choose a dose, a grind and a duration, then walk away for a day.

Nitro cold brew

Nitro cold brew is cold brew dispensed under nitrogen gas from a tap system borrowed from beer, which gives it a cascading pour and a soft, thick texture without any sugar or dairy.¹ It arrived in the early 2010s, and Starbucks put it into 500 locations in the summer of 2016 — the moment the format stopped being a specialty-café curiosity.¹

Stumptown Coffee Roasters is credited on this wiki as an early mover on nitro cold brew in cans, and its ready-to-drink cold brew reaching American grocery shelves at scale is part of why the whole cold coffee category grew.

Where it came from

The history runs through the Netherlands and Japan rather than through American cafés. Wikipedia states plainly that the Dutch introduced cold brew coffee to Japan, where it has been a traditional method of coffee brewing for centuries.¹ The slow-drip version — water released drop by drop through a tall glass tower over hours — is known in East Asia as Kyoto-style or Dutch coffee.¹ In Japanese the immersion version is called mizudashi, literally “water-extracted.”³

That lineage matters for reading the modern market. The Japan coffee market was drinking cold coffee, in cans and out of towers, long before Western specialty rediscovered it, in the same way the kissaten tradition had hand-brewing figured out decades before third wave cafés arrived at it.

The other cold-coffee ancestor: Mazagran

Running alongside the Japanese line is a completely separate one, out of North Africa. Mazagran is a cold, sweetened coffee drink that originated in Algeria, named after a fortress at Mostaganem on the northwest coast that was granted to France in 1837.⁴ French Foreign Legion soldiers besieged there during the 1840 war “used water in their coffee in the absence of milk or brandy and drank the beverage cold to counter the heat,” and the drink was made with coffee syrup and cold water; returning soldiers carried it back to Paris cafés as café mazagran.⁴

Mazagran matters here as a precedent, not an ancestor. It is coffee syrup cut with cold water — a hot-brewed base served cold — so by this wiki’s own definition it belongs to the iced coffee family rather than to cold extraction. This wiki’s Iced coffee note already records it as the earliest documented claim on the cold-coffee format generally.

What the popular histories get wrong

Almost every blog history of cold brew tells the same four-beat story: Kyoto in the 1600s, Dutch sailors who could not light fires at sea, Mazagran, and then Todd Simpson’s Toddy in 1960. Only the Mazagran beat survives contact with a source. The Wikipedia history that this note’s method sections rest on is strikingly short — the Dutch-to-Japan introduction and the Kyoto-style naming, and nothing else.¹ Everything past that is secondary retelling, so it is flagged below rather than stated.

To verify

“Cold brew was first documented in Kyoto in the 1600s.” The research report behind this pass records this as the single most-repeated origin claim, carried by several coffee blogs.³⁵⁶ It is contradicted by a better source: Wikipedia states that coffee first arrived in Japan via Dutch traders in 1700.⁷ A 1600s Japanese cold-brew tradition would predate coffee’s arrival in the country. This wiki’s Iced coffee note carries the same contradiction from the other direction, dating Japan’s own iced coffee custom to the 1920s.² The report’s own author flagged the date as unverified. Treat “1600s Kyoto” as unsupported, and read the defensible version as: cold brewing is a long-established Japanese tradition of unrecorded start date.

To verify

“Dutch sailors invented it because they could not light fires on ships.” Repeated across several histories: that Dutch traders carried cold coffee concentrate at sea to avoid open flame, and taught the method to Japan.³⁵⁶ No primary source appears in the report, and the report’s author declined to state it. Wikipedia confirms only the bare fact that the Dutch introduced cold brew to Japan¹ — it says nothing about ships, fire, or invention. The no-fire-at-sea detail is the kind of tidy explanation that spreads because it sounds right.

To verify

Todd Simpson, Peru, and the 1960 Toddy system. The standard modern-history beat is that Todd Simpson invented the Toddy Brewing System around 1960 after seeing cold coffee brewed in Peru, and that this is what commercialised cold brew in the United States.⁶⁸ Two blog sources, no primary. Toddy’s own website returned HTTP 403 on three attempts from this machine, so the company’s account of its own founding was not read. The Wikipedia cold brew history does not mention Toddy at all.¹ Neither the person, the year, nor the Peru trip is confirmed here.

To verify

The Cuba and New Orleans chicory line. One source in the report describes a Cuban-style cold coffee made by repeatedly saturating very fine grounds, and says chicory-laced cold brew fed into New Orleans coffee tradition.⁶ Single secondary source, no archival citation, and it sits awkwardly against the coarse-grind logic of every documented cold-brew method. Not stated as fact.

Caffeine, acidity, and what is actually known

This is where most cold brew writing goes wrong, so it is worth being precise about what is documented.

Caffeine. Wikipedia reports research finding that brewing at a lower temperature for 24 hours results in higher caffeine content, when brewed in equal volume, than 6 minutes at 98 °C (208 °F).¹ Note the qualifier — in equal volume, comparing brews, not comparing a finished café drink against another finished café drink. Once a concentrate is diluted for service, the arithmetic changes completely.

Acidity. The claim that cold brew is “less acidic” is everywhere in consumer writing and is the single most repeated selling point of the format. It is also the claim this wiki can least support — see the callout below.

Standards. There is no Specialty Coffee Association standard for cold brew. The SCA’s published standards list covers sample preparation and tasting, descriptive and affective assessment, evaluator competencies, and equipment specifications for home brewers, grinders and espresso machines — and nothing on cold extraction.⁹ Anyone citing an “SCA cold brew standard” is citing something that does not exist on the SCA’s own standards page.

To verify

The “less acidic” and “more caffeine” percentages. The research report behind this note cites a blog claiming cold brew has up to ~67% less acidity and 50–67% more caffeine per serving than iced coffee.¹⁰ No primary measurement is named behind either figure, the report’s own author flagged them as uncertain, and they come from a single secondary page summarising unspecified studies. The Wikipedia page fetched for this note makes no acidity claim at all.¹ Do not quote these percentages.

To verify

The 205 mg vs 185 mg caffeine figures. GoodRx is cited as giving 205 mg of caffeine in a 16 oz cold brew against 185 mg in a 16 oz iced coffee.¹¹ The page returned HTTP 403 when fetched from this machine, so neither number was confirmed at source. Even if accurate, these are consumer-market product values from named chains, not a property of the brewing methods — dose, grind, steep time and dilution all move them.

To verify

Concentrate strength and shelf life. KitchenAid is cited as saying cold brew concentrate holds about twice the caffeine per ounce, before dilution, as ordinary brewed coffee,¹² and a consumer blog suggests refrigerated storage for up to about two weeks.¹⁰ Neither was fetched. The shelf-life number in particular is a home-kitchen guideline from a blog, not a food-safety authority — cold brew’s low acidity has been a subject of commercial food-safety attention precisely because it does not have hot brewing’s kill step, and no primary safety source was read for this note. Do not treat “two weeks” as a professional standard.

To verify

The 1:5 concentrate ratio. This wiki’s Brew ratio note already carries a flag on this: a single brewing-calculator site puts cold brew concentrate at roughly 1:5, diluted about 1:1 at service. Unconfirmed, and cold brew recipes vary much more widely than hot ones.

Related

• Iced coffee — the other cold format, and the one cold brew is constantly confused with
• Mazagran — the 1840 Algerian cold coffee that most cold brew histories claim as an ancestor
• Brew ratio — applied twice in cold brew: once to brew the concentrate, once to dilute it
• Coffee grinding — why cold brew sits at the coarse end of every grind chart
• Extraction yield · Total dissolved solids — what a long cold steep is actually doing, and what you taste
• Pour-over brewing — the percolation method cold brew is the immersion opposite of
• AeroPress — the other immersion-style brewer on the specialty counter
• Japan coffee market · Kissaten — where Kyoto-style slow drip and canned cold coffee came from
• Stumptown Coffee Roasters · Starbucks — the roaster credited with nitro cans and the chain that made nitro national
• Third wave coffee — the movement that carried cold brew into specialty cafés
• Specialty Coffee Association — the body that has published no cold brew standard
• Coffee roasting — roast level changes what a long cold steep pulls out

Official links

• Official site — Specialty Coffee Association, Coffee Standards

Footnotes

1. Cold brew coffee — Wikipedia — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the definition, 12–24 hour steep, room-temperature water, coarse grind, filtering methods, concentrate output, the Dutch-to-Japan history, Kyoto-style/Dutch coffee naming, the 24-hour vs 98 °C caffeine finding, and nitro’s early-2010s arrival and 2016 Starbucks rollout ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶

2. Iced coffee — Wikipedia — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the hot-brewed-then-chilled definition and the explicit contrast with cold steeping ↩ ↩²

3. Driftaway Coffee — The History of Cold Brew — roaster blog cited in the research report, not independently fetched; source of the mizudashi naming and the 1600s Kyoto and Dutch-ships claims ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Mazagran (drink) — Wikipedia — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the Algerian origin, the Mostaganem fortress granted to France in 1837, the 1840 siege and Foreign Legion account, the coffee-syrup-and-cold-water preparation, and the café mazagran name ↩ ↩²

5. Sucafina — It’s Hot, Let’s Talk Cold [Brew] — green-trader article cited in the research report, not independently fetched ↩ ↩²

6. Sagebrush Coffee — The History of the Cold Brew Method — roaster blog cited in the research report, not independently fetched; source of the Todd Simpson/Toddy and Cuba/New Orleans claims ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

7. Coffee in Japan — Wikipedia — confirmed via WebFetch; source of coffee arriving in Japan via Dutch traders in 1700 ↩

8. Timeline — The history of cold-brew coffee is fascinating — media article cited in the research report, not independently fetched ↩

9. Specialty Coffee Association — Coffee Standards — confirmed via WebFetch; the published standards list contains no cold brew standard ↩

10. My Coffee Explorer — Iced Coffee vs Cold Brew: What’s the Real Difference? — cited in the research report, not independently fetched ↩ ↩²

11. GoodRx — Cold Brew vs. Iced Coffee: What’s the Difference? — fetch returned HTTP 403, not confirmed at source ↩

12. KitchenAid — Cold brew vs. iced coffee: what’s the difference? — cited in the research report, not independently fetched ↩