Black coffee generally refers to pure coffee with nothing added except water. Americano, pour-over, cold drip, and others are all part of the black coffee family. Because they contain no ingredients such as milk, cream, or sugar that could affect the coffee's flavor, the taste of the coffee can be presented more purely.So it should not be hard to notice that among all these black coffees, cold drip tends to be on the pricier side. If a café sells cold drip, its price is very likely to be higher than Americano or pour-over. Front Street's store is a good example: even when the same beans are used, cold drip is still priced higher than Americano and pour-over.This has made quite a few customers curious: "Why is the price of cold drip made from the same coffee beans higher than other categories?"There are two reasons! The first is that compared with other black coffees, cold drip coffee takes longer to make and involves more complicated steps!A longer production time and more complicated production stepsNo matter which type of black coffee it is, making it requires water as a solvent to dissolve the flavor compounds out of the coffee. And the temperature of the water determines the speed of dissolution! In"What Water Temperature Makes the Best-Tasting Coffee"this article, Front Street mentioned that the kinetic energy of water molecules is affected by temperature. The higher the water temperature, the faster the water dissolves flavor compounds, and vice versa.Pour-over, Americano, and most other black coffees use hot water for extraction, so they do not take very long to make and can be finished in a few minutes at most. Cold drip coffee is completely different. It is a type of cold brew coffee and uses very low-temperature ice water for extraction. But because the water temperature is too low, the extraction efficiency is very low, so the extraction time it needs often stretches to several hours.At times like this, a professional cold drip tower is usually used(it can also be omitted), using the drip rate valve to let ice water slowly fall in the form of droplets, thereby extending the overall extraction time and allowing the coffee to achieve a complete extraction.Take Front Street's cold drip production as an example: when making cold drip coffee, Front Street generally uses 60g of coffee grounds, with a coffee-to-water ratio of 1:10, and the ice water drip rate is about 7–8 drops every 10 seconds. Under these parameters, the entire extraction process usually takes around 5–8 hours.And after extraction is complete, cold drip coffee cannot be drunk immediately, because at this point it still needs to develop its flavor through fermentation. So we need to pour the filtered cold drip coffee into a sealed bottle and put it in the refrigerator for "low-temperature aging." Front Street usually lets it ferment refrigerated for more than 8 hours to ensure that the cold drip can develop a unique wine-like aroma/fermented feel. Only after fermentation is complete can we officially begin to enjoy the deliciousness of cold drip coffee!From the cold drip production Front Street has shared, I believe it is not hard to see that the process of making cold drip coffee is very complicated and takes a long time. Roughly calculating, making a 600ml pot of cold drip coffee takes about 13 hours or more, and that is still considered relatively fast.Front Street's cold drip serving standard is 200ml of cold drip coffee plus 1–2 ice cubes, which means that the 600ml of coffee made through "countless hardships" can only serve 3 cups. Whether it is pour-over coffee or Americano, the longest time they need to serve 3 cups is only about ten minutes. By comparison, the time cost of making cold drip coffee is already dozens of times greater.But more often, cold drip coffee is expensive mainly because of material costs. Still using the example above, Front Street used 60g of coffee grounds to make 600ml of cold drip coffee liquid, but in the end it could only serve 3 cups. If those 60g of coffee grounds were used for pour-over coffee, they could serve 4 cups, because the serving standard for pour-over coffee is 15g of grounds brewed into one pot.Because one cup of cold drip coffee uses more grounds and therefore has a higher cost, its selling price is usually higher than other black coffees. In summary, now everyone knows why cold drip coffee is sold at a relatively high price most of the time. It is both because its material cost is higher and because the time required to make it is longer~ The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.
