It is that time of the year, when some of us may feel “it’s too hot for coffee”! But iced coffee can kick that notion away. If you love coffee in summer , what can be better than an iced coffee? Cold brew iced coffee ❤
Yes, cold brew coffees – Just what we want for summer. A brewing technique so incredible that you are very likely to get hooked on it all year round.
In lieu of the launch of their cold brew coffees, a few of us coffee lovers in town got invited to The Flying Squirrel Micro-Roastery & Café Bangalore, to learn about the concept of Cold Brewing.
The Flying Squirrel was founded in 2013 by a group of passionate coffee lovers represented by Ashish D’Abreo, Tej Thammaiah – third generation coffee estate owner and coffee connoisseur – and Phalgun Chidanand, entrepreneur and restaurateur. Ashish and Tej, two primary founders, have 15 years combined expertise in the coffee industry. During those years they have greatly expanded their knowledge which includes coffee roasting, barista training, cupping, and blending. The brand primarily retailed online though www.flyingsquirrel.in and supplies coffee to cafes and restaurants across India – as long as they too approach their own offering as artisanal or gourmet.
The founders Ashish & Tej shared their start-up story and lead us into the fascinating journey of a coffee bean before it reaches out cup.
It was wonderful to hear they nurture every coffee plant at the nursery to ensure only the healthiest Arabica & Robusta seedlings are replanted in the estate to grow in patches under heavy shades. It is things like this that enables the brand to know every bean that goes into a cup. They grow their coffee in patches amidst – Citrus, vanilla, spices and a whole of other wild plantations in the estate.
During the harvest, which is usually after 7 months for Arabica & 9-10 months for Robusta, each coffee cherry is carefully handpicked. It is assessed on it’s perfect amount of ripeness, size and colour, and only the best make it into the Picker’s basket.
It is also at this stage , where the brand allows customers to customize the coffee to their liking. It starts right here. Depending on the flavour profile we’re looking for from each bean, the freshly handpicked coffee cherries are either pulped, semi-pulped, mildly fermented, sun-dried on brick yards, either whole or washed.
They use their time-tested proprietary profile-roasting curves to extract the desired values of each flavour element (sweetness, bitterness, fruitiness, acidity etc) for each of our variants. 
The Cold Brew coffee blend contains Honey Sun Dried Arabica and some Arabica Peaberry amongst other beans, and uses a medium to medium-light roast coffee, roasted using a unique profile, that delays caramelisation of the bean sugars until the very last few moments of the roast.
In our Brewing – Cupping – Tasting Session, before we got into making our cold brews, we were oriented about how flavours of the same ground coffee differs when brewed differently.
An experiment where the hot and cold brew coffee were compared. We learnt that Cold Brew coffee is up to 60% less acidic than the typical, hot-brewed version. 
Cold brew coffee is when coffee is brewed in cold or room-temperature water for an extended period of time).
Cold brew is an age-old technique of brewing. The first evidence of Cold Brew dates backs to early 1600s , from Kyoto Japan. The Japanese brewing style is more artistic, by brewing drop by drop.
The more popular cold brewing technique now is the immersion and filter. The coffee beans ground to a specific Cold Brew grind size are placed in cold water for about 12 – 14 hours, and then filtered.
It is best to do a 1:4 ratio for cold brewing. A part ground coffee to 4 parts water ( room temperature or cold) . The filtered brew is then bottled and kept refrigerated (it stays for about 7-8 days)
This style of brewing draws out the natural sweetness of the roast perfectly while keeping a check on the acidity and bitterness.
The Cold Brew Blend of coffee is the perfect summer beverage, caffeinated and cold and the coffee blend is specially formulated to make palate-pleasing cold brew at home. It is amazing just by itself. It works really well with different kind of milk and a bit of sweetener of your choice.
While I absolutely loved the cold brew , just by itself , I loved one with coconut milk and one with citrus bloom. We also sampled cold brews with condensed milk , regular milk and with ice cream.
Another interesting coffee we got to try was the Nitro Coffee. A fresh blended espresso which is pumped with nitrogen that is strong & intense in flavor and looks almost like a little shot of frothy stout beer. A great shot of coffee, only for the true blue coffee lovers.
I have been cold brewing coffee for more than year now. And you can find one of my cold brew coffee recipes here on my blog. Since I have done this at home, it was wonderful to learn more about it.
Generally,to learn about where you coffee comes from is a very satisfying feeling. The session talked about all that more.
At the end of the session, all of us were given a little Cold Brew Coffee Kit – The blended ground coffee, muslin cloth for filter and notes on how to cold brew. I plan to do a separate post on how I went about cold brewing using the kit and my recipe. Stay tuned!
Scene from a lunch that followed the workshop
Thank you The Flying Squirrel Team and Radhika for making me a part of this.
To know more about THE FLYING SQUIRREL :
website: http://www.flyingsquirrel.in
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fscoffee/
instagram: theflyingsquirrelcoffee/ twitter @GoArtisanCoffee
Lingering Aftertaste 