Cold Brew Coffee Has Been a New Orleans Thing for a Long Time

Cold Brew Coffee Has Been a New Orleans Thing for a Long Time

Cold brew coffee feels like a recent invention if you encountered it for the first time sometime in the last ten years, which most Americans did. It went from obscure specialty shop offering to mainstream grocery staple in what felt like a single summer. But the method itself is old, and New Orleans was practicing a version of it long before the rest of the country figured out what to call it.

Where cold brew actually started

The earliest documented record of cold-brewed coffee comes from Japan. According to historians of coffee, the practice of brewing with cold water was established in Kyoto by the 1600s, making it one of the oldest brewing methods still in use. The Japanese version, known as Kyoto-style cold brew, evolved over centuries into something almost meditative: instead of steeping grounds in water for hours, coffee is brewed drop by drop through a tall glass tower, a single bead of water moving through the grounds at a time. The process is slow and deliberate and produces a concentrated, exceptionally clean cup.

One theory holds that Dutch traders introduced the cold-brewing concept to Japan during their occupation of the country in the mid-1600s. The Dutch were looking for a way to make coffee that didn't require an open flame, which was a genuine concern on wooden ships, and that could be stored for long voyages without spoiling. Cold brew solved both problems. Whether the Japanese adapted that technique and refined it into the Kyoto style, or whether the method developed independently, is a question historians haven't fully settled. What is clear is that cold-brewed coffee had been a living tradition in Japan for hundreds of years before it became a trend anywhere else.

How it traveled to New Orleans

The path from Kyoto to New Orleans runs through France. During the Napoleonic Wars, when a British naval blockade cut off French coffee supplies, French roasters began blending chicory root into their coffee to stretch what little they had. Chicory added body and a roasted bitterness that complemented coffee well, and once people tasted the combination, they kept drinking it long after the blockade ended. That chicory-laced coffee tradition crossed the Atlantic with French settlers, and it found its most permanent home in New Orleans.

When Union forces blockaded the port of New Orleans during the Civil War and coffee supplies again ran scarce, the city leaned on that French tradition. Chicory-blended coffee became the standard. And because New Orleans is hot for most of the year, the city developed its own approach to drinking it cold: a strong concentrate, steeped slowly, served over ice with hot milk. It was cold brew before the term existed. According to CoolBrew, a New Orleans company that launched one of the first commercial cold brew products in the United States in 1989, the cold-drip process had been practiced in New Orleans for nearly 150 years before they brought it to market. The rest of the country was late to something New Orleans had been doing since Reconstruction.

Why cold brew tastes the way it does

The chemistry of cold brew is different from hot-brewed coffee in a few important ways. When you brew coffee with hot water, the heat extracts compounds quickly, including acids and some bitter elements that contribute to the brightness and sharpness of a standard cup. Cold water extracts the same compounds but much more slowly, and it never reaches the temperature that activates the more volatile acids. The result is a coffee that is naturally lower in acidity, with a heavier body, more sweetness, and a smoother finish than its hot-brewed equivalent made from the same beans.

This is why people who find regular coffee hard on their stomach often tolerate cold brew much better. It's also why cold brew tastes sweeter without any added sugar. The bitterness that masks underlying sweetness in a hot cup is simply less present, and what's left tastes rounder and more approachable.

The trade-off is time. Cold brew requires anywhere from 12 to 24 hours of steeping depending on your method and how concentrated you want the result. It's not a spontaneous decision. But the hands-on time is minimal; most of those hours are the coffee doing its work in the refrigerator while you're sleeping or going about your day.

How to make it at home

Cold brew is one of the more forgiving methods in home brewing. The basic process requires coarsely ground coffee, cold or room-temperature water, and something to strain the grounds out when the steep is done. A French press works well. A mason jar covered with cheesecloth works too. You don't need specialized equipment, though there are dedicated cold brew makers that make the straining step easier if you plan to do it regularly.

The standard ratio is about one part coffee to four parts water for a concentrate, which you can then dilute to taste. Coarse ground is important: fine grounds will over-extract even in cold water over a long steep, and they're harder to strain cleanly. Steep for 12 to 16 hours in the refrigerator, strain, and store the concentrate in a sealed container. It keeps well for up to two weeks, which makes it practical to brew a large batch once and have cold brew ready every morning without any additional effort.

For a New Orleans style, brew with a chicory blend as your base. The chicory adds depth and body that carries through the dilution and the ice in a way that straight coffee sometimes doesn't. Add equal parts cold brew concentrate and cold milk over ice, and you have something close to what New Orleans has been drinking since before the Civil War.

What we use

Any Brassline blend works well as cold brew, but Root Note, our chicory blend, is the most natural fit for the New Orleans style. The chicory gives it the body and low bitterness that the method was built around. Echo, our dark roast, also makes an excellent cold brew: the slow cold extraction pulls sweetness and depth from the beans and softens the edges of the roast in a way that makes it particularly drinkable.

Cold brew is one of the easiest ways to get more out of a quality bag of coffee. If you haven't tried making it at home, the barrier is lower than it looks, and the result is worth the overnight wait.

Root Note and Echo are both available at brasslinecoffee.com.

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