Where to begin.
Most cafés start out small with cold brew coffee, brewing with a Toddy system on a shelf in the back room. But what if you run multiple cafés, and each of them needs cold brew in the summer? What if you are a roaster, and selling your beans to multiple cafés, restaurants and offices, and they all want cold brew coffee? How do you scale production to meet the growing demand? Lucky for you, it is not as hard as it sounds.
We have developed a number of cold brew coffee systems for roasters all over the country, and there a few basic questions you have to answer first before we begin to design your system for you. How many gallons per day will you serve from each location? That will help you decide what kind of containers you will use, from bottles, to growlers, to bag-in-a box, to “Corny kegs” or the more professional “Sankey” kegs. If you choose kegs, you can have 1/6 barrel kegs (around 5 gallons), 1/4 barrel kegs (around 7.75 gallons) or 1/2 barrel kegs (15.5 gallons). Each of these containers can effectively be doubled by offering concentrate or ready-to-drink strengths.
Nitro or still?
The question of whether to serve your cold brew on nitro or still, is up to you. Nitro creates an incredible mouth feel and enhances the flavor of cold brew, but it requires an investment in equipment to nitrogenate the coffee, and the ability to serve nitro cold brew from the tap.
Whether you plan to serve it still or on nitro, we can help you get your coffee into kegs.
Gallons per day per location.
For each of your accounts, whether they are your own cafés or wholesale customers of yours, you have estimated the gallons per day of cold brew that each location is likely to sell. Gallons per day will depend on your foot traffic, the number of customers you serve per day, and the local weather conditions around your store. Most people are discovering a greater demand for cold brew than they originally thought, so plan big.
Gallons per day will drive a lot of your decisions for your home brew system. It will determine how often you will deliver to each location, what kind of containers you will deliver your cold brew in, and how strong you brew your cold brew.
Coffee is best fresh, and cold brew is no exception. The fresher your cold brew, the more your customers will learn to love the flavors and come back for more. The good news is that as you scale your production to larger batch sizes, there is more you can do to keep your cold brew fresh.
Once you know the gallons per day, you can make some decisions about the kind of container you use to deliver, how often you will deliver, and what kind of brew system you want to build. When you scale your cold brew program, you can create efficiencies so you can make greater cold brew with less labor time.
Ready to Start Cold Brewing? Check out some of our cold brew equipment and make sure to visit the Cold Brew Coffee section of our website to learn more about what it takes to be successful in the cold brewing business. And don’t forget… we are here to help in any way that we can.
Cheers!
