Building Up A Head Of Foam

With its canned nitro cold brew, Austin roaster Cuvée pioneered the hottest trend in coffee

- Mark Pendergrast

I take a can of Cuvée Coffee Black & Blue nitro cold brew out of the fridge. When I crack it open and pour it into a glass, the coffee foams into what looks like a half-inch-thick beerlike froth. I take a sip: It’s pure coffee, delicious but without much acidity. The taste is chocolaty and sweet even though it has no added sugar, with a creamy texture and milky body.

Mike McKim, founder and CEO of Cuvée (www. cuveecoffee.com) in Austin, Texas, uses Colombian coffee from a group of small farmers in the Huila region for Black & Blue, grinding the beans coarsely for easy filtration. After steeping for 12 hours in chilled water, the brew is filtered into conditioning vessels, where nitrogen gas saturates the coffee for 24 hours.

“We are the only brewers who keep the entire process cold from start to finish,” McKim says. “What I have found is that the cooler the water, the less acidity and more sweetness there is. Cold water also helps preserve the freshness of the product.”

Nitro cold brew, now a hot trend in the coffee industry, was pioneered by McKim. His “aha” moment came in 2006, when he saw high school students mobbing a beer tap dispensing lattes in a small coffee roaster’s retail shop. Returning to Austin, he urged his wholesale customers to put cold brew on tap in their stores, but few were interested. “But it stuck with me,” McKim says.