Your Starbucks run in the morning just got a whole lot cooler. The Seattle-based coffee seller is coming out with Nitro Cold Brew. That’s right—kegs of coffee everywhere with the all-important baristas pouring out your daily dose of caffeine into a darkly foaming, smooth masterpiece.
Gone are your days of boring old iced coffee. Starbucks’ new batch promises all the great things of other nitrogenized drinks (think Guinness when it’s done properly). How much classier could it get?
“We start with a small, chilled keg of Starbucks Cold Brew coffee,” Anthony Carroll, a partner on the Starbucks Coffee Team explained in a Starbucks statement. “Then it’s infused with nitrogen, which unlocks the super-smooth, natural sweetness of the Cold Brew coffee, which then cascades from the tap with a velvety texture you can see and taste.”
The Nitro Cold Brew will be served unsweetened without ice, since it comes cold right out of the tap. It only packs in 5 calories, so you don’t need to replace Frappuccinos as your favorite guilty pleasure. Double Chocolatey Chip, please!
Starbucks has also announced a Vanilla Sweet Cream Cold Brew. According to Mashable, the sweet cream was made specifically for the cold brew coffee in order to form a complete coffee drinking experience. The cream is made in-house daily and is supposed to take away the need for cream, milk or sugar in the coffee. You just order that sweet, sweet cream to top off your cold brew and you’re good to go.
Unlike the Nitro Cold Brew, the Vanilla Sweet Cream Cold Brew has 100 calories and 12 grams of sugar in a Tall (hey, it’s still less than a Frappuccino).
Apparently, Starbucks reported a 20 percent increase in their iced coffee drinks sales after it introduced cold brew to its stores. In addition, Nitro Cold Brew is the second highest selling drink at the Starbucks Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room in Seattle (the only location where their Nitro brew is available now). Statistics show more and more Americans are ordering iced coffee everywhere—cold brew sales have grown more than 300 percent in the past six years, while iced coffee sales have risen 75 percent in the same time period.
As Starbucks’ press release states, the company is simply seizing an opportunity in a “Multi-Billion Dollar Cold Coffee Market.” It makes sense for them, and our taste buds will thank the iced coffee economy later.
Unfortunately, only seven U.S. cities will see the nifty Nitro Cold Brew this summer: Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Portland, Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles. The rest of the expanded cold coffee menu, including a Starbucks Doubleshot on Ice and the Vanilla Sweet Cream Cold Brew, should be available across the country at participating stores soon.