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50 Fresh Cup Magazine | freshcup.com COLD BREW: A (CHEMICALLY) DIFFERENT CUP OF TEA to Bill. "Once you teach it to your customers, the sales for the loose-leaf tea skyrocket," he says. hile cold brew accommodates specialty tea neophytes, what's the worth of the preparation to a teahouse or an aficionado? Cold brew- ing takes a lot of time for a nice cup. When Maria makes her pitch for cold brew, she stresses two things: "It's forgiving and it's a different taste." That different taste sets cold-brew tea apart, providing the argument that it is, actually, a third type of tea. When tea professionals describe how cold brew tastes different they go straight for the word smooth. Cold- brew tea lacks even a hint of astrin- gency or bite. Put a cup of cold brew next to a hot-brewed cup of the same tea and the two will be distinct. In the coffee world, some purists feel cold- brewed coffee is missing something and that lack, to some, is so profound that cold brew might not even count as coffee. That extreme position hasn't been staked out in tea (not yet, or at least not loudly), and it likely won't. What's missing in a cup of cold brew is replaced by a heightened engagement with the flavors that are there. In some teas, cold brew- ing shows that the astringency, while providing a rounded mouth feel, also masked some fascinating flavors. Let's shrink to the molecular level and dive into the cool liquor of a steeping cold brew to find out what makes it different. As we hit the sur- face and begin to descend into the steeping vessel, this one happens to be a mason jar, you'll notice it's pretty calm in here. The water molecules and trapped oxygen are moving about, but in a lugubrious way, like an audience at a jam band concert. If we were in a hot brew, the molecules would be bashing around in a frenzied mosh pit. As we go farther down, there are more and more molecules that have come from the tea. Most are vari- ous carbohydrates and amino acids, super-tasty flavor compounds. Every so often we see a polyphenol or a caf- feine molecule, the latter are much bigger than the others. Now we're getting to the leaves, which have mostly all sunk to the bottom. Here's where the action is, where water molecules break tea compounds away from the leaves. Though here, the action is fairly calm. Donna Fellman, a tea expert and the online education TAKE CARE WITH HERBALS Herbal tea blends, tisanes, and Pu-erh teas should first be doused with boiling water before cold brewing. Tea and herbs are processed differently, and many herbs can foster bacteria that have a chance (a very small one) of blooming in the cold water. W C O R Y E L D R I D G E May14_magazine.indd 50 4/18/14 10:45 AM