Nitro Cold Brew Coffee

There is a coffee shop in San Jose, B2 Coffee, that does nitro cold brew. I always grab a cup when I’m in the area. When I was in Canada the other weekend, I was looking around for coffee shops and saw one close by that had posted on their site that they were getting a nitro system in for their cold brew. I went there and was disappointed to learn that it wouldn’t be installed for another week, long after I was gone. I’m currently in an area where there isn’t even a grocery store closer than 15 miles. Needless to say, there’s not much in the way of coffee either.

That got me thinking about what it would take to do this at home. The first thing that I found was a full-blown system, shown below.

Add this to the list of things that I want to do when I have the requisite time/money. Realistically though, it’d be much better at the office. You’re really only supposed to keep cold brew for a week, and I don’t drink nearly enough to justify a whole keg.

You can get a mini-keg that’s basically just a stainless steel growler, and a tap for it, add a nitrogen tank, and maybe a mini-fridge, and you’re good to go:

Even a mini-keg would be a bit over-the-top for home usage for me. This lead me to Google around a little more. Apparently there’s an even cheaper and easier way to do Nitro Cold Brew coffee. Just use a whipped cream dispenser, they have little nitrogen canisters that attach, and it looks like it works pretty well.

I’m not sure if they’re using nitros or nitrogen cartridges in the video. Typically, with whipped cream, you’d use nitros. However, I found that you can get pure nitrogen cartridges, for not too much money. From my research, I found people doing both, for both beer and coffee, so I figure that I’ll probably experiment with both when I get around to this project. Either way, if it works, it’ll be a hell of a lot cheaper than buying a keg and a nitrogen tank.