Have you ever been consumed with an irresistable desire to sip on something cool, and the only thing that’ll really hit the spot is a cold brew, except when you finally hit a Starbucks (because that instant mix you make at home sucks) the best of the cold stuff costs a bomb and your wallet starts giving you major shade? Well it turns out that there’s a reason that iced coffee is usually more expensive that hot coffee, and it’s actually pretty logical.
Firstly, you need plastic cups and straws for iced coffee, which costs more than paper cups, so the price for supplies goes up.
Secondly, cold coffee requires ice, so the shop needs to invest in an ice machine.
However, the main reason for this confusing price difference lies in the brewing. It’s widely accepted nowadays that the only truly legit kind of cold coffee is coffee that’s been ‘cold brewed’. This involves grinding beans coarsely, letting them sit in room-temperature water overnight, filtering the grinds out to produce cold-brew concentrate and then cutting it with water to make iced coffee.
However, one bag of beans yields significantly less cold brew iced coffee than it does hot coffee.
Combined with the fact that making this is also more labour intensive, it makes sense that real, good iced coffee would cost more than its steamy counterpart. You can definitely taste the difference though!