As great as cold brewed coffee is when it’s done properly, cold water isn’t the most efficient at getting flavor out of coffee grounds.
And anyone who makes iced coffee at home by pouring hot coffee over ice knows the pitfalls of oxidation and flavor dilution due to all the melting ice.
Enter what could become your new obsession: Snapchilled coffee.
In the simplest terms, Snapchilled coffee is coffee that has been cooled immediately after brewing, to freeze the flavor without the coffee becoming oxidized or diluted.
How do you make it? With a Snapchiller, obviously.
What the heck is a Snapchiller? Well, it’s a machine that “instantly” chills fresh brewed coffee, using a submerged evaporator coil. The Snapchiller was created by David Dussault, a guy who loves cold coffee. Besides those credentials, he’s also a mechanical engineer, MIT grad, and expert in heat exchange technology.
The machine looks like some kind of edgy Mac Pro from an alternate timeline, where Apple didn’t decide to start making them look like trash cans.
Super sleek with its mix of black and stainless steel, and a kind of grated, kitchen strainer like front—it works, trust me—the Snapchiller is probably one of the coolest looking coffee machines in existence.
With its submerged stainless steel evaporator coil, it can make ready-to-drink chilled coffee that retains much more flavor than your typical iced coffee or cold brew.
How fast?
The Snapchiller can cool fresh coffee from 140F to 40F in 1 minute. It can cool all the way down to -10F without ice or chemicals.
This all means you can enjoy your favorite coffee cold, without having to worry about drinking the whole glass down super quick to avoid experiencing the heartache of a watery cup of coffee. If you’re like me and you like to sit with a glass of iced coffee rather than guzzle it down in 4-5 minutes, Snapchilled coffee could be for you.
What’s the downside?
Well, the only problem at the time of writing is that Snapchillers are still fairly rare, and aren’t really being aimed at the residential market right now.
Even if you’re hip enough after reading this article to know about Snapchilling and want to get your hands on one, they go for a little under 6 grand, which is more than you might be used to spending on a coffee machine unless you’re in the coffee industry.
But, as Snapchilled coffee expands and becomes a more common consumable, I expect that the tech to make it will become more affordable, and we’ll probably see Snapchillers in coffee snobs’ kitchens in the not-too-distant future.
While it’s not really meant for the average home kitchen just yet, Snapchilling has the potential to become a game changer for cold coffee lovers. Of course, if you want to be on the absolute razor’s edge of coffee, you can always look into acquiring a machine for yourself.
But for the moment, most of us will just have to up our cold brew game if we want a flavorful, non-watered down cup of cold joe.
