November 26, 2018

Crash Brew better than Cold Brew

It snowed early. And then it got very very cold. And Boston says: give me an iced.

The first winter we operated our food truck I was shocked how many people ordered iced coffee off a truck in freezing temperatures. This is Boston. We love our iced coffee. And honestly getting iced coffee right has been one of our largest coffee challenges at Clover. We LOVE the pour over method we use for iced coffee (sometimes called Japanese Method). I’m not sure if anybody else in Boston does it this way, but it’s so so good. Now we’re offering that same approach on tap. We’re calling it Crash Brew Iced Coffee.

We ditched cold brew and went to crash brewing our iced coffee (the Japanese method). I played with cold brew back in 2009. We sold it on our trucks in 2009, 2010, and when we launched Clover Harvard Square in 2011 we sold it there too. Then I decided all the cold brew was tasting the same, and the novelty ran off for me. There are some persistent paper-y tones to cold brew. Turns out this is the result of the fact that hot brewed coffee has many flavor compounds that simply don’t make it into cold brew. As cold brew never brings any heat to the beans many compounds are never extracted from the coffee, in particular the flavorful oils. Instead water soluble elements of the coffee are over-extracted. As a result cold brew sort of tastes the same regardless of underlying bean (bad for farmers and customers who enjoy flavor). Crash brew on the other hand is more expressive, and if done carefully a better balanced and more craveable cup.

For crash brew you brew a more concentrated coffee over ice. The coffee goes from hot to cold very very fast. The idea is that you avoid oxidation and other loss of flavor that could result from slower cooling. The final cup is beautiful. This is Clover Iced Coffee.

Some of you may have enjoyed the Chicory Cold Brew we ran last year. But not enough of you. I’m a chicory fan myself. But the sales never took off as I’d hoped. So we went back to the drawing board and figured out how to crash brew batches of coffee (brewing hot concentrated coffee onto ice instead of cold brew). We keg it with Nitrogen not to make it bubbly but to preserve the flavor. The result is a coffee you can pull from a tap that tastes unbelievably fresh and nuanced. Extra bonus? We can sell it for less. The Nitrogen in the Chicory Cold Brew was super expensive and kept the price of that product higher than we would have liked. The new Crash Brew is much less expensive. Yeah!

Recent Posts

May 24, 2023
I recently learned that garlic has 4 stages that it goes through on its journey to become the cured stuff you’re probably used to seeing. This year I learned about Green Garlic. It’s the mild, sweet, un-cured bulb, plus the fresh green shoots. We got our hands on a super limited crop from Red Fire out in Granby, and so we decided to see if we could incorporate it into every single different type of box we make next week…
May 23, 2023
We’ve intentionally steered clear of bowls for a long time. If you see Ayr tomorrow, ask him why : ) Tomorrow (5/24) we’re starting a 2-week test of bowls at CloverNTV, our restaurant in Newtonville. If it goes well, this could represent the beginning of one of the bigger changes our menu has EVER seen. We’re hoping we’ve cracked the code to bowls that are seasonal, carefully-composed, easy to carry, and craveable – all the things we love about bowls, and none of the things we don’t.
May 18, 2023
I used to eat Cheesy Grits almost every morning, and if you were eating with us around 2017, I bet you did too. We took our Plimoth-ground-grits off the menu for a little while, but now they’re back at all locations (except for the HUB for the time being). Stop in for breakfast during the next 2 weeks – we’re aiming for these to be hot and ready at 8am and we’ll be selling them til they’re out. The staff has been waking up extra early and adding a lot of extra whisking to their mornings, so we’d love to hear what you think. If you’ve never had our Cheesy Grits before, here are some things you should know….
May 16, 2023
What is Chris eating? When we toured the field at Siena, the crew was planting dahlia tubers. They get planted in warm soil, will grow all summer and will be ready for harvest in the fall. They reminded us of sunchokes, so we got to talking about whether the tubers are edible and it turns out they are! Are they delicious?
May 15, 2023
Do you want a beautiful box of produce for a fraction of what you’d pay in the grocery store? Do you want to invest in a farm’s success and be with them throughout the harvest season? Do you think you hate eggplants but you’ve just never had a good one? It might be time to look into a CSA (or farmshare).
May 5, 2023
I remember exactly the moment we started celebrating May the 4th (“May the Force” be with you). We were on a planning call about meal boxes and we were talking about how we were going to launch our Taco Tuesday program on Cinco de Mayo (May the 5th). Chris accidentally said “May the 4th” and Ayr said, “May the 4th! We should do a Star Wars Box!”
April 24, 2023
If you’ve been reading for a while you probably know we hate waste. Most of the time, minimizing waste is pretty unglamorous, but every once in a while our mission to reduce waste takes us to some very cool places. I look after Clover’s grocery marketplaces (including our Assembly Row grocery store). A few months ago I noticed that the marketplaces were going through a lot of our paper bags. They’re compostable, which is great. But I think the best bag is one you can use over and over again.
April 22, 2023
Few people know that Clover is environmental activism. This is by design.  And it works. We do these customer surveys and see that 9 out of 10 Clover customers are NOT vegetarian. Yet I’m constantly troubled by conflicting feelings about the approach we’ve taken.
April 10, 2023
Over the next 3 weeks, on a rolling schedule, most Clovers are going to be giving out a free hot or cold George Howell Montecarlos coffee to anyone who stops in between opening and 11 am. No strings— we just want to see you all and talk about coffee!! George Howell’s Montecarlos is a single-origin coffee we love for our pour-overs…
March 30, 2023
Each year, early spring is a busy time at the Clover kitchen because we have 2 of our tastiest boxes, usually back-to-back. For the Passover box, a lot of care goes into the kashering of the kitchen, with Rabbi Dolinger coming in to ensure the box is totally Kosher for Passover via Lighthouse Kosher.
March 15, 2023
That photo is corn fritters drizzled with maple syrup. We just started frying them up for a 2pm special – and they’re an element of our Maple Meal Box. If you head away from the city this time of year, you’ll see signs for sugar shacks, where maple sap gets boiled down into syrup and little restaurants pop up to serve pancakes, corn fritters, cider donuts, and dill pickles (to cut through the sweetness of the fresh syrup).
February 28, 2023
You’ve been asking! And finally we can announce: sunchokes are here, starting tomorrow, 3/1. Thanks to Pete’s Greens in VT for getting us local sunchokes. At breakfast we’ll be making The Sunchoke Truffle: fluffy house-baked pita, creamy truffled butter, caramelized onions, a 6.5 minute egg, and thin, crispy sunchoke slices. At lunch and dinner: The Sunchoke Mushroom: scallion-black-pepper mayo, fresh arugula, roasted crimini mushrooms, fried brined onions, and roasted sunchokes. But what IS a sunchoke?