Intelligentsia Cold Coffee Review: My Week Drinking Cold Cans

Cans of cold coffee now take up an entire fridge at my local grocery store, and most of them are some form of cold brew. I don’t have a problem with cold brew (and if you are a cold brew person, I understand and respect your life choices). But it’s so subtle and smooth, I just don’t think it tastes enough like, well, coffee. That’s why I’ve been interested to see flash-chilled coffee and its brighter, punchier flavors gain steam. One of the newer ones to hit the market is from a longtime stalwart in the direct trade coffee world, Intelligentsia.

I spent a week trading my typical morning pour-over for Intelligentsia’s cold, flash-chilled coffee cans to see if something so convenient could satisfy my taste for coffee with bold, complex flavors.

Flash chilling vs. cold brew

So first, a bit about flash chilling, how it’s different from cold brew coffee, and why Intelligentsia’s flash-chilled coffee may be worth a spot in your breakfast beverage rotation.

Flash-chilled coffee is brewed hot and rapidly cooled down. Cold brew, like the name suggests, uses cool (though not cold) water during the brewing process. Hot water extracts a fuller spectrum of flavors from ground coffee: berry, citrus, spice, it runs the gamut. Cold brew, on the other hand, tends to offer a more one-note flavor profile in my opinion.

Importantly, flash-chilled coffee is not just a completed pot of hot coffee dumped over ice. Typically, the water is split between the hot used to extract and ice in the brewing vessel. When I make it I use 60% hot water and 40% crushed ice. That makes for a hot coffee concentrate chilled and balanced instantly by the ice, and produces flavors that match more closely to what you’d get if you drank it hot.

What we like

Intelligentsia’s cold coffee has a chocolate cherry taste to it that’s easy to drink without the one noteness that leaves me bored with lots of cold brew. And while the caffeine content isn’t listed anywhere on the can, it didn’t give me the kind of jittery caffeine jolt cold brew typically does.

It doesn’t come with the same feeling of ritual that swirling concentric circles of water over a Chemex does, but downing an 8-ounce can was a quicker, easier way to start the day.

What we’d leave

The one real downside to Intelligentsia’s cold coffee cans (which I’ve found with every single can of coffee I’ve ever tried) is that there is just that bit of a metallic aftertaste to it. Unless you find ready-to-drink coffee in a glass bottle, though, that’s the price of admission.

How does canned compare to homemade?

Drinking canned coffee of any kind tends to leave me with a question: Would it be better if I just made it myself? In most cases, it’s impossible to answer. I don’t have much of an idea of what went into the can, so trying to recreate it would be a shot in the dark. But Intelligentsia actually has a cold coffee blend, so I got myself a bag to contrast and compare. I made it both as a cold brew concentrate and flash-chilled. And I was pleasantly surprised at how close in flavor the canned coffee came to my own cold coffee brewing. It also made for some very caffeinated mornings.