Cold brew. You can buy it everywhere. But there's a vast difference in flavors (and prices!). Let's discover what's worth the money and what's not.

We're Bruce Weinstein & Mark Scarbrough, veteran cookbook authors with three dozen (and counting) cookbooks to our names. This is our podcast about food and cooking . . . and we're so honored you've chosen to spend time with us.

Here are the segments for this episode of COOKING WITH BRUCE & MARK:

[00:55] Our one-minute cooking tip: Buy ice for parties because you're going to need more.

[04:44] We're doing a taste-test of purchased, bottled cold brews . . . not the stuff from a coffee shop, but the bottled cold brews available at North American supermarkets. Find out which we think is worth the money.

[22:06] What’s making us happy in food this week: veal (don't hate Bruce!) and roasted chicken.

Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein, and this is the podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

And I'm Mark Scarborough, and together with Bruce, we have written 36 plus

one cookbooks, as you well know.

So many cookbooks, it's hard to believe, since 1999, not counting the

ones for celebrities, not counting the ghost written things that don't

have our name on it, and not counting the tens of thousands of recipes that

we have developed for magazines and websites over the Course of 25 years.

This is our food and cooking podcast in which we get to play out our

obsessions with food and cooking.

And in that manner, we're going to have a one minute cooking

tip about throwing a party.

For your friends.

We're going to do a taste test of bottled and sold cold brew coffee and

see what we think about various foods.

Brands on the market, and we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week.

So let's get started.

Our one minute cooking tips.

Outsource your ice.

Oh, uh, this is a big one for me.

You're having a party?

More important than food or drinks is ice.

Buy it.

Buy your ice.

Get a giant bag of ice that afternoon.

Keep it in a spare sink or the bathtub.

You don't have to worry about freezer space.

You don't have to think about filling up Ziploc bags of ice.

Just buy the ice.

Yeah, I know.

It's, it's a thing with me.

I think that ice is always this underrated thing that nobody ever has.

Now, listen, I have moved north as a southerner and I'll hear,

here's how you know, I've lived in the north a long, what, 28 years?

A long time.

I no longer drink ice and water.

And it's hard to even fathom as a southerner that I don't put ice and

water because I put ice in everything.

When, um, I order a Coke in, or, yes, I'm a good Southerner, so I call

it a Coke, even though it's a 7 Up.

Or a ginger ale.

Right.

So when I order a Coke, meaning a generic soft drink, a pop soda,

in a store, I ask for extra ice.

I say, can you fill it with more ice before you add the Coke to it?

I'm cheap.

I say

no ice so I get more soda.

I know, and I don't care because I

like, you can't make me not do that because I like the ice, and

especially I like the chew ice.

But!

I think that ice at parties is just the often overlooked problem.

It is, and when you first moved in with me a million years ago, you

were horrified that I bought ice.

Well, yeah.

You

were like, we have ice cube trays, why are you buying ice?

Mind you, this is 28 years ago, and we lived in Manhattan and had ice cube trays.

So, okay, do go on.

And our first meeting.

freezer, you could fit basically a pint of ice cream, a half a

frozen pizza and two ice cubes.

Basically, I bought ice and you just will like, you will like the

parents were on mad about you.

That show with Paul Reiser

stating it slightly because I can remember going down to the

corner and buying ice for a party.

So my

grandparents, they would go down to a

vending machine in their building and buy

milk.

They were milk.

No,

my father, when I was a kid, my father on vacation was very obsessed with always

having a cooler of ice, even, and this is what kills me, even if we didn't have

anything in the cooler, we would stop at, oh, and now I'm going to tell you how old

I am, we would stop at service stations.

Now you know really how old I am.

Uh, we would stop at service stations and my dad would buy a bag of ice, even

though there was nothing to put on ice.

What kind of

service would you get at You would get the Texaco man to come out.

Um, we would have ice.

My father was always obsessed on vacation that we had ice.

We wanted a refrigerator

with

us.

Right, and so, um, yeah.

And, uh, I think ice is just absolutely this thing that you

should think about before a party.

Especially as we come into the summer months.

People use ice.

If you live south of the Mason Dixon line, people really use ice.

Ice in crazy ways.

But even up here in the North, we go through ice like crazy at summer parties.

And you just can't have enough of it at a party.

And the last thing you want to do is fill your freezer with bags of ice that

you're going to be filling up for days.

Just go buy ice.

Before we get to the next segment of our podcast, let me say that it

would be great if you If you could write a review of this podcast, even

nice podcast would do wonders for us.

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And it is the way that you can help support this podcast.

Thank you for that.

All right.

Up next, we're going to do a taste test of cold brew coffee.

First off, what is cold brew coffee?

Oh, well, some people don't know.

Cold brew is made by steeping coffee grounds in water at room temperature.

room temperature or in the refrigerator for hours, if not day.

Okay.

So long before I met Bruce and long before cold brew was a hipster thing

and a millennial thing, I have to tell you that I only made coffee

with a toddy coffee maker and bat.

If you know, if you're as old as I am, you know what I'm talking about.

It was this plastic jug with a filter in the bottom of it.

And you fill it with coffee.

coffee and then you just fill it with cool tap water.

You let it sit overnight and then you set that plastic jug container over a glass

jar and let it drip through the filter.

You buy new filters about every three to four months.

And I didn't know I was being hip in the early eighties.

I just knew this is how I was making coffee.

Well, what I love about cold brew versus hot brewing is you

get a completely different cup of coffee out of the cold brew.

You get a milder, chocolatey, sweet, mellow, and especially low acid

result.

Yeah, and

low acid is, uh, now I'm back to how old I am again.

Low acid is continually a bigger and bigger problem for me the older I get.

So, uh, I'm always looking to keep the acid down.

Okay, here's the thing about cold brew.

If you made it home in your old toddy coffee maker, as I

did in the early eighties, it's stronger than drip coffee, but the

manufacturers changed the percentage of added water to the cold brew.

And so you can buy it stronger or weaker for how it is.

In fact, one of the coffees we're going to be tasting is a dark coffee.

double strength, meaning they expect you to water it down one to one to

water even before you add milk to it.

Yeah.

The

strength of store boughts can vary as Mark said, product to product, and they're made

mostly to be drunk over ice or with some milk or as Mark said, some to be diluted.

And the dilution can be with milk.

It could be with water.

It could be with almond milk.

What we have today in front of us are five cold brews, four

of which are meant to be drunk.

As they are out of the bottle over ice, but you could still add milk.

One of them is a double strength and it is meant to be diluted.

So we're going to start with Califia farms.

Now, wait, can I say before we do this taste test, just in the, in the, in

the, uh, uh, spirit of honesty, we are not supported by any of these brands.

We paid for these bottles on our own.

We were not given these bottles.

donated them.

We weren't getting coupons for them.

And let me also say we are drinking this stuff without sugar and without milk.

So we're drinking it just out of the bottle with one exception that will

tell you about when we get to it.

But right now, this first one straight out of the bottle and we're going to taste it.

Now, Califia

Farms, they're known for their nut milks.

I like their almond milk and they have other nut milks.

And they started selling a bunch of different iced coffees in the supermarket.

They actually have regular brewed.

iced coffee, and they have the cold brew, and they come sweetened or not sweetened.

This is the unsweetened.

Mark's already tasted it.

I have tasted it, and this is unsweetened

medium roast.

And, um, uh, uh, can I just say what I think?

Yeah.

Okay, this is Clevia Farms.

It tastes like cold Mr.

Coffee.

I was just thinking it tastes like you put Poured a cup of

coffee for me and it's cold.

Yeah, I taste like we made a pot of drip coffee and three hours later

somebody poured me a cup that was cold out of the coffee, out of Mr.

Coffee.

Yeah, it

just tastes like iced coffee.

It doesn't, to me it doesn't have the chocolatiness or the mellowness

It has a little bit of nuttiness

to it.

I mean, as I'm sitting here having, drunk it.

It has a little bit of nuttiness to it, but I don't think

it's, it's not a standout.

The Califia,

I'm going to read what they say.

They claim it has notes of apple, caramel and cocoa.

Are you getting freshly opened tennis balls?

And

I'm getting dryer lint and toenail fungus and all that stuff.

Yes.

I

like this one better when it's over ice with the Milk and to be honest,

I think it would be better with milk.

I think on its own.

It shows its deficit I can imagine having this with a little sweetener I

can imagine a tiny bit of maple syrup in this would actually soften those

edges and give me a little more going on

Yeah, and a lot of people we should say but in the spirit of tasting

coffee a lot of people like sharp edges They do I don't I tend to

like really big base note coffees.

And so, um, I'm not a fan of the acidic, like raspberry overtones

and strawberry overtones.

Oh, no, no, no, no.

Okay, so now we're going to move on to the next one.

And this is the one that's slightly different.

Stumptown Coffee.

They sell a ready to drink cold brew and a two times concentrated cold brew.

The store I went to yesterday only had the two times concentrated, so

we have watered it down one to one.

Yes.

It's what they recommend.

We first discovered Stumptown Coffee on a trip to Portland, Oregon,

and it's Real schmancy coffee.

I mean, they have high, it's a high end roaster.

Let me say that the bottle we're drinking

out of is glass.

Oh yeah, there's a nice

glass bottle.

I know.

So it's schmancy without a doubt.

Um, and I've, I've tasted it just a minute ago and now Bruce is tasting it.

I'm going to let him talk first.

This has so much more coffee.

coffee, body, coffee, aroma, and coffee character than the first one.

I know it's concentrated, but we did water it down.

So it should be at the same drinkable levels the first, but

there's so much more going on.

I think.

It's more acidic than the Califia farms.

And I think it's got brighter notes, which, you know, I'm not

a grand fan of, but I think it's a little bit, uh, uh, acidic.

Um, it's okay.

I, I, I don't know that I would pay the upmarket charge for the glass.

It

is the most expensive of all the ones that I have on the

glass bottle.

Well, clearly.

I think, yeah, well, it's, it's funny, because it's a smaller

bottle, it's only 25 ounces.

Everything else here is ranging 48 ounces, 32 ounces, so this was more expensive.

And it's not only

a, uh, glass bottle, it's a bespoke glass bottle.

I mean, it's been Crafted for them with their labels blown into the glass.

So it is

like an embossed glass.

Yeah.

Uh, it's clearly schmancy to me.

It's really high note.

And if you like strawberries, raspberries, if you like that

acidic taste, if you like, um, lemon zest in your coffee, getting a

little lemon in that,

yeah, I think that you would like the stump town.

It's not to my taste, but I think.

It is better overall as coffee.

I think it is better as coffee, but I imagine it's going to

be a heartburn afternoon.

Okay, so what's up next?

Next is Stoke,

S T O K.

They have a whole line of unsweetened cold brew coffees that range in strength

based on the kind of beans they use, and this is their espresso blend.

So this is their darkest roast.

The bottle says it is Still smooth because they have three levels of roasts.

They call it dialed in flavor.

And if you know anything about dialing in coffee for your espresso

machines, it's a whole thing.

Let me try it.

Okay.

So I have tried it and I think it's really good.

I think

it's really

good.

It's soft.

Really good.

It's not a stick.

It's acidic.

It's

soft.

It's, it's really fine.

Chocolatey.

It's chocolatey.

It's, to my taste, what I want in coffee, which are deeper, baser notes.

I think it's got a really nice body to it.

I'm not overwhelmed by it.

It's closer to espresso than the other two that we tried.

It has a really beautiful flavor to it and a really deep, dark textured flavor to it.

I, I think that this one for me is a really is a winner out of the lot so far.

It

really is.

I'm curious now to try their other ones that aren't quite as darkly

roasted, but this is, despite its dark roast, I'm not getting a bitterness.

I'm getting bitterness.

Bits of caramel.

I'm getting bits of chocolate.

Stoke S T O K.

They claim this is the darkest and the strongest, but they say it's still

smooth and I got to tell you it is.

And it's fabulous.

Yeah.

Uh, uh, so far that wins.

So now we're moving on to La Colombe, which you may know, it's

very prominent across North America,

especially in airports, especially in airports.

This is their cold brew and we're tasting the bold and rich.

We all, we mostly always go for the dark and the bold and

the rich and all that stuff.

So, uh, I'm going to take a

taste of this.

You taste it and I'm going to say that they sell a ready to drink and

they sell a three times concentration.

In the, our local supermarket, the three times concentration was not available.

So this is just, uh, The ready to drink, out of the bottle.

What do you think?

I can't tell that much difference between this and the Califia Farms.

If I, if I were looking at them both, I would literally, and I,

you know, those were my choices, Califia Farms and La Colombe.

I would just pick the one based on price.

I would say, uh, well, which one is cheaper?

And that's the one I would buy.

I think I agree with you.

They both taste like I made a pot of drip coffee

and I let it get cold.

The stemmed down coffee is more interesting.

The stoke is more complex and more to my liking.

Uh, I think that the Califia Farms and the La Colombe are, um, they're okay.

I think they need things in them.

I think they need oat milk.

I think they need almond milk or cow milk.

I'm going back to

my little bit of maple syrup.

Um, and I think Also, the luck alone for me, and we're not, we're not

drinking this in the sugar for me.

It's a little sweet.

Um, I taste a lot of sweetness in it.

So if I were putting dairy in it, I would be probably putting goat milk

in it because goat milk is more savory than cow milk, and it would Pull up

the savoriness of the coffee a bit.

Wow.

Uh, I, it would be, that would be a question of price for me.

And the end of this whole taste test, of course, we're going to taste Starbucks.

Starbucks sells a whole bunch of canned and bottled coffees.

They sell coffees, flavored coffees, sweetened.

They sell cold brews at the ready to drink out of the bottle.

They also sell it.

Concentrated, but I've owned a mark is making a face.

That's the same face you make when you get Starbucks at Starbucks.

That's that Starbucks taste.

And so, you know, here's the thing about Starbucks.

They've been around for so long that people have developed

a taste for Starbucks.

And I don't have that taste.

I bet you I could count on one hand the number of times

I've drunk Starbucks coffee.

So I don't have that taste and I know that a lot of people do it.

It's just like ketchup.

People have proclivities to the Heinz or Del Monte ketchup and you know, it's like

born in the genes at this point because they've had it so much and they don't

want to have another kind of ketchup.

I think that that's what's happened with Starbucks.

There's so much of it that people have just developed this affinity

for the flavor of Starbucks coffee and it's not an affinity I have.

There is a burned edge, I think, to Starbucks coffee in general,

and it's definitely coming through in their cold brew.

Well, yeah, I don't really, I mean, it's, it's a, it's a cliche at this point to

talk about the burned edge of Starbucks coffee, but it's, it's, uh, it's sharp.

And there, I think it's designed, uh, um, you know, if I had to be the product

designer, which I'm not, but if I had to guess what the product designers are

after with, uh, with Starbucks, is there after our coffee that can stand up to

whipped cream and caramel syrup and sugar syrups and simple syrups and macchiatos

. And all that.

I don't even know what they sell.

So again, I, again, I am not.

the Starbucks audience.

I can honestly tell you that I have probably had Dunkin Donuts

coffee more than I have ever had Starbucks coffee in my life.

So, and I haven't had that much Dunkin Donuts coffee.

So I get, I'm just not, uh, an aficionado and I haven't developed

a taste for it, but I do know that people stand in huge lines.

I see them in airports and I've, I've seen this.

I, we live so rurally that there really is no Starbucks around us.

So I don't live in a city and I don't pass by Starbucks all the time.

So I don't see lines there, but I do see them in air.

airports, and I know that people have a grand affinity for Starbucks.

Uh, it just escapes me a little bit.

Mark and I don't

agree on this because I like Starbucks.

You love it.

And I like getting Starbucks espresso over ice with lots of skim milk added.

And I love that.

And I find it when I get that in the store.

It's actually less acidic than this is right here.

I

think Starbucks is to you as Canisius are to you.

I think there is something better than an Espresso Canish.

That's

disgusting.

I, but you love Canisius because of your childhood.

Yes, exactly.

And I find them claggy.

and stodgy and difficult to eat.

I don't understand them.

It's just mashed potatoes and chicken fat in a dough.

But that connects to your past.

What connects to my past in iced coffee was instant coffee.

We used to take a teaspoon or two of instant coffee in a tall iced tea

glass, put about two inches of water, fill it with ice and top it with milk.

And that was iced coffee growing up.

And I didn't know that iced coffee was a thing.

thing.

My very, very poor rural Oklahoma paternal grandfather would

drink coffee on ice with milk.

And we're talking in the early sixties.

And I thought it was the most disgusting thing I'd ever seen.

Little did I know that he was a trendsetter.

This poor dirt farmer in rural Oklahoma was some kind of trendsetter,

but that's how he would drink it.

And I always thought, ew, gross, what are you putting ice in milk for?

But I think that, um, Starbucks coffee is designed to be, uh,

developed into other drinks.

I think you're right

about that.

And, but I do think that, I'm not, I'm not trying to pin it on you, but I do

think that you've had enough Starbucks over your life that you've developed

a taste for it and you like it.

And I'm not putting you down for saying this.

We land on a plane going somewhere and Bruce will have ordered on his

app his coffee from a Starbucks in the airport and he'll pick it up.

And.

I never follow his lead.

I never get a coffee from Starbucks.

Never.

Well, I

only do it if I pre order because I'm not waiting in line for it.

But I'm just saying that never occurs to me.

And I wouldn't even when he says to me, Do you want Starbucks coffee?

I say no.

So because of this very problem, it tastes a little funky to me.

It, it's still sticking around my tongue, which is I don't like.

Um, it's, it's sharp.

Um, but not, Not with those raspberry notes.

It's just sharp.

It's just, again, it's just that burned edge is what it is.

It's a bitterness.

It's a bitterness.

So again, we tried five of them.

We tried La Colombe, Stumptown, Califia, Stoke, and Starbucks.

And I think we both agreed that the Stoke is the hands down.

Down winner in the bottle.

Cold

brew.

Yeah.

And, and can you speak, uh, do you remember anything

about price, about these?

I know you said that Stump down was the most expensive.

The other ones the Khalifa, the Stoke, the Starbucks, the Colo were all about

six bucks for a 48 ounce or thereabouts.

container.

The stumptown was like 11 bucks and it's 25 ounces.

They do claim you'll get twice as much out of it.

But you know, that's, they're not cheap.

And so I think it's really good that we did this.

And now I know what not to waste our money on.

Yeah, it's an interesting thing.

And it's an interesting thing to try.

You know what, here's an idea for you.

Try this sometime at a party, I'm serious, have a bunch of friends over this summer

and have a deck party, and pull out, you know, three or four, you can go crazy like

we did and have five different cold brews, and have your own taste test, see what you

think, uh, you know, put out some glasses, tell people that you really want them to

try it without any sweeteners and without milk, and then, if you want to go crazy,

Put out some milks and some sweeteners and see if their opinions about the cold

brews change when they've drunk them.

It's kind of a, I don't know what an adult party game that's

doesn't involve getting naked.

No, but it would

also suggest putting out a bowl of Tums.

Maybe, maybe it depends on if you're as old as I am and you get acid reflux.

It's all a matter of question.

So.

That's our coffee taste test.

Let me just say that we do have a newsletter.

It comes out.

Oh gosh, it should come out, uh, twice a month.

It hasn't in a while because we've been killed by this giant book,

but it will start coming out again.

If you'd like to get that newsletter, it's not necessarily connected to this podcast.

Sometimes it's recipes.

Sometimes it's recipes from our TikTok channel, Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

Sometimes it's recipes from our Instagram feed, Cooking with Bruce

and Mark, or our Facebook group, Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

We really do tied it all up together, didn't we?

Um, and you can get that newsletter from us and unsubscribe at any time.

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So I don't even know who has signed up or who isn't signed up for that

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website, clicking with bruceandmarked.

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That's our episode for this week, except for one last thing.

What's making us happy in food this week?

Don't hate me, but it's veal.

I'm Oh no.

Don't write in.

Veal cutlets were on sale.

I bought them and I'm making veal for dinner.

Don't write it.

So I'm doing veal cutlets in a tomato with mushrooms and peppers and that's dinner.

Okay.

Veal.

Alright, well what's making me happy in food this week is if you are

a listener to this podcast you'll know it often makes me happy in food

this week and that is roast chicken.

We had roast chicken for dinner a few nights ago.

Bruce stuck it in the oven, we roasted it, he roasted it until it was crunchy

and delicious and if you know anything about, you know that I think roast

chicken is just about the finest thing.

ever.

Period.

No questions asked.

I would prefer a roast chicken to almost anything.

I'd prefer a roast bird of any sort.

The entire avian world must hate me because I want to eat all of them.

So, uh, the roast chicken was just delicious.

And if you haven't roasted a chicken in a long time, I encourage

you to do so because it is a hearty and delicious dinner.

And it'll last you several meals too, which is also very nice.

Okay.

That's the podcast for this week.

Thanks for joining us.

Thanks for being a part of this journey.

We certainly appreciate your time with us, and we would love to hear

from you on any social media feed.

And every week we tell you what's making us happy in food, so tell

us what's making you happy in food this week on our Facebook group,

Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

We will check it out, and if it's a fun, interesting thing, we'll talk

about it here on another episode of Cooking with Bruce and Mark.