When it starts inching towards 80 degrees, reaching for hot coffee is an abomination. It’s mid-summer, and officially the season for cold brew and iced lattes. At Future Foodie, we think we may have found our favorite new product and drink of the summer: instant cold brew coffee from Saturnbird.
SaturnBird is a coffee roaster based in Shanghai that began selling specialty coffee products (like cold brew steep bags) in 2016. In 2018, the company unveiled its proprietary instant cold brew, which we were lucky enough to try recently.
The company sent us its “Premium Super Instant Coffee Collection” which contains six different roasts, including two lights, two mediums, and two darks. The instant cold brew coffee is packaged in individual containers which are adorably shaped as to-go coffee cups, and pictured above (the mini cups are recyclable).
Making your own cold brew takes some forethought, as you must steep the coffee for anywhere between 18-24 hours (and not forget about it because it becomes incredibly bitter!). Or, another option for homemade cold coffee is brewing it hot per usual, and then sticking it in the fridge overnight to be enjoyed the next day.
If you’ve ever tried to make an iced latte or iced coffee on the spot, you’ve certainly had the experience of trying to add a bunch of ice to the hot liquid and then ending up with super watered-down coffee (no thank you).
SaturnBird’s coffee was truly instant, and incredibly easy to make either iced or hot. For instant cold brew, I just added a splash of hot water to the freeze-dried coffee powder, and mixed it. If you wanted to sweeten your cold brew, this is a good step to add honey, sugar, or syrup to incorporate it into the hot water. Note here: Even if you don’t have hot water, the coffee powder can dissolve in any temperature of the water. I just used hot water so I could mix the honey more easily into my coffee.
I then added a few more ounces of water (the company recommends about 9 ounces of water), a generous amount of oat milk (personal preference), and filled the glass full of ice. And there it was – a perfect mason jar full of instant cold brew.
Instant coffee can certainly have an old-coffee-that-was-brewed-hours-ago flavor (again, no thank you!). The SaturnBird instant cold brew did not have this at all, and this is likely due to its technology it calls “Super Extraction™” which preserves both the flavor and aroma of the coffee.
SaturnBird uses 100 percent Arabica beans for all of its coffee products, and no additives. Out of the six different roasts, my personal favorite was the two dark roasts (which had deep, toasty, and chocolatey flavors), but I found all of them to be excellent. This was surprising to me since I normally dislike any light roast coffee.
We are not the only ones that are a fan of SaturnBird Coffee – in 2020, the company won the Reddot Award for Innovation for its instant coffee cups.
For any high-quality products we try and love, we feature them in our marketplace so our readers know where they can try them out. SaturnBird Coffee gets the Future Foodie stamp of approval – and you can find the coffee we tried here. The Super Premium Collection costs $35 for 24 cups, and our readers get a special discount code for 20 percent off: STBCOFFEE20.
