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My favorite day of the year is the first morning in New York City when it’s warm enough to walk to the Dunkin’ Donuts around the corner from my apartment and order a medium iced coffee with cream and sugar.
Now, I know there are staunch iced coffee heads who take pride in drinking the beverage year-round, but I am simply not one of them. It’s tough to want a cold coffee when it’s under 50 degrees, and I look forward to brewing a hot cup with my fancy coffee maker during those chillier months. But as soon as I wake up to a sunny, clear-skied day in late March/early April, I can taste the iced coffee on my lips.
However, unlike my daily ritual of brewing a hot cup of coffee, I don’t really make iced coffee at home. Partly because I enjoy walking myself out to get one, but mostly because I haven’t mastered the process. Admittedly, I haven’t tried too hard. I know there’s an overnight process that involves steeping coffee grounds or something. I think they call it cold brew? Whatever it is, it sounds a little too involved for me, a lazy person. So in the past, I have instead brewed a normal hot cup of coffee and poured it over ice. If you’ve ever done such a thing, you know it tastes like watered-down ass. So now I spend $5-8 dollars almost every day in the summer on an iced coffee — a not incredibly sustainable practice.
Well, that was until I discovered Cometeer, an instant coffee and iced coffee brand I was introduced to by a co-worker with a promising review: It’s actually, like, good. Consider me sold.
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How to save yourself some money this coming iced coffee seasonMy Cometeer order arrived in theatrical fashion: on dry ice. The brand uses a proprietary extraction system they say “allows flavor and aroma compounds to be extracted with unprecedented precision.” After the extraction process, Cometeer uses liquid nitrogen (oooh) to freeze each capsule of coffee. This locks in the flavor and aroma, and ensures you’re getting the freshest cup of coffee even though you thawed it straight from your freezer.
Cometeer’s capsules might remind you of single-use plastic Keurig cups, but they’re much more sustainable. While still disposable, the capsules are made from aluminum and contain no coffee grounds, which makes them easy to recycle. And unlike your batch of cold brew that has a week-long shelf life, Cometeer lasts an entire year.
Inside each capsule is an 8oz., square-shaped piece of nitrogen-frozen coffee you either can dump in a mug and pour hot water over (for hot coffee!) or melt and pour into a glass of ice and water (for iced coffee!). And that’s it. A godsend for me, a lazy person as previously mentioned.
For iced coffee specifically, there are a couple of ways to melt the capsule. The night before you can throw it in the fridge and have it thaw out overnight, so in the A.M. all you have to do is pour it into a glass. But if you are a forgetful person like myself, you can also just run the capsule under hot water for a few minutes and that usually gets the job done.
Cometeer doesn’t sell its own trademarked coffee, but instead, works with a dozen different roasters from around the world. So you can experience single farm-sourced coffees from Massachusetts, roasts from a New York institution with 20 years of brewing experience and even coffee from a UK roaster that’s cofounded by a world barista champion.
All in all, Cometeer has been a surprisingly simple, extremely delicious at-home iced coffee experience. Instant coffee has truly been the bane of my existence — maybe all of our existences — but this futuristic coffee cryo-chamber Cometeer has pioneered has completely changed that long-held belief.
You can choose from a variety of roast options: Mixed, Light, Medium, Dark, Half Caf and Decaf, but Cometeer (as of now) only offers 32 packs (that’s eight cups from four different roasters) to purchase for $84. That comes to about $2.62 per cup, a damn near steal for a precisely brewed, deliciously strong cup of coffee.
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