Seeing as we are smack dab in the middle of cold brew season, odds are by now that your wallet is sweating even more than you. Nobody can blame you for not being able to resist the sweet, sweet lure of ordering cold brew ahead on your app so you can roll up to the coffee shop like a boss and grab it from the counter like you're starring in your own music video, but then your bank account's all "hey, remember moi?" Enter Trader Joe's new Cold Brew Coffee Bags, here to save your paycheck, your summer, and possibly the entire world.
According to the Trader Joe's blog, the new cold brew bags operate a lot like tea bags, although these are filled with "100% Arabica medium-roast coffee, grown in Tanzania at the base Mt. Kilimanjaro". (Wow, even TJ's cold brew is getting better Instagram opps than I am this summer.) To brew it, you throw two of the bags into a pitcher with seven cups of water to steep in the fridge overnight — Joe recommends 8-12 hours — and boom. You have enough cold brew to get you through the entire week. (Or, like, at least the first few days of it.)
Each 8.5-ounce bag of the Cold Brew Coffee Bags comes with four bags apiece and sells for $5.99, which, according to math, means that each 8-ounce cup of cold brew you make with it costs you less than 50 cents. Compare that to the price of the cold brew you buy on the way into your office and the saved money adds up so fast that you'll be able to see Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again at least ten times in theaters without taking a major financial hit! Dreams on dreams, y'all.
Not only that, but the description of this brew will make your mouth water: according to TJ's, it boasts "subtle, complex notes of berries and molasses". Sounds like the universe is asking me to buy a bunch of TJ's pretzel bread rolls and cookie butter just to make sure that the pairing tastes as good IRL as it does in my junk food-driven brain!!
This is far from the first Breaking Cold Brew News to hit the airwaves this summer. In June, 7-Eleven launched its own affordable cold brew for $1.69 a pop that you can customize with different flavor options. And if you're really in a bind cold brew-wise, the chain also announced in May that in selection locations, it was carrying Fizzics' self-chilling cans of sparkling cold brew — cans that use patented technology that took over 25 years to develop, that you can "activate" and take from room temperature to deliciously chilled in just over a minute. Sounds like some straight up Muggle magic, if you ask me.
Of course, it would be remiss not to mention what is, in my incredibly un-humble opinion, the best innovation of cold brew wine to date: Apothic Wine's Apothic Brew, a hybrid of red wine and cold brew that I'm pretty sure I did something awesome in a past life to get to enjoy in this one. While opinions about this were mixed around the Bustle office when we sampled it, I personally inhaled my glass — it's like red wine, but deeper and a little sweeter, and even better when chilled. The aftertaste is every bit as satisfying. Bad news for people who are in it for the adrenaline rush, though: there isn't actually any caffeine in this drink, so no, it is not the grown up Four Loko you might have been looking for.
But while you have a frankly intimidating number of options for how to get your cold brew on this summer, Trader Joe's, at least, has given us the gift of making it a habit that we can actually afford through the whole season. We can all raise a glass and overly caffeinate to that.
