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MY
ROUSES
EVERYDAY
MAY | JUNE 2017
I
did not grow up in a coffee-drinking
household. Hot tea was my mom’s
go-to beverage. I did not grow up in a
peanut-butter-and-jelly-eating household
either, but that is a story for another day.
My father did drink hot coffee, dripped
in an old-fashioned percolator. The coffee
was thick and inky, looked and smelled
strong, and was kept in a plastic canister
in the refrigerator until he drank all of its
contents — generally, within a week or so.
He would heat up less than a mugful, then
add milk, creating his own version of café au
lait. I eventually “learned” to drink coffee in
a teachers’ lounge, where the hot beverage
serves as a must-consume, or so it seems, for
faculty and staff across all grade levels.
A friend recalled her earliest experience
with coffee concentrate, which was different
from my dad’s.Her father cold-brewed thick
Union Coffee in a Filtron coffeemaker, a
process in which time takes the place of
heat (the Filtron process is the original cold-
brewed coffee system).Her dad’s ritual was to
drain the liquid concentrate in the morning
into an empty Chivas Regal Scotch bottle,
which he stored in the refrigerator.
Many families on the Gulf Coast have made
coffee concentrate at home, as was the case
with the McCrory family, owners of New
Orleans Coffee Company and creators of
CoolBrew Coffee.
Jeff McCrory, company president, who,
along with his brother, Gregory, operates
the business his father established nearly 30
years ago, has his own coffee tale to tell.
“We drank instant coffee when we were
kids; however, my grandparents brewed
CDM coffee with chicory,” recalled Jeff
McCrory. “I thought the brewed stuff they
made tasted bitter, and I always preferred
the instant, although I’m not really sure I
enjoyed it.”
As McCrory also remembers, his father,
Phillip, drank a lot of coffee. Director of
pharmacy services for the State Office of
Public Health, and often described as a
Renaissance man, Phil was on a quest for
a better-tasting, less acidic coffee, begun
when a friend gave him a Filtron cold-
water coffee brewer to make concentrate.
The family voted his new version a hit.That
was in 1986, when coffeehouses weren’t
anywhere near as plentiful as they are today.
“When dad starting making CoolBrew,
blending it with chicory and other stuff, it
was the first time I tasted coffee I liked,”
said McCrory. “And I would have friends
over after high school, and Dad invited us
to try it, and all the guys liked it. That’s
when we came up with the crazy idea to put
this stuff in a bottle and sell it.”
New Orleans’ rich coffee heritage proved
an ideal backdrop for the elder McCrory’s
quest, as he pored over a wealth of
information to aid him in repurposing
the more than 150-year-old cold filtration
process.
What Is Cold Brewing?
Cold brewing is the unique process of
capturing the full flavor of freshly roasted
coffee using only cold water, extracting the
most flavorful essence from freshly roasted
coffee and using absolutely no heat. The
cold-drip process calls for steeping ground
coffee over a long period, which minimizes
acidity and celebrates the beans’ natural
flavors.There is no heat used in a cold-brew
process, so most of the acids normally found
in hot brewed coffee remain in the grounds,
producing a rich, smooth and less bitter
coffee — or, in the case of CoolBrew, a rich
and smooth coffee concentrate without the
bitterness.
The McCrorys believed in their product
and decided to act on their crazy idea.They
started their company, then called Coffee
Extractors of New Orleans, in a building in
Covington.
“Few people had heard of iced coffee
back then, but its popularity grew,”
recalled McCrory, who decided working
alongside his father in the coffee venture
was preferable to college. “I liked what we
were doing and creating,” he said. In 1989,
they changed the company’s name to New
Orleans Coffee Company.
the
Coffee
issue
The
Brews
Brothers
by
Mary Beth Romig