A new coffee machine (pictured) got some coverage in the July 5, 2024, edition of The Wall Street Journal. The article I am talking about was titled, "Want an Iced Coffee? Brands Want You to Make Your Own."
Here is how the new machine is described:
Cold brews and iced lattes have soared in popularity at coffee shops. Now brands made to be drunk at home want a piece of the action. As the world becomes hotter, cold coffee is becoming more of a year-round drink ... Peter Giuliano, director of the Coffee Science Foundation, a coffee research nonprofit, forecast[s] that cold coffee will make up most of the category by 2030.Cold coffee had long been an afterthought for many packaged coffee makers who limited their involvement in the category to milky, ready-to-drink bottles and cans. Figuring out how to get products typically brewed hot to taste good cold was a challenge.Keurig in 2018 launched a “brew over ice feature” for its machines that brewed a hot coffee at 198 degrees Fahrenheit and then cooled it to 150 degrees. “We knew it wasn’t going to deliver on that true cold experience consumers were after,” says Morgan Lombardi, a senior director of product management at Keurig. “It was seen as a hack.”Eventually, Keurig determined that consumers would wait three minutes at most and that the optimal temperature was 50 degrees. Any cooler and people couldn’t tell the difference. Very cold coffee also didn’t melt the ice, leaving drinkers with an empty glass full of it, which Keurig says they disliked....“It’s easy to chill something with lots of ice or to put coffee in the fridge and wait,” says Lombardi. “Our challenge was trying to chill the coffee very quickly without impacting the flavor.”Earlier versions of Keurig’s new machine were too big or took too long to cool the coffee down. The breakthrough came at a hackathon last year, when engineers found a way to cool hot coffee by passing it through a chamber containing aluminum and water that absorbs the heat.It plans to launch the new $200 machine in the fall with ads touting the affordability of the drinks it brews vis-à-vis what consumers get from coffee shops.
As global warming advances, we want our coffee cold. So, let's get people to buy a machine that first heats up water to make good coffee, and then uses even more electricity to cool it down.
And producing that electricity, of course, requires the burning of more fossil fuels, heating up the planet even more.
Oh, the irony!
Oh, the insanity!
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