Need some caffeine to go with your National Doughnut Day haul? Good, because Buddy Brew Coffee has fused its specialty coffees with water to create a certified-organic canned cold brew equivalent to three regular cups of joe. The new ready-to-drink product, called Bolt, comes in two varieties — original and nitro — and is available at all of the Tampa roaster’s cafes, starting Friday.
Founders Dave and Susan Ward, who opened Buddy Brew’s first roastery and bar on Kennedy Boulevard in 2010, have been churning out their popular cold brew for nearly a decade, but they’re the latest Tampa Bay coffee company to launch the liquid goodness in cans. St. Petersburg-based Made Coffee, ICYMI, introduced its signature canned cold brews last year.
According to Dave, coffee fiends should begin seeing Bolt in retailers that carry Buddy Brew, including Publix, next week.
“Cold brew is something that we’ve done since we opened, and it’s one of those things where we just couldn’t keep the stuff made,” Dave told CL during a media preview for the sleek cans earlier today. “I mean, we were making it in a very traditional way with Toddys — and every store had a set of five-gallon buckets that they were making stuff with — and we just couldn’t keep it made. So we knew, the writing was on the wall, that we had to do something bigger… volume-wise.”
Buddy Brew debuted its bottled cold-brew product in summer 2017. Bottles, however, are more prohibitive than cans. They’re not great around pools, for one, or quite as convenient for on-the-go sippers — plus, Dave adds, the true advantage of canning cold brew comes down to quality.
“Now you can introduce nitrogen in a much greater way. You can really pressurize the can, whereas you can’t truly pressurize the bottle to the extent you can with a can. That improves a lot of things for us,” he said.
Made with Buddy Brew’s Columbia and Guatemala coffees, the original Bolt features a flavor profile similar to the cold brew in bottles, yet it also has a fresher and cleaner taste with easily identifiable nuances. The nitro, on the other hand — which pours like a Guinness, thanks to the nitrogen pumped into it — calls for the Guatemala and Sumatra coffees, ultimately resulting in a creamy, smooth mouthfeel.
While the roaster won’t do away with the bottled cold brew completely, it won’t be in everyday production. Going forward, Dave says the plan is to use the bottles for small runs of seasonal or one-off batches.
Buddy Brew has been talking about Bolt for about a year and a half. Development of the can’s logo and design, though, really sped up within the last year. As Dave puts it, the capacity of their production facility at the corner of Willow Avenue and Cass Street is “ginormous” now (big enough to take them across the country, apparently), and they’ve made such a huge investment in Bolt — state-of-the-art canning line from premier manufacturer Wild Goose and all — because they believe it’s a huge product.
A 10.5-ounce fill priced at $3.49, Bolt looks and feels different than other ready-to-drink cold brews out there, which allows it to stand out on the shelves. But the Wards also made that call for another reason.
“If you look at what the cold-brew market is today, it’s probably about a $40 million business — maybe a little bit more — but the energy drink market is a $55 billion business, and growing like crazy,” Dave said. “And there’s a move in that energy world to ‘clean’ — no chemicals, fresh, organic, all those kinds of things. So we believe that we’re gonna make the jump into the energy drink market, too.
“We wanted to offer the look and feel of an energy drink, and in terms of an energy drink, it’s probably the most powerful on the market.”
What else are the founders working on? Turning the former roasting space at their Kennedy flagship into a commissary kitchen. Doing so allows them to produce Buddy Brew’s food in-house, then distribute it to their family of cafes. By the time July 1 rolls around, Dave hopes the commissary will be fully functional.
Oh, and there’s one more thing locals should know about Bolt.
“We say, you know, it just might give you superpowers,” Dave said. “We’re not 100 percent certain, but there’s been some reports.”
This article appears in Jun 7-14, 2018.
