Sure, beer is great and all, but those of us with day jobs can’t exactly drink round the clock (or can we?).
Luckily for those of us with the PicoBrew Pico, we can now use the countertop beer maker to brew up batches of cold brew coffee. The new feature, announced today, is made possible via a software upgrade and the addition of a new Pico reusable cold brew coffee filter available for $4.99 on the PicoBrew website. New customers will also get cold brew filters out of the box with a purchase of the Pico C craft beverage bundle.
PicoBrew’s move into cold brew isn’t all that surprising after enabling the beverage on their high-end Pico Z system and teasing the feature on the canceled Pico U.
From the announcement:
The new offering highlights PicoBrew’s expansion from a beer-focused, single-appliance company to a total craft beverage company with a complete line of beverage appliances and accessories that can make everything from coffee and kombucha to craft spirits like gin and whiskey.
While the Pico technically ended its status as a one-trick drink pony when it introduced kombucha, cold brew is the appliance’s first non-fermented beverage. Basically what this means is that, for the first time, a Pico user can make a drink and have it the same day (beer made with the Pico takes a minimum of a week to ferment). According to PicoBrew, a batch of cold brew coffee will be available two hours after the start of a brew cycle. Once brewed, the coffee is then stored and dispensed through the Pico mini-kegs.
The cold brew feature is also the first move for the Pico towards a more open brewing system where the user can make drinks with their own ingredients. While we saw hints of this last summer when Bill Mitchell told me there was an interest in bring-your-own-beer ingredients for the Pico U, cold brew coffee is a logical first step in this direction since ‘bring-your-own’ is pretty much how everyone makes coffee.
The Pico is hardly the first company to make a home cold brew coffee maker. Toddy has been selling essentially the same old-school cold brew makes for decades while Cuisinart and others have been attempting to “appliance-ize” cold brew for a couple of years. That said, the Pico is certainly the first home appliance to do both beer and cold brew in the same box.
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