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Above, Cuvée Coffee Roasters in Austin, Texas, is the first specialty roaster to master canned nitro coffee. "Originally I thought coffee shops were the no-brainer, but now we're in a fast-casual restaurant, we're in a handful of cra-beer bars. We average between 80 to 100 kegs per week," Cuvée owner Mike McKim says of the demand for nitro. Below: Highwire Coffee Roasters in Oakland, Calif., named its nitro coffee Howling Wolf, and it's taking off with Bay Area crowds in a big way. always appealing. And [Austin is] an environmentally friendly city, so aluminum makes a whole lot more sense than glass." He also found that variable-temperature brewing was best for Black and Blue in terms of maintaining a lower caffeine content. "Cold brew can be really caffeinated, and, in a lot of ways, it's more like you're using the coffee instead of drinking the coffee," says Lorenzo of Cuvée. "Our brew ratio is not that much different than what you would do with regularly brewed coffee. The hot water pulls out some things that the cold water never will, and just presents different elements." Although Cuvée is one of the pioneers (if not the pioneer) of nitrogenized coffee and now the canning of nitrogenized coffee, the company has no plans to expand beyond Texas as of yet. In fact, because canned and kegged nitro coffee is so similar to beer, it needs to be treated and transported as such, encourag- ing these coffee companies who wish to distribute to other cafés or bars outside of their area to partner with the already estab- lished beer distributors who have refrigerated trucks, begging the question of whether coffee and beer have more in common than we thought. "The coffee and beer industry are a lot alike," says Cody of Highwire. "We're rediscovering ourselves and each other as 69 www.baristamagazine.com