High Brew - 5 Reviews

Coffee is certainly easy to make at home. Iced coffee isn't even that much of a pain it just requires some anticipation as to when you will want to drink it. All of that is out the window though when you wake up and it's suddenly 90+ degrees when you were wearing a hoodie the night before. At times like these you want nothing running in your home that is giving off any sort of heat. All you want is the refrigerator, air conditioning and fans. When it's this hot you also can't count on your brain functioning properly for preparation. These are the moments when the world should count their lucky stars that cans of iced coffee exist and can be purchased on the cheap. When this is the case it's High Brew to the rescue.

I personally think that this is the best product in their line. It is just cold brewed coffee with the tiniest amount of cane sugar (1g). The sugar is barely there in the flavor it just takes away a slight amount of the bitter edge of the coffee. I appreciate the lack of “creamer” in here, dairy or no. It's no secret that I am not coffee's biggest supporter, but the times when I do drink it I prefer it black (& bold). I don't have a refined enough palate to distinguish between blends of coffee, but they use Arabica beans to create this and I find it pleasant enough. It's true that there is nothing really special about this beverage, but there's not supposed to be. It's the base version that all that fancy garbage is built from and a lot of people like to keep it simple and I'm there with them a lot of the time.

My ladyfriend, who is a coffee snob, and a great hater of all things that contain zero calorie sweeteners said, “That's not bad at all.” That is some serious high praise from someone such as her. Me, I'm not so impressed. I can't help but concentrate on the taste of the stevia, and the weird aftertaste it leaves. The coffee taste itself is more than decent, but honestly the caramel flavor gets lost in the stevia for me. I know it's there with its little scuba gear on just swimming around in a pool of sweetener. It wants to come out. It wants to shine. Why won't you let it stevia?

Here's a question; if someone, such as myself, is not a fan of coffee, but enjoys a coffee beverage, what does that say about said beverage? Is it an exceptional coffee that has changed my mind, or has it gone off route from its coffee roots and in turn actual coffee fans won't like it? I'm going to guess somewhere in the middle. This is cold brewed coffee, milk and sugar. From the name I'm going to assume that the coffee involved equals a double shot of espresso. I think most coffee drinkers would embrace this drink. I could totally see my mom drinking this, but at the same time she is by no means a coffee connoisseur. My ladyfriend on the other hand would probably think this is gross. She is a barista, and thus is a coffee snob.

This tastes like coffee to me, but it's not very bitter. There's not too much sugar in here (7g) and the color is more brown than tan, so I'm going to assume the milk quantity is low as well. It's most definitely not black coffee, but you already knew that's not what you were getting yourself into. I think the enjoyablility rating of this is going to vary from person to person, so give it a try. At least they didn't use stevia like they did in their flavored versions.

Good. Good. Good. Good. Bitter. Bitter. Cold. That's the roller coaster that this drink takes. It's good for a while. It's got a good coffee taste. In hindsight I don't really taste any vanilla but the fact that it's not super coffee tasting I can only assume that it's partially due to the vanilla smoothing the edges like the nice router collecting dust in your late grandpa's basement. The bitter comes from the coffee. It's good. It tastes like a good, sweet, iced coffee. Where the cold comes from is the Stevia. It is quite dastardly in this drink. It somehow overpowers vanilla and coffee. It leaves you with a distracting cold that takes away from the otherwise good flavor of its brethren. How dare you. Show your elders some respect.

Let's be honest with ourselves, when you drink coffee out of a can you can't really expect a brew of very high quality. It's never going to be as good as getting something made at your local coffee shop, well unless that shop is run by a bunch of yokels who have no idea what they are doing. I've drunk a decent amount of these canned mochas and they range from horrible to decent. I've never been blown away by one before, until now...Oh wait, no this one didn't get me there either, although I really thought it would. It has a nice coffee flavor, and an exceptional chocolate taste to it. The problem is that they used a blend of sugar and stevia and that just throws the whole thing out of the window. I'm all for lowering the sugar intake of humans, but there are times when just using less sugar would be the better choice over using a zero calorie sweetener, natural or not. It almost always takes a nice, natural flavor and makes it feel wrong.

I don't want to dwell on the negative here though. If it wasn't for the inclusion of stevia, this would be the best canned coffee drink I have ever tasted. The chocolate would have been the secret of this drinks success. It actually tastes like a quality dark chocolate bar was melted down, and not like some garbage powder that most companies use. The fact that the coffee was cold brewed is also a nice touch. It's just too bad that one ingredient can knock down an otherwise really nice product.