Starbucks barreled aged coffee? Allow me to drink a cup of coffee of'82 to suppress shock.

Guide: Starbucks recently announced that it will sell two drinks made from coffee beans ripe in whisky buckets at a Roastery store in Seattle, USA. Bagged whisky buckets of raw beans are also sold.

Starbucks placed a batch of selected Sulawesi beans in oak barrels provided by Woodinville Whiskey, a local spirits distiller in Washington state, and ripened for weeks before baking. The roasted coffee beans no longer contain alcohol residue, but still retain the complex aroma of whisky.

From March 6, some consumers will be able to drink coffee "brewed" in oak barrels at Starbucks.

Whisky barrel aging technology has been widely used in the production of wine, beer, gin and even chocolate, and coffee may be the next popular drink affected by this technology.

The process of making aged coffee is like this: unroasted coffee beans are placed in used wine or spirits barrels and fermented for several weeks, during which time manual stirring is required to ensure that the surface of the coffee beans is in contact with the inner wall of the barrel.

The aroma of the original wine or spirits in the barrel is transferred to the coffee beans, which are roasted to remove the alcohol, while giving the coffee beans a "mixed soil and oak aroma" that the traditional baking process does not have.

It is reported that Starbucks uses 800 pounds of Sulawesi beans at a time to get the taste of whiskey.

Starbucks says it is the first company to try using barreled aged coffee, although this is somewhat absolute, as many roasted cafes in the United States have been experimenting with this method since 2012. but Starbucks' move may mark the beginning of this approach into the mainstream.

Ceremony Coffee Roasters of Annapolis is generally considered to be the first American coffee shop to use barrel aging and roasting technology to make coffee, and other early experimenters included the Dark matter Cafe in Chicago (Dark Matter) and the Modern time Cafe in San Diego (Modern Times), a process refined by hundreds of coffee roasters to what it is today.

Currently, aged coffee is available only for a limited time at Starbucks' Roastery store in Seattle, offering cold-extracted coffee and hot coffee with milk, both with vanilla syrup. A medium cup of aged coffee costs $10, or you can buy the beans at $3.7 an ounce.

(picture from: Business Insider)

Roastery is a concept put forward by Starbucks in 2014, focusing on the baking process, and the corresponding Chinese brand is "Coffee roasting Workshop and Zhenxuan Restaurant". In Roastery, consumers can choose different coffee beans and different brewing methods, and witness the complete process of coffee making.

(picture from: Business Insider)

The first Roastery, which opened in Seattle in 2014, covers an area of 1400 square meters, which is also seen as part of Starbucks' foray into the high-end coffee market. Roastery in Shanghai is expected to open this year, about twice the size of a Seattle store.

Judging from Starbucks' past style, there is still a high chance that Chinese consumers will taste Starbucks aged coffee. For example, in 2015, Starbucks put cold brewed coffee ("cold extracted iced coffee") on its North American stores. A year later, the coffee, which is made of coffee beans and boiled in cold water for at least 20 hours, is on sale at Chinese mainland's Zhenxuan stores like beer.

Including the now popular "Flat White", which first went on sale in North America in January last year, and then appeared in Starbucks' Chinese stores ahead of National Day.

According to this routine, aged coffee is expected to hit the Chinese market as soon as this year.

If the inscription and matching pictures are not specified, they are all from Starbucks' American website.