The Long Road to Canned Cold Brew
Every year, the four of us owners have what I like to call our Annual Vision Meeting. We take time to reflect on the year prior and think about the year ahead, slowly and methodically laying the groundwork for strategy and goals that begin with something much less structured: open-ended dreaming.
Each year, we write down the things we’d love to see happen and begin the process of prioritizing them. One item has made the list every single year since 2017, and a few weeks ago, we finally crossed it off:
Launching canned cold brew.
Why canned cold brew?
Cold brew has long been controversial—see our recent blog, Why We Love Cold Brew, for a deeper dive into the classic cold brew-versus-iced coffee debate—but we’ve been firmly planted in the cold brew camp since the beginning.
We love the deep caramel sweetness, easy-sipping smoothness, and the simple joy of pouring a glass from the tap. For years, we’ve dreamed about making that experience even more convenient: cracking open a can and finding the same great coffee inside.
Canned cold brew is perfect for all the moments when brewing a proper cup of coffee just isn’t practical: road trips, camping weekends, long workdays, classrooms, beaches, early flights, or simply those afternoons when life gets busy. The idea of making great coffee this accessible has been on our minds for a long time.
Why was it such a long road?
For such a small product, you might wonder why it took nearly a decade to make it happen.
The answer is pretty simple: we had a lot of other things to do, too.
Canned cold brew was always a dream, but it was rarely the most urgent thing on our list. Opening cafés, growing our wholesale program, building systems, and strengthening the foundations of the business naturally took priority.
But there was another challenge, too: getting it right.
There’s some pretty specific equipment involved.
Canning anything requires, well… canning. Canning lines, specialized equipment, packaging materials, and storage space all represent significant investments, both financially and physically.
We’ve always loved the idea of producing canned coffee entirely in-house, but investing in all of that infrastructure for a product we weren’t even sure we could perfect never felt particularly wise. From early on, we knew we would need the right partner.
There are a lot of bad ways to make cold brew.
Over the years, we’ve talked with plenty of people who claimed to have cold brew canning figured out. Of course, we won’t name names, but most of the samples we received had one thing in common: They just didn’t taste very good.
We love cold brew too much to compromise on quality simply for the sake of convenience.
As it turns out, there are plenty of reasons cold brew can suffer once you scale it up. Batch sizes increase dramatically, brew times change, and the entire process shifts when you’re producing enough coffee to run a canning line.
Recipes that taste great on a small scale often fall apart when expanded to hundreds of gallons. We knew that if canned cold brew was ever going to happen, there would need to be a significant amount of research, development, and experimentation behind the scenes.
Then we met NordsKov.
A while back, Ryan from Nordskov Coffee Roasters reached out to Keith to talk shop about cold brew. As it turned out, he had been running into many of the same challenges we had.
Rather than accepting mediocre results, the team at Nordskov was determined to solve the problem: how could specialty roasters preserve the character of their own recipes while producing coffee at a scale large enough for canning?
It was exactly the question we’d been asking ourselves for years.
Dialing in the recipe
Over the past several months, we’ve worked closely with the folks at Nordskov to develop a recipe that truly reflects what we serve in our cafés while also being scalable enough for a canning line.
That process involved countless tweaks, taste tests, and side-by-side comparisons. We wanted the final product to taste like Cannonball poured fresh from the tap—adjusted, of course, for the fact that most people will enjoy it straight from the can rather than over ice.
After many iterations, we landed on something we’re genuinely proud of: a canned cold brew that tastes unmistakably like Tala.
More than just a can
For us, this project was never really about packaging coffee differently.
It was about figuring out how to bring something we already love into moments where brewing simply isn’t possible. It was about preserving the sweetness, clarity, and balance that make Cannonball what it is while making it easier than ever to take great coffee with you.
And maybe, in some small way, it’s also a reminder that some ideas are worth carrying from one Annual Vision Meeting to the next. After all, this one took eight years.
Joanna Tong
Joanna is one of the owners here at Tala, heading up Operations and Strategy. Born and raised in Minnesota, she moved to Illinois in 2014 with no intention of staying long-term until the idea of Tala came to light. When not in the office or the cafe, you can find her in a forest preserve enjoying the outdoors or at home hanging out with her cat.
