There's no better drink on a hot summer morning than a cold glass of iced coffee. The problem is, if you want some smooth, homemade cold brew, you'll have to have gotten the ball rolling about 12 hours earlier. Unless you get a vacuum-powered machine like Prisma Cold Brew to do the job in mere minutes.

If you're not familiar with cold brew coffee, it's a simple if time-intensive process. Instead of running hot water through coffee grounds and getting a piping hot caffeine delivery mechanism on the spot, cold brew coffee is made by mixing water and grounds into a slurry and then letting it sit around for hours, generally 12 or more. The result is a smoother, sweeter, cooler, and often stronger concoction. Brewed strong and served over ice roughly 2:1 with milk, it's my favorite way to kick off a lazy Saturday morning. So long as I was able to get the whole process started on Friday night.

There are all kinds of aids for making cold brew coffee— —but Prisma Cold Brew actually manages to make the process faster and by orders of magnitude. By vacuum-sealing its upper container to maximize infusion, the brewer can can turn a mix of cold water and grounds into a drinkable brew in minutes, as fast a normal drip-maker might.

The folks behind the Prisma Cold Brew, a company known as FirstBuild, swung by the Popular Mechanics' offices with a fully-functional prototype, and I can tell you firsthand that it puts out a damn drinkable cup, and fast.

Eric Limer

Let me be clear about my qualifications: I am no coffee connoisseur. I've never been one to search for "notes" of this or that in my cup and I wouldn't know what to do if I found them. But I have been making cold brew the arduous old-fashioned way in a giant mason jar for years, and if nothing else I've learned how to do things wrong. The Prisma's brew was at least as good as—if not better than—anything I've ever made, and it took roughly one hundredth of the time.

The brew was at least as good as anything I've ever made, and it took one hundredth of the time.

The advantage is more than just the convenience of pressing a button and having coffee a few minutes later, though. Since the Prisma shortens the wait-time down from hours to minutes, it offers all kinds of freedom to experiment with different coffees, different ground sizes, different ratios of coffee to water, all without having a short eternity to see how it turned out, and waiting a second eternity for a new batch if the first one turned out undrinkable.

The real big sell here is definitely the speed and simplicity—pour it all in and just press go. The Prisma even uses typical basket filters you might already have hanging around. But the finished product will have a smartphone app that lets you extend the brew time and tweak other variables as well.

Eric Limer

Speaking of the finished product, it's not quite here yet. Like so many other gadgets, the Prisma is looking to raise money through crowdfunding to help it get to market. Fortunately, FirstBuild has already done this successfully twice before, and actually has a partnership with GE to help ramp up production once the initial crowd-funding campaign proves there's a demand. Laying down money for a crowdfunding campaign is always—always—a risk, but this is about as unrisky as it gets.

The IndieGogo campaign for the Prisma won't start until July, but if you're interested you should just brace yourself for the price. FirstBuild puts the retail price of the cold brewer at $300, with a "significant discount" for early backers.

And as cool as the Prisma Cold Brewer is, it's hard to forget that all you really need to accomplish the exact same job is a jar and a French press, equipment you can probably snag for 10 percent of the Prisma's full price tag. It's like they say: Time is money. It's just up to you to figure out the exchange rate.

You can sign up for an alert about the Prisma Cold Brew's July launch over on the official website.

Eric Limer

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