San Diego has two kinds of weather: cold brew weather and weather that is technically not cold brew weather—but someone is still wearing shorts and ordering one anyway.
So we wanted to know: does summer actually change what San Diego coffee drinkers choose, or does it just feel that way from behind the bar?
We checked aggregated item counts from Achilles Coffee Roasters cafés for January and July in two consecutive years. The answer was clear. Cold brew did not merely get a little more popular in summer. Its share of core coffee selections jumped by more than 50% in both years.
In 2025, cold brew accounted for 14.1% of core coffee selections in January. By July, it had climbed to 22.3%—a 58.5% relative increase. Put more simply: cold brew went from roughly one out of every seven core coffee selections to more than one out of every five.
And no, espresso did not disappear. San Diego still loves a latte. Cold brew simply gained ground fast when the days got longer and the mornings stopped pretending to be chilly.
The quick answer
- Cold brew’s share rose 52.1% from January to July 2024.
- It rose 58.5% from January to July 2025.
- The same summer shift appeared independently at our Gaslamp café at 4th + J and our Solana Beach café.
- Espresso drinks remained the largest core coffee category in every period we studied.
That last point matters. This is not a story about hot coffee losing. It is a story about a seasonal favorite taking a much bigger piece of the coffee menu.
Two years, the same cold-brew swing
For this analysis, core coffee means three drink families:
- Cold brew
- Espresso drinks, including lattes
- Brewed and pour-over coffee
Tea, smoothies, food, retail merchandise, and other menu categories were left out so the comparison stayed focused on coffee.
| Year | January cold-brew share | July cold-brew share | Relative increase |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 15.4% | 23.4% | 52.1% |
| 2025 | 14.1% | 22.3% | 58.5% |
One summer can be a fluke. The same movement in two different years is more interesting. It tells us that the cold-brew rush is not just barista folklore or one unusually busy beach weekend. It is a repeatable pattern across Achilles Coffee locations.
Why cold brew fits a San Diego summer
Cold brew is not simply hot coffee poured over ice. It is brewed with cold or room-temperature water over many hours. That slow extraction often creates a rounder, smoother cup with lower perceived acidity and plenty of body.
Iced coffee starts hot and is then chilled, so it tends to preserve more brightness and aromatic detail. Neither is automatically better. They are built for different moods:
- Choose cold brew when you want smooth, mellow, chocolatey, and refreshing.
- Choose iced coffee when you want a brighter, crisper cup with more origin character.
If you want the full coffee-nerd version, read our guide to cold brew versus iced coffee.
The weather offered useful context, too. We matched the café periods with public daily observations from NOAA’s San Diego International Airport station. July was warmer and drier than January in both years. Average July lows were especially different: 67.0°F in 2024 and 64.8°F in 2025, compared with 47.6°F and 45.3°F in the matching January periods.
That does not prove temperature alone caused the shift. Tourism, routines, neighborhood activity, menus, and promotions can all affect what people order. But warmer evenings, dry July days, and a smooth drink built to live over ice are a pretty natural match.
What to order when cold-brew season hits
The data is fun. A better drink is more useful. Here is the fast route through the Achilles coffee and food menu:
You want it smooth and straight
Start with Single Origin Cold Brew. It is the cleanest way to taste the coffee itself: rich body, a smooth finish, and the kind of chocolatey profile that makes milk optional.
You want creamy without turning it into dessert
Go for Nitro Cold Brew. Nitrogen gives it a creamy texture and a soft natural sweetness, and it is served without ice.
You want your coffee to have a little fun
This is where the cold-brew concoctions come in. Finest City brings vanilla, cinnamon, and silky cream. The Aztec adds house-made mocha and cinnamon. Julien goes bright with vanilla and orange sweet cold foam. There is no prize for ordering the plainest thing on the menu.
You are loyal to espresso
Stay loyal. An iced latte keeps the espresso-forward flavor and gives you the summer temperature. Our numbers say espresso remains the heavyweight; cold brew just becomes a much louder challenger in July.
The neighborhood matters—but the direction stayed the same
Chainwide numbers can hide local behavior, so we tested the 2025 comparison at two established cafés.
| Café | January cold-brew share | July cold-brew share | Relative increase |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4th + J | 15.1% | 26.8% | 78.0% |
| Solana Beach | 12.8% | 18.5% | 44.0% |
The scale was different, but the direction matched. At 4th + J, cold brew represented more than one-quarter of core coffee selections in July. Solana Beach made a smaller—but still substantial—summer move.
That is exactly why local café data is interesting. A downtown morning crowd does not behave exactly like a coastal one. Yet both neighborhoods reached for cold brew more often when summer arrived.
Choose your Achilles Coffee location
The location-level check above used Gaslamp and Solana Beach because those were the two established locations we validated independently. That does not make this a two-location story. Achilles Coffee has five distinct San Diego-area locations, and each one offers a different setting for putting the cold-brew trend to a taste test:
- The Rey at 800 B Street is the outdoor downtown option, with a spacious courtyard and shaded seating in the Financial District.
- Gaslamp at 4th + J puts you near the Gaslamp Quarter, Convention Center, and Marina District, with indoor and outdoor seating.
- Park 12 sits next to Petco Park and within walking distance of the Convention Center and 12th & Imperial trolley stop.
- Solana Beach is the coastal stop, close to Highway 101, the beach, nearby hotels, and the Coaster.
- Carmel Valley is the North County choice, with a spacious setup, indoor and outdoor seating, and the full breakfast experience.
Choose the location that fits your day—not just the one that happened to appear in a data table.
Want to make cold brew at home?
You do not need a miniature café in your kitchen. A jar, coarse-ground coffee, water, time, and a good filter will get you most of the way there. Our step-by-step guide shows you how to make cold brew at home.
The basic move is simple: use a coarse grind, let the coffee steep slowly, filter it well, and adjust the finished brew with water or milk until it tastes right to you. Start with fresh coffee from our currently available whole-bean selection, then experiment. Cold brew is forgiving, which makes it a great place to learn what different coffees taste like.
What this study can—and cannot—tell us
This is first-party Achilles Coffee Roasters data, not a survey of every coffee drinker or café in San Diego. It describes what happened across our own locations during the periods studied.
Menu names and reporting categories change over time, so we compared the winter-to-summer direction within each year instead of pretending the raw totals were perfectly identical across years. We also used aggregated item counts only—no customer identities, employee information, payment information, or financial results.
The weather comparison uses monthly observations from NOAA’s San Diego International Airport station as context, not proof of causation. For the source details, see NOAA’s Local Climatological Data documentation.
The bottom line
San Diego does not stop drinking espresso in summer. It simply makes more room for cold brew.
Across two consecutive years, cold brew’s share of Achilles core coffee selections rose by more than half from January to July. The pattern appeared chainwide, at a downtown café, and at a coastal café. That makes the seasonal switch real enough to see—and delicious enough to investigate for yourself.
Find your nearest Achilles Coffee location, order whatever fits the weather, and feel completely free to be the person holding a cold brew in January.
