Nashville summers run hot from May through September, which means iced coffee stops being a preference and becomes a logistical requirement. The shops that take cold coffee seriously have built signature items around it rather than just chilling whatever they brew hot.
The Barcelona at Dose is the most talked-about iced coffee in the city right now. It’s a $6 draft iced coffee topped with soft, salted whipped cream, and it has enough of a following that Dose made a T-shirt for it. The Infatuation describes it as so popular it defined the shop’s identity. Dose has two Nashville locations, Sylvan Park and East Nashville, and both run the same program. The Saturday line at Sylvan Park can span the full length of the small space, which means weekday mornings are the practical time to go.
Elegy’s Honey Bear Cold Brew is the other item that shows up consistently across best-of lists. It combines cold brew, oat milk, burnt honey, cinnamon, and maple syrup into something that sits between dessert and breakfast. Elegy has three Nashville locations in Germantown, Downtown, and Wedgewood-Houston, plus a walk-up window in East Nashville.
The technical approach
Steadfast Coffee in Germantown built its reputation partly on flash-chilled coffee, which is different from cold brew in a meaningful way. Cold brew sits in water for 12 to 24 hours and comes out heavy, chocolatey, and sometimes bitter. Steadfast’s flash-chill method brews hot and chills rapidly, which preserves brightness and acidity that disappears in cold brew. The result is a cleaner, more complex iced coffee. Their coffee soda, made with the same flash-chilled coffee and carbonated water, is strange the first time and impossible to stop ordering the second time.
No Free Coffee in Elizabeth Park takes a different approach. The Grapefruit Tootsie, cold brew with tonic water and a tart house grapefruit syrup, is built for Nashville’s heat in a way that a standard iced latte isn’t. The Kurogoma latte, made with black sesame, is the unusual hot option, but the cold brew tonic is what people come back for.
Retrograde in East Nashville runs coffee tonics and soda programs that treat sparkling water as an ingredient rather than a gimmick. The espresso tonic format has been around in specialty coffee for years but Retrograde executes it well and stays seasonal with the combinations.
The cold brew worth hunting down
Switters Coffee is a Nashville-based woman-owned brand founded in 2014 that produces flash-chilled iced coffee in cans and 50-ounce pouches. It’s stocked at restaurants, bars, markets, and hotels in downtown Nashville and the Gulch. The brand doesn’t ship, so you have to be in Nashville to find it, but it shows up in enough places that it’s become a background presence in the city’s coffee landscape. The format is ready-to-drink, not something you’ll make at a coffee shop counter.
For Japanese-style iced coffee, which brews directly over ice rather than chilling afterward and produces a cleaner, brighter cup than cold brew, Crema is the standard recommendation in Nashville. Their downtown SoBro location has the most space and the most consistent quality across a long list of brewing methods.
What to avoid
Nashville has plenty of shops selling cold brew that amounts to concentrate poured over ice. The difference between that and an intentional iced coffee program is noticeable. The Barcelona, the Honey Bear, Steadfast’s flash-chill, and Crema’s Japanese iced coffee are all built around process. A generic iced latte anywhere in the city will be fine, but it’s not why you’re there.
Sources
- The Infatuation, “The 17 Best Coffee Shops in Nashville” (May 2025)
- Nashville Guru, “Best Coffee Shops in Nashville”
- Yelp, “Best Iced Coffee in Nashville, TN” (2025)
- modernluxury.com, “Nashville’s Best Coffee Shops to Elevate Your Morning Routine” (November 2025)
- switterscoffee.com
- justinpluslauren.com, “Best Coffee in Nashville” (March 2025)
- styleblueprint.com, “New Nashville Coffee Shops” (April 2024)