Homemade Vanilla Sweet Cream Cold Brew [Recipe]

Thankfully it is very easy to make a homemade vanilla sweet cream cold brew that is easily on par with, and in my humble opinion, better than Starbucks.

…and you’ll find out why when you read this article and make the recipe as per my instructions.

Keep reading for an excellent recipe and how to customise your sweet cream cold brew at home and at Starbucks.

Why Make Your Own Homemade Vanilla Sweet Cream Cold Brew?

The one stand out reason that comes to a coffee lover mind when wanting to make a Starbucks copycat recipe at home or make an exotic homemade gourmet coffee like a homemade vanilla sweet cream cold brew is this:

You can make it exactly as you like it and experiment to your hearts content. Sure,

you can customise your drink at Starbucks but your limited to the ingredients that they have. A fine example of this is the inability to make a vegan vanilla sweet cream or a keto friendly option.

You can get an “almost vegan” version at Starbucks, but it is very watery and lacks the same consistency and texture when using oat milk, coconut milk or the other non-dairy milk options.

You can even make your drinks focusing on a reduced fat and sugar content or whatever you need for your own needs, or enriched with nutrients.

Let’s crack on with making a homemade vanilla sweet cream cold brew, and let’s do it in an easy step by step or stage by stage manner starting with making the sweet cream.

Read: Whats in Starbucks vanilla sweet cream

Starbucks Sweet Cream Recipe – How To Make Sweet Cream At Home

I am absolutely delighted to tell you that you don’t need to be a master chef or a master barista to make a great sweet cream. It is so easy, it is literally child’s play!

Ingredients Needed

This requires only 2 two ingredients, which are:

• 2% Milk
• Heavy cream.

Use these ingredients in equal amounts and mix well. To add the vanilla flavor is so easy. Just add vanilla simple syrup in small amounts, stir well and keep taste testing until you get the perfect vanilla taste for you.

Read: How many calories in sweet cream at Starbucks?

How To Make Your Own Vanilla Syrup

This is entirely optional as you can of course buy this syrup ready-made from Starbucks, Walmart, Target, Amazon and eBay.

Ingredients Needed

Making a tasty and quality vanilla syrup only requires that you have only 3 ingredients, which are:

• Sugar.
• Filtered Water.
• 2 Fresh Vanilla Pods

Use 6 ounces (1 cup) of water and 6 ounces (1 cup) of sugar and place them in your saucepan. Heat your saucepan and bring the water and sugar mix to a boil while mixing well. Let your sugar-water mix simmer and stir until all your sugar has dissolved.

Chop two fresh vanilla pods and add them to your simmering sugar-water. Stir well and cover your sauce pan with a lid and let it simmer for 20 to 25 min to extract the flavor from the vanilla pods.

When it is ready, let it sit and cool for 30 to 40 minutes. Stir well and filter out the vanilla pods.

Pour and store in a glass container, preferably a bottle with an airtight lid.

And now, all that is left for you to do is the final step of making a great cold brew coffee.

Homemade Vanilla Sweet Cream Cold Brew – Let’s Now Make The Cold Brew Coffee

Replicating the quality cold brew from Starbucks and taking it up a notch by making one that is better is easy. 

Seriously! 

Replicating it exactly – simply go to your nearest outlet and buy their cold brew is one option. Another option is to go online to Amazon and buy a 72 Oz ready to drink box of their tasty cold brew. 

Replicating their cold brew and making it better – you will need to buy their Breakfast blend whole coffee beans available on Amazon, Target, eBay and Walmart. Can also buy them at one of their stores. 

Vanilla Sweet Cream Cold Brew Ingredients For The Cold Brew Coffee

This requires only two ingredients.

• Starbucks Blend Whole Bean Coffee.
• Filtered Water.

The better your ingredients, the better your brew. Since coffee is 99% water, the better the quality of your water the better it will be, so at the very minimum use filtered water, better still use mineral water.

Use a coffee to water ratio of 1:8 and weigh your coffee beans as whole beans as the mass is the same when you grind them. Delaying the grinding, keeps your beans that little bit fresher.

Weigh 100 grams (3.33 Oz) and measure 800 ml of water. Use ice-cold water for the best possible results.

Grind your coffee beans to a coarse, even grind using a ceramic burr grinder. A burr grinder produces a better quality and more even grind while a ceramic burr is heat-resistant and produces less heat.

Put your coffee grinds in your container and add your ice cold water. Simply store it in your fridge for 12 to 16 hours, until it extracts.

Test after 12 hours to find if it is of a taste that you like and enjoy. If it is not. Test again after 2 or 3 hours.

When the taste hits the spot for you, filter out the coffee grounds. This is important as your coffee will continue to extract if your do not remove the grounds, and it will become overtly bitter and undrinkable.

You will end up with a better coffee than Starbucks as they extract their cold brew at a room temperature. You will be extracting at a much colder temperature and getting a better extraction of the low temperature compounds.

Putting Your Homemade Vanilla Sweet Cream Cold Brew Together

This is the fun part.

Pour your coffee into a glass with ice and slowly add your vanilla sweet cream as it drizzles and cascades down into your coffee and enjoy. 

Vanilla Sweet Cream Cold Brew Nutrition Facts

It is always a good thing to have your health at the forefront of your mind and to know how much sugar, fat, calories and caffeine are in your gourmet coffee drinks.

Of course,

how many are in each drink varies on the drink size. The best way to detail this is to present an easy-to-read table.

From the table above, the one drink I’d be wary of is the Trenta size, with my biggest concern the 320 mg per cup – not to mention the sugar content. (I stick to a keto diet, myself).

The recommended safe amount of caffeine per day is 400 mg per day. 320 mg in a single drink can easily blow you over that amount.

Read: Vanilla sweet cream cold foam

What To Add To Vanilla Sweet Cream Cold Brew – Customising Your Beverage

There is no need for you to be stuck for what to add to your tasty vanilla sweet cream cold brew coffee at home or at Starbucks.

This is not particularly a beverage that needs a sweetener added as the sweet cream does this very well. You can, if you want to, experiment with Stevia, or brown sugar syrup for more caramel-like flavor from the coffee.

Different sugars and sweeteners do bring a very different tasting coffee. Others you can try at home that are not available at Starbucks are honey and coconut sugar.

Coconut sugar would work well with alternative milks and creams to make the vanilla sweet cream and one that jumps to mind is coconut cream and coconut milk.

Using alternate milks also changes quite dramatically how your coffee will taste. At home, this works much better than the options at Starbucks as they don’t have coconut cream or another alternate non-dairy creamer.

Notably, changing the type of milk alters the texture of your drink. Nice options include soy, almond and oat milk.

Syrup, of course, using flavored simple syrups are great additions to your beverage to customise it to your exact liking. Personally, I suggest flavoring the cold brew coffee and not the vanilla sweet cream as this already is flavored. At home, you have an infinite choice, and are only really limited by the choice of flavored syrups that you find on Amazon, Walmart, eBay and Target.

At Starbucks you are limited to the 11 flavors of syrup that they have and the ones that will go well with a vanilla sweet cream cold brew coffee.

This narrows your choice down to just 4, which are:

• Hazelnut.
• Toffee nut.
• Caramel.
• Cinnamon Dolce Syrup.

This is not a drink that works well with toppings or powders unless you opt for whipped cream. In which case cinnamon powder or a sprinkling of cocoa would work very well. At home, you could go a step further here and decorate with chocolate shavings.

Frequently Asked Questions About Homemade Vanilla Sweet Cream Cold Brew

What Is Vanilla Sweet Cream Cold Brew Made Of?

Vanilla sweet cream cold brew is made from only 4 ingredients: 2% Milk, heavy cream, vanilla simple syrup and of course cold brewed coffee.

When you make your own, always pay attention to the chef’s principle of using ingredients of the highest quality. The better your ingredients, the better your coffee will be.

How Many Pumps Of Vanilla Are In A Vanilla Sweet Cream Cold Brew?

Vanilla sweet cream cold brew at Starbucks is available in their 4 standard sizes, Tall (12 Oz, 360 ml), Grande (16 Oz, 480 ml), Venti (24 Oz, 720 ml), Trenta (31 Oz, 930 ml). Each one has a different number of pumps of vanilla simple syrup.

The number of pumps of syrup is as follows:

• Tall 1 pump.
• Grande 2 pumps.
• Venti 3 pumps.
• Trenta 4 pumps.

Each pump of vanilla simple syrup has 5 grams of sugar and 10 calories. If you are ordering this drink it would be a good idea to order the sugar free vanilla syrup, particularly if you are ordering a Venti or Trenta sized drink.

Does Vanilla Sweet Cream Cold Brew Have Milk?

Yes,

while cold brew coffee does not have milk in it unless you request it. The vanilla sweet cream cold brew has milk as milk is used to make the sweat cream. It has further dairy from the heavy cream. For a free version request coconut cream (or milk) to be used. For your knowledge and awareness without dairy milk, the drink does not have the same texture.

What Coffee Does Starbucks Use For Their Cold Brew?

Starbucks use their breakfast blend to make their cold brew coffee. The breakfast blend by Starbucks is a blend of 100% Arabica coffee beans sourced from Africa and Latin America. The exact locations are a trade secret.

What Is The Sweetest Cold Brew At Starbucks?

Undoubtable the sweetest cold brew available at Starbucks is their Nitro cold brew. The brewing method creates a creamy and sweet coffee without the need for adding milk or sugar. It is very common to enjoy a nitro cold brew coffee as it is or by adding a shot or two of vanilla syrup.

Final Thoughts – Homemade Vanilla Sweet Cream Cold Brew

Learning and perfecting this homemade vanilla sweet cream cold brew coffee will bring you a very refreshing cup of coffee that you can enjoy year round, above all a very cool summer drink that really hits the spot.

Join our online coffee community on Facebook/Meta and share your coffee creations, customisations, recipes and photos. I love it when members share photos of the coffee that have made at home!

Derek Marshall

Coffee is love, it's more than love — it's a passion of mine. I've had the luck to have travelled and enjoyed the most exotic of coffee's and unique flavors, brewing methods and techniques of making the perfect coffee from Thai hill tribe coffee to Indonesian volcanic coffee, Malaysian coffee that comes in a tea bag and the array of flavors in Vietnam, from Vanilla to Orange to Coconut to Avocado to even salt coffee and the famous egg coffee. The best part of my coffee adventures is getting to mix with the locals over a nice brew and learning how they make it! I'm cited and referenced on Google Scholar for the topic of coffee.