I ran a microbiology lab that specifically tested for food borne illness causing bacteria.

Here’s a very recent attempt to assess the safety of cold brew coffee coming out of UGA. newswire.caes.uga.edu/…/cold-brew-coffee.html

These findings line up with earlier work such as this paper doing a general analysis of cold brew coffee and this Canadian government report on detected food borne pathogens in cold brew coffee..

The consensus I’m seeing is that cold brew coffee, especially when kept cold, is not a great environment for most food borne illness causing pathogens to thrive. Bacillus cereus and potentially botulism would have been more accurate choices.