I thought I had posted this before. But went looking for it, and couldn’t find it. So here you go. A visual guide to different drinks on the average cafe menu. Some rarer than others…
Via Coffeenate.com
coffee recipes
Mix your drinks: Coffee and alcohol
I dabbled with coffee beer a while back (and more recently I made a visit to the brewery who put together the Giraffe beer I tried before my own little experiment).
But don’t let my experiments deter you from what is actually a much more appropriate approach to mixing a stimulant and depressant than vodka and Red Bull.
Image Source: Open Windows
You don’t need to polarise coffee and alcohol on your daily schedule.
Here’s an interesting looking recipe from Cafe Grumpy – it was used in a coffee cocktail competition, though I had to pull this from my Google Reader because the site appears to no longer exist…
The Italian Royal Family Punch
1/2 oz lemon
3/8 oz Passion syrup
1 oz red wine sorbet
3/4 oz coffee concentrate
1/2 oz Zucca
1/2 oz Smith and Cross Rum
3/4 oz English Harbour 5 year
Shake it up & top with scoop of sorbet
The coffee concentrate used a Chemex brewed Yirgacheffe.
“I was able to play with the coffee concentrate a little more, and found that it lacked the acidity that I was looking for, so I took a couple of extra steps and they resulted in a truly wonderful base to work from. I blended and iced a Chemex batch to bring out more of the pleasant acidity that Ethiopian coffees are known for, as well as left the concentrate unfiltered. Normally the coffee would pass through both a paper filter as well as a cloth pad, but I cut out that step. Straining through a french press screen, I found so many more flavors present than we saw with just the filtered concentrate. When the resulting coffee from these two methods were blended together, we were ready to move forward.”
There are some more conventional coffee cocktail recipes here, and some other coffee recipes (including some interesting looking hot drinks and cocktails) here, and some more from The Hairpin, that all look a whole lot more palatable than home made coffee beer.
Got any interesting coffee related beverages worth sharing? Hit up the comments.
Coffee Infographic: 50 ways to drink your java
There are many ways to enjoy a coffee, and many ways to ruin good coffee by trying to enjoy it… while this infographic struggles with some basic english, it provides a bunch of new drink varieties for you to google.
50 types of Italian coffee: espresso, cappuccino and many more by Charming Italy
Coffee Infographic Friday: A Dry Cappuccino
Do you know what a dry cappuccino is – it’s one with airy foam rather than microfoam. I can’t understand why you’d want that.
Here’s a handy infographic from Flickr user Nyoin.
Coffee Infographic Friday: A visual guide to popular drinks
While the infographic I posted a couple of weeks ago went down the pie graph path for explaining the content of some standard (and some rare) coffee fare – this one sticks to the basics to make sure you get your drinks right first time, every time.
From lokeshdhakar.com, where there are heaps more.
The definitive guide to Turkish Coffee
I know. I know. I said Greek and Turkish coffee were exactly the same. They are. And I’ve already posted a how to on Greek Coffee. But then this Turkish guy named Mustafa Arat from Turkish Coffee World wrote this guide for Bean Scene. And I thought “hey, you can’t have too much good information about coffee.
Cool fact about coffee: The word for “breakfast” in Turkish means “before coffee”.
Image Credit: Bean Scene
Here’s a quick history of Turkish Coffee (skipping over its discovery in Ethiopia, and initial brewing methods:
“Eventually its [coffee’s] fame reached the center of Ottoman cuisine in Istanbul, where the imperial cooks and the metropolitan elites had a tradition of bringing together elements of regional cuisines from across the empire. It was a place to experiment and invent new dishes before they were served to the Sultan. Here they developed what we know today as Turkish coffee. Coffee beans were roasted over a fire, ground into a powder using flourmills, then mixed with water and cooked slowly over ashes. The result was a thick, syrupy and aromatic beverage that was delicious.”
Now. Onto the good stuff…
According to Arat Turkish coffee:
- Remains on the palate longer than any other type of coffee due to its velvet-like texture.
- Remains hot for a long time because of the foam, which acts as a lid for several minutes after coffee has been poured.
- Cools much more slowly than other varieties of coffee as it is served in thin porcelain cups, thus prolonging the drinking pleasure.
- Has an unforgettable flavour thanks to the thick, syrupy consistency that stimulates the taste buds.
- Is thicker and more aromatic than other kinds of coffee.
His guide can be found at Bean Scene. It’s pretty similar to mine. But worth a read.
I’m going to try making some – and then I’ll post a video of the results.
It’s hot. Eat an iced coffee…
Here’s a decadent summer coffee recipe to keep the heat at bay. Some experts say you should actually drink hotter coffee in the summer – there’s some sort of science that is meant to back that up. But I say “these look amazing”…
The recipe calls for “Vietnamese Filtered Coffee” – but I reckon any filter method will do the job.
Coffee Infographic Friday: What’s in your favourite cuppa?
So you’ve offered to make coffee for a party or something – and disaster. Somebody orders an Eiskaffe – or something exotic. Have no fear. Consult this handy poster.
Found here.
How to make authentic Greek/Turkish Coffee
I had the pleasure of travelling through Greece and Turkey in September 2010 – and one of the lowlights of the trip was the coffee. Every cafe we discovered in both countries proudly served Nescafe Instant. One cafe even served cappuccinos that turned out to be one of those Nescafe satchels. At one trendy looking coffee bar I ordered a capuccino – only to be served an iced coffee with cream that was made on a shot that was poured for about a minute, using coffee grounds from an overfilled doser (that had obviously been ground hours ago). It was terrible.
But there was good coffee to be found – especially if you were prepared to brave the Turkish Coffee experience, or the Greek Coffee experience. They’re exactly the same – just geographically bound (and don’t make the mistake of ordering one when you’re in the other’s country…).
I had the pleasure of a “how to” session with a lovely Greek lady named Mima, who hosted our group for a lunch in her house.
Here’s what you’ll need:
- Finely ground coffee
- A saucepan, or ideally, a little Turkish coffee pot
- A gas burner or stove.
- Sugar. Lots of sugar.
- A stirring spoon. There’s lots of stirring.
Basically you are trying to make coffee that is almost toffee.
You start by measuring the amount of water you want for your cup.
Then you add two and a half teaspoons of sugar to your heating water.
And two and a half teaspoons of very finely ground coffee.
Then you stir. And stir. And stir. Forty times clockwise, then forty times anti-clockwise.
You wait for the coffee to visibly thicken – like the first sign that sugar is caramelising.
Then you serve it immediately.
