Cocktails

Four drinks, both coffees.

Coffee is not only a morning drink. Every one of these is built on the same gear as the pour-over — a press, a dripper, an AeroPress. None of them needs an espresso machine.

Start here

Three ways to make it strong enough

A cocktail needs coffee two to five times stronger than you would drink from a cup. Which one you make is not about convenience — each pulls something different out of the bean.

AeroPress concentrate

1:3

The closest thing to espresso you can make without a machine. Short, thick, and still hot-extracted, so the sweetness and body survive.

  1. 20 g of coffee, ground finer than you would for a pour-over — closer to table salt.
  2. 60 g of water at 92.5 °C.
  3. Stir for 10 seconds, steep for 1 minute, then press slowly over about 30 seconds.
  4. Cool it before it goes anywhere near a drink. Warm coffee thins a cocktail.
Yield
About 50 ml
Use it for
Stirred and shaken drinks

French press cold concentrate

1:5

Cold and slow rounds the coffee off and drops the acidity, which suits the sweeter drinks. It also keeps five days, so it is the one to make ahead.

  1. 100 g of coffee, coarse, in the press.
  2. 500 g of cold water. Stir once so nothing sits dry.
  3. Lid on, 14 hours in the fridge.
  4. Press gently, then pour it through a paper filter. The paper is what makes it clear rather than silty.
Yield
About 380 ml
Use it for
Tall drinks, and anything you are making more than two of

Flash-chilled pour-over

1:12 onto ice

Brewed hot and cooled fast, so the acidity is still there. Cold brew would flatten exactly the notes Wineberry is worth drinking for.

  1. 25 g of coffee, same grind as the hot recipe.
  2. 150 g of ice in the carafe, underneath the dripper.
  3. 300 g of water at 92.5 °C, poured as usual.
  4. It lands on the ice and chills as it brews. Use it the same day.
Yield
About 250 ml
Use it for
The tonic, and anything where the fruit is the point
The drinks
Garapa

Garapa Old Fashioned

Spirit-forward, stirred, no shortcuts.

AeroPress concentrate
  • 45 ml aged cachaça
  • 15 ml bourbon
  • 22 ml AeroPress concentrate, cooled
  • 7 ml demerara syrup
  • 2 dashes orange bitters

Stir over ice until it is properly cold. Strain over one large cube. Express an orange peel over the top and drop it in.

Garapa is sugarcane juice, and cachaça is distilled sugarcane juice. That is the whole idea of this drink — the spirit and the coffee come from the same plant. The bourbon is there for vanilla and oak, not for volume.

Garapa

Coffee Caipirinha

The national drink, with the coffee doing the sweetening.

French press cold concentrate
  • 60 ml cachaça
  • 22 ml cold concentrate
  • 15 ml fresh lime juice
  • 15 ml cane syrup
  • 2 dashes saline, optional

Shake hard with crushed ice and pour it in unstrained. Lime wheel.

Keep the lime honest. Garapa already tastes of sugarcane juice with lime, so the citrus is echoing the coffee rather than leading. Push it further and it turns into a sour and the corn sweetness disappears.

Garapa

Molasses Highball

The easy one. Scales to a room full of people.

French press cold concentrate
  • 45 ml aged cachaça
  • 30 ml cold concentrate
  • 7 ml molasses syrup
  • 60–90 ml soda water

Build over ice, top with soda, stir once. Orange peel.

Soda, not tonic. Quinine fights the floral and custardy side of this coffee, and those are the parts worth keeping.

Wineberry

Wineberry Coffee Tonic

Bright, long, and the one to drink before dinner rather than after.

Flash-chilled pour-over
  • 60 ml flash-chilled Wineberry
  • 120 ml tonic water
  • 10 ml grapefruit or orange juice
  • grapefruit wedge

Fill a tall glass with ice. Tonic first, coffee poured slowly over the back of a spoon so it sits in layers for a moment. Stir at the table.

Here the quinine helps. Wineberry is red berries, blackberry and wine, and tonic pushes all of that forward instead of arguing with it. This is the one to put next to the Old Fashioned — the two coffees could not taste less alike.

Measures are in millilitres to match the brewing recipes. All four scale up cleanly except the Old Fashioned, which is worth stirring one at a time. Drink them the way you would drink anything with cachaça in it — slowly, and not on an empty stomach.

Back to the coffee itself? The pour-over