Four drinks, both coffees.

Coffee is not only a morning cup. All four of these are zero-proof — no alcohol in any of them — and every one is built on the same gear as the pour-over: a press, a dripper, an AeroPress. None needs an espresso machine.

Start here

Three ways to make it strong enough

A drink over ice needs coffee two to five times stronger than you would pour into a cup, or the ice and the mixer wash it out. 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 ice. Warm coffee melts the cube and thins the drink.
Yield
About 50 ml
Use it for
Short drinks, stirred or shaken

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 on the rocks

Short, stirred, served like a spirit. Zero-proof.

AeroPress concentrate
  • 60 ml AeroPress concentrate, cooled
  • 10 ml demerara syrup
  • 20 ml cold water
  • orange peel

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

An Old Fashioned is sugar, dilution and orange oil around something strong. Here the coffee is the strong thing — Garapa's molasses and sugarcane are what the bourbon used to bring, and the orange does the rest. Drink it slowly; it is more coffee than it looks.

Garapa

Coffee Caipirinha

The national drink, with the coffee doing the sweetening.

AeroPress concentrate
  • 60 ml sugarcane juice, cold
  • 30 ml AeroPress concentrate, cooled
  • 15 ml fresh lime juice
  • 1 pinch salt, optional

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

Cachaça is distilled sugarcane juice, so the swap writes itself: the juice, not the spirit. Garapa is the Portuguese for sugarcane juice — this is the coffee in the drink it was named after. Frozen cane juice from a Brazilian or Asian grocer is fine; thaw and chill it. Without it, 15 ml of cane syrup and 45 ml of cold water. Keep the lime honest, or it turns into a sour and the corn sweetness disappears.

Garapa

Molasses Soda

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

French press cold concentrate
  • 60 ml cold concentrate
  • 10 ml molasses syrup
  • 90–120 ml soda water
  • orange peel

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. Make the concentrate the day before and this is a jug, not a recipe.

Wineberry

Wineberry 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 Garapa on the rocks — the two coffees could not taste less alike.

Measures are in millilitres to match the brewing recipes. All four scale up cleanly except the first, which is worth stirring one at a time. There is no alcohol in any of them, so none of them needs an evening — the tonic is a good afternoon.

Back to the coffee itself? The pour-over