ACP 064: Making Cold Brew Coffee Cocktails

Real time recording as my friends come over and create some fun coffee cocktails. This miiiiiiiight get silly.....

 

Cocktails we will create in this episode:
1) Bourbon and Cold Brew:
Just splash some DaVinci Gourmet Cold Brew Coffee Concentrate and water over your whiskey any way you take it
2) Lunchbox or ‘Cafe Disaronno’:
Inspired by "The Lunchbox" cocktail, using cold brew. The orange juice brings out the wonderful complimenting bakers chocolate specific to this cold brew concentrate. 0.5 oz DaVinci Gourmet Cold Brew Coffee Concentrate 1 oz Disaronno 4 oz orange juice Serve on ice with orange wedge garnish
3) Cafe Boulevardier:
0.25 oz DaVinci Gourmet Cold Brew Coffee Concentrate 1 oz bourbon 1 oz sweet vermouth 1 oz Campari Chill and stir with ice, serve 'up' with orange zest, cherry garnish optional
4) Cafe Cola:
Cynar Americano Cafe: 0.25 oz DaVinci Gourmet Cold Brew Coffee Concentrate 05 oz Cynar 4 oz cola
5) Cafe Sazerac:
0.125 (1/8th) oz DaVinci Gourmet Cold Brew Coffee Concentrate 2 oz Sazerac Rye 2 dashes Peychauds bitters Give glass an absinthe rinse, build cocktail in separate glass with ice, chill then strain into fresh glass. Garnish with lemon zest and peel.
6) Salty White Russian:
0.25 DaVinci Gourmet Hawaiian Salted Caramel 3 oz DaVinci Gourmet Cold Brew Coffee Concentrate (diluted) 1 oz Titos vodka 1 oz Baileys Served on ice, salted caramel treat on rim as garnish

Cold brew coffee cocktails! Obviously coffee goes great with bourbon, but what else? Listen in as Levi creates 6 cocktails with some of his closest friends.

TIME 2:20 - Who is the Kurt guy?
TIME 2:55 “Who drank all the Fernet? Who drank all the Baileys? ….Adam he makes my drinking look like childsplay”

TIME 4:35 This is where you drink the first cocktail, the first cocktail.

TIME 5:05 “We *slurrrrrr*…” “Did you eat all the ice cubes out?”

TIME 5:10 As you can tell by my inability to talk without slurring and recall what was actually in the cocktail, I was indeed smashed. That combo is something I will play with in the future - but for now - let’s meet my friend Danny the pilot….

TIME 5:45 “Check check, can you make more money if you turn the GAIN up?” Danny Blaha.

TIME 5:52 Danny and I drink together a lot, so naturally when he visited last weekend I had to make him this strange cocktail… also he brought a knife? No, that was just a butter knife.

TIME 6:00
Levi: What do you think of this cocktail? Danny, put down that knife.
Danny: The pain makes me know that life is real. Um, that’s a good way to start?
Levi: yeah, it lets people know you have nothing to say at all. What do you think of this cocktail?
Danny: When you decided that you wanted to make it, I was a little concerned when you took Disaronno, cold brew coffee and orange juice out of your refrigerator. Um, it scared me a little bit.
Levi: I didn’t have Disaronno in my refrigerator, but yes I understand your fear.
Danny: Yeah. *Indistinguishable grunt* Like I said three flavors you just don’t think would go together. But I do think it tastes like one of those orange chocolate balls that you have to hit on a table and it splits into pieces. Maybe that was only cool in the 1990’s but there you go. It tastes good and it goes together, orange and chocolate it good.
Levi: orange and chocolate are amazing together. Orange and coffee are okay together but certainly most places don’t put those together. This is cold brew of course. I think Disaronno goes really well with coffee. I’ve made a similar cocktail with Disaronno, Almond syrup, espresso, shaken with milk and ice.
Danny: you make a lot of cocktails that are really bitter, that’s kind of your go to. I like this one because its NOT bitter. You put a lot of bitters into cocktails, its very common for you, but this doesn’t have that. I like your cocktails that are higher in citrus.
Levi: Joey my coworker teases me because for like 6 months I put lime into everything I made.
Danny: Do you cook it for 6 months? Because when you cook…. you definitely take your time.
Levi: you make it sound like I cook completely stoned, but really I just like to take a few days.
Danny: is it done cooking? Oh is it charcoal black now? Mmmm tasty.
Levi: get out of my house….

Time to try the Cafe Boulevardier. Which was actually the very first cocktail we built that day. When I am tasting I start with the more bitter and move to the sweeter. It’s hard for me to go from sweet to bitter, do you ever do tastings like this?

TIME 8:40
Cafe Boulevardier…
Levi: our first try, Kurt, wanna say what we got?
Kurt: We have ourselves the Negroni, Boulevardier, BREW-vardier? I don’t think that’s too bitter.
Levi: I’m not sure the coffee-note is the right note for this. Sweet enough. What is tough is all I taste is garlic from my lunch.
Kurt: I like the ending note, its all coffee.
Levi: We did 1 oz of sweet vermouth, 1 oz of Campari, 1 oz of bourbon, and then just a 1/4 oz of a cold brew super concentrate. Yeah right now this aftertaste is really great, should we do an orange zest or any herbal element like mint?
Kurt: I don’t think so, I think its done.
Levi: recipe #1 is done, its in the banks!
Kurt & Levi *CLAP*

TIME 13:30
Cafe Cola Cynar “big mistake”
Kurt: so its Cynar, cold brew,a nd Coke
Levi: the big mistake we had made?
Kurt: was adding white rum, then dark rum, all bad.
Levi: the big lesson here is to start simple, then layer in more flavors on top.
Kurt: yeah. So the recipe is 0.5 oz Cynar, 4 oz Coca-Cola, 0.25 oz cold brew.
Levi: on the nose its a lot of coffee, the Cynar and the Coke are balanced together. The cold brew again is the lingering aftertaste. BAM.

TIME 14:30
As I taste a drink I pay attention to the BIG categories in flavor: sweet/sour/bitter/umami/salt, then also very important is the “Exact-flavor.” There is ‘good’ verses ‘meeting the standard of identity.’ This Cafe Cola is such a simple recipe and I already knew about the idea of a “Cynar Cola,” its actually on the bottle of Cynar, so I used that recipe idea as a baseline. I also already knew I like Cold Brew and “Cola” SO we knew instantly this idea would work. Where we went wrong was trying to make it even more unique and adding rum…..
Also, I pay attention to temperature and texture of course.
Look, we saved you a painful step of experimentation! But if you do have a build on this, let me know what you found tasty.

TIME 16:15
Levi: I don’t know about you but between the note sleeping and closing down bars the last 2 nights, I’m pretty tired….
Kurt: we did a play on the Sazerac because we wanted to add some cold brew in to incorporate all the flavors. We have varying opinions on how much coffee to add at the moment, I think we are going to have to revisit this when we have the proper Sazerac Rye instead of Woodford Reserve Rye. We took down the Peychauds bitters from 4 drops to 2?
Levi: Let’s talk about this, we have been thinking about all these drinks, but we start from Googling a recipe to have a starting point. On this one specifically I thought the cocktail would be bitter enough and if we added a coffee flavor it would take it to a more bitter realm. Piece of advice - when you are making cocktails with friends always listen twice to their advice because there is usually a lot both said and ‘unsaid.’ If there is cold brew in a cocktail then it needs to be fairly apparent.
Kurt: We are like 2 hours into this session.
Levi: we started with brainstorming crazy ideas and wrote them all down. Then we did a grocery list. Then we talked through the brainstorming and groceries. I ate a bunch of garlic, then we did the grocery run,
Kurt:

19:05
Salty White Russian:
That moment when you realize you’ve been day drinking and are trying to explain things... This one was much harder to type up and talk about because, as mentioned, I had been day drinking allllll day. Then during production you can likely tell that I have been drinking along.

Cold Brew coffee used was a brand new launch from DaVinci Gourmet. To learn more visit DaVinciGourmet.com.

Music by “The Dirty Moogs” title - “Im Alright Instrumental”