Today, we're talking about this, the espresso tonic.
Now this is a drink, has made people feel
a whole bunch of different ways.
It's made journalists who don't do good journalism go,
ah, how disgusting, how hipster,
who could possibly want a bitter coffee and bitter tonic?
But it has made the coffee industry,
the specialty coffee industry as a whole pretty excited.
It's a fun, easy to make drink.
You can serve in cafes, it's great for summer.
Today we're gonna look at it in a bit more detail.
We're gonna make our own version from scratch
to see what we can learn as we chase
the ultimate espresso tonic.
In terms of history,
this was certainly put on the cultural map,
the first person I heard about doing this was Anne Lunell,
at Koppi Coffee in Sweden,
fantastic coffee roasters you should definitely check out.
I don't know if they can claim to have invented it,
or someone at their staff party claimed to invent it,
but they popularized it.
People in the coffee industry saw it served there,
tasted it, picked it up, put it on menus,
and it spread around the world.
It's really down to ingredients.
You're gonna need good tonic,
and good espresso, and a lot of ice.
Don't get the Schweppes out for this one.
Seriously, don't drink Schweppes tonic.
There's just so many more delicious tonics
in the world than Schweppes,
so sorry Schweppes, but no.
Here, we've gone pretty traditional.
It's a good single origin espresso.
It's a Fever-Tree, Indian tonic water.
And the result--
Is pretty good.
You get like a little tickle of coffee,
some nice citrus kind of botanicals come through.
Definitely some citric acid in here.
And the coffee's bitterness is almost switched off
by the presence of the tonic's bitterness.
You get that nice little tonic bite in there.
It's not overwhelming, but it's very pleasant.
But considering it's espresso on ice,
it's not particularly bitter.
Now certainly a darker roast coffee
is gonna taste much more bitter in this drink.
And I think this certainly suits
light to medium espresso style roasts
better than it suits darker espresso roasts.
But your mileage may vary, it's up to you what you like.
Mm.
The sugar from that tonic syrup is present
but it's not overwhelmingly sweet.
It's really nicely balanced.
Overall it's a good drink.
You can taste the coffee,
it's complimented well by the tonic.
But can we do better?
Can we do better?
That's the question.
And to start with,
well we're gonna have to make some tonic syrup.
A lot of credit for this episode
is gonna go to Dave Arnold in New York.
He's a chef, mixologist, kind of bartender-y, but not,
but he's a chef, but he's a food scientist,
but he's a podcaster, and an author.
And you should just check out Cooking Issues as a podcast
and you'll have a good time.
Maybe give it a couple episodes just to settle in.
Now his book, "Liquid Intelligence",
contains a phenomenal gin and tonic recipe,
and we're gonna take that all the way back
to the beginning, which starts with a cinchona bark syrup.
That's our base of our tonic.
And I just wanna taste that,
pure and neutral against coffee,
and see where we go from there.
Now we have some advantages, in that I have a bunch of CO2
here in the studio so I can carbonate things as I go.
I don't need to go and buy sparkling water.
And we can look at carbonating
with and without coffee in the mix.
So let's get on and make some syrup.
So to make the syrup I'm using Dave Arnold's recipe,
and I'm gonna do a half batch.
I'm gonna take 10 grams of cinchona bark chips.
I'm gonna grind them in a hand grinder
down to a fine powder.
I'm gonna add that to 375 grams of water.
Combine them in a little sauce pan,
bring them to the boil
and leave them to simmer for five minutes.
Let it cool down and then strain it through a strainer,
and then strain it again through a coffee filter.
Here I'm gonna use a V60 filter.
And you'll end up with a pretty clear looking liquid.
Check the weight of the liquid,
and top it up with water back to 375 grams of weight.
Now we're gonna take 375 grams of sugar
and combine it with the cinchona infusion
to create a very simple cinchona syrup.
That's gonna be the basis of our tonic water.
So we're back,
and here's where things get really interesting.
Here we've got the Fever-Tree tonic, 140 grams of that.
Here we've got the homemade tonic,
slightly different color from the cinchona bark.
What this is gonna do is super interesting.
By comparing and contrasting one,
I'll be able to tell what kind of sugar levels
I'm aiming for.
I know exactly how much sugar is in here
so if it's as sweet, too sweet, not as sweet as this,
I've got some idea of where the sugar level
in commercial tonic is, that's good.
Secondly, this has a lot more aromatics
and botanicals in it, this does not.
When you taste two things like this side-by-side,
you'll start to ignore what they have in common
and only really taste the differences between them.
So it should amplify what's in here that I like
or maybe don't like,
and might wanna change for a final recipe over here.
This does contain one more thing, an acidulant.
Now I'm recreating according to Dave Arnold's recipe
lime juice with none of limes flavor.
Essentially it's a 6% acid concentration
split between citric and malic acid.
Those are the two primary acids in lime juice.
In addition, that would be succinic acid in lime juice,
but we're not gonna use that 'cause it's harder to get,
and I don't think necessarily all that useful
for what we wanna do in general.
But enough talk, let's get on with some tasting.
So let's start with the Fever-Tree again.
Very pleasant.
Really quite dominant citrus botanicals in there,
which is interesting.
Let's taste this without those.
Hmm.
That is interesting to taste.
A little bit more acid than in here.
So I know that I need to use a little bit less acid
when it comes to my preferred recipe.
In truth, I don't think it's as sweet
as this one over here is,
so I might use a little bit more syrup in my recipe.
And what's really nice
is that I can taste the cinchona bark.
I can taste that sort of tonic syrup in there quite clearly.
And it's still doing that thing where it kind of negates
the bitterness of coffee,
or at least compliments it in a way
that is extremely pleasant.
Going back to this, it's like Sprite,
it's lemons and limes.
It's all you really taste, really heavy on those.
Now with coffee, personally I like orange
as a botanical more than I perhaps like lemon or lime.
So what I'm thinking here
is that I definitely wanna have some citrus in this drink.
I think it's a really nice aspect of this one
that I definitely wanna recreate.
But I think I might go oranges and lemons,
a little bit softer and warmer,
and let that coffee still have room to be itself.
I think it's gonna be really easy
to be a little bit heavy handed with the citrus in this,
and have it just be quite dominant over the coffee,
and that would be a terrible mistake.
And now I need a bit more tonic syrup in there as a ratio.
So I'm gonna up that in this next batch.
And I know I need a little bit less acid.
This is a little acid heavy.
It's like you've dosed lime juice into tonic water.
You need some acid,
and you'll find typically citric acid only used in here.
There is something pleasant
about the malic acid addition in this one,
it's just a little bit dominant for me.
First thing I'll do is essentially halve it
in the next round.
So here's the plan.
I'm gonna do half the acidulant in here,
half the sort of lime acid in this version,
and 20% more syrup, that might be a bit heavy.
But I will try it, I think 20% is about right.
In addition, I'm gonna get some orange zest,
and some lemon zest, I'm gonna infuse it
into the tonic water before carbonation,
see if I can give it a little bit more
of that kind of citrus kick,
and then we'll make another round.
Very exciting times.
So again, classic Fever-Tree over here,
it's from freshly carbonated citrus additional,
slightly sweeter, slightly less acidic,
homemade syrup over here.
Let's have a taste.
Set the standard, set the benchmark for today.
Interesting.
Now the advantage I have here
doing it this way is freshness.
I freshly zested an orange and a lemon,
half a gram of each into my batch of tonic water,
which is about 300 mils total
as a sort of single small batch.
Very present from a very short infusion
maybe two minutes under pressure, but very pretty.
Now interestingly I would say,
we're actually a little less sweet still over here
than we are over here, also a little less acidic.
But there's a bit more cinchona kick in this
than this one here.
So I need more syrup, which is interesting,
and relatively easy to do in a batch.
The aromatics are very enjoyable.
Very pretty when they're kinda fresh that way.
Maybe it's additional sweetness,
but there's almost a sort of suggestion of vanilla in here.
God, that's a that's a pretentious sentence isn't it?
A suggestion of vanilla.
We're getting pretty comparable,
if not more delicious than one of the best tonics
you can buy on the planet.
It's reassuring.
But again, we're trying to build this to work with coffee
rather than to work with gin.
I'm not gonna try and enter the tonic business anytime soon.
It's a bit crowded these days.
But, enjoyable.
Now the one other topic that I do wanna address
in this video is carbonation.
Now, Dave Arnold in his gin and tonic recipe
is pretty obsessed with carbonation.
And so for that reason,
he's making a kind of clarified lime juice,
or replicating lime juice just by building it
out of water and acids,
because he doesn't want any pieces of lime in the drink,
because those will act as nucleation points.
Those will cause the CO2 to come out a solution.
And the reason that gin and tonics
are never as carbonated as you want them to be
is one, presence of lime juice and two, presence of ice.
So what I'm interested in is essentially
carbonating a very cold finished drink and trying that.
So what we're gonna do is this,
we're gonna pull our shot of espresso,
and we're going to strain it through paper
to get rid of any sort of particulate matter inside it,
anything suspended in there.
Anything that would create a nucleation point.
And then we're gonna combine that with our tonic syrup,
touch of saline, with a little bit of our acidulant,
and with some water,
and then we're gonna carbonate and chill that down.
That way we should get maximum crisp fizziness.
We should be able to serve it nice and cold
without needing ice in the glass
which would cause the fizz to kind of disappear,
and the drink to go flat quickly.
And we should be able to have a crisp, acidic, bubbly,
delicious, citrusy coffee flavored espresso tonic.
Let's give that a go.
So here we are, we now have an ice cold glass.
We have some espresso tonic that has been chilled,
carbonated, and is ready to go.
Now, to get the sort of citrus levels that I wanted
I kind of had to go back to the beginning
and infuse it into the syrup itself.
That way I could use a good amount of citrus
and it be well distributed across the whole syrup.
So, it makes life a little easier that way.
This espresso has some foaming agents
I'm gonna be a little bit careful
with this when we're pouring.
So here it is, espresso tonic from scratch.
That is delicious.
The texture on that is really nice.
That syrupyness is there, the acid is really nice,
the sweetness is not overwhelming.
It's really sort of squashed down the bitterness.
Just a little citrus aromatic to make it complex and fun.
You don't have to go the whole hog.
You don't have to lose your mind
and carbonate everything.
Though having no ice in there
gives it an extra tickle of carbonation.
Like it's really good.
Mm.
I've had quite a lot of coffee so far
and I wanna keep drinking this.
This is really super good.
The thing for me, the lesson here is one,
this recipe is delicious
and I'll make sure it's on my website,
which I'll talk about in a second.
But two, this was really easy.
You have the one ingredient
that's a little bit tricky to get,
but a Google search will get you there.
But as a process to make a drink like this from scratch,
to make something as good as is available commercially
but have so much more flexibility.
You can tune this into your coffee.
Whether you're a cafe or you're at home,
you could build a custom tonic
around a particular coffee really easily.
This is just like an Ecuadorian single estate coffee,
it's really delicious,
it's got a kind of milk chocolate
through a slight peachiness here.
And so it works really well
with just a little lemon and orange in there.
But if you're using a Kenyan coffee,
you could get away with using lemon grass,
or some pink peppercorns,
or some other interesting botanicals in your tonic mix.
So they're there, and they're subtle,
and they're interesting, but it is delicious.
The full recipe, the whole breakdown, the techniques,
all of that kind of stuff, including guidance on when
and where you might wanna add different botanicals.
Well, that's on my website.
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So that's it, that is my espresso tonic recipe.
That's my kind of approach to this whole thing.
I'd be really interested to know
if you've built your own syrup at some point.
If you do that all the time,
if you've got a cafe or somewhere like that,
that does this as a standard,
I'd love to see what you're doing differently
to what I was doing.
Let me know if this tempts you into trying it.
Let me know your results.
Let me know how it goes.
Let me know if you've never tried espresso tonic
because it just sounded too weird,
but I promise you it's really good.
Love to hear from you all down in the comments below,
but for now I'll say thank you so much for watching,
and I hope you have a great day.