#6 Developing Drinks
#3. Developing signature drinks: Turning creative concepts into beautiful drinks and using creativity and personal preference to your advantage. Prt 1
To shift a customer’s focus onto a beverage you love so much is to show them a part of you. There is a challenge in making a good coffee, but the real challenge is identifying your own brand from the crowd. I love the nobility of creativity and I think there is no better way to celebrate flavours than with custom drinks.
Getting the customer what they enjoy drinking is great. Getting the customer to drink something that’s a reflection of you is another matter entirely. In this column I want to break down some thoughts on drink creation, on how you don’t have to sell lolly water or compromise your artisanal side to get a good vibe. But coffee is just another drink and you do have to get your hands dirty and add a lil sugar syrup sometimes to your favorite light roast coffee to get a good result.
Lets get started.
The most straight forward form of a creative drinks development and arguably most controversial. The signature café, I would liken this to a fine dining experience at a ‘name’ restaurant. An example that comes to mind is Gordon Ramsey the restaurant named after the celebrated chef. If you go to Gordon Ramsey you don’t modify the food, you enjoy the fare he’s developed and examine the experience food and vibe as a whole. Its his restaurant you aren’t there to have your favourite meal, you are there to try one of a number of dishes developed by the meaestro himself. This is a blunt creative concept, but if you approach it with an open mind a good one. These venues work best when their menu’s come out guns blazing, no compromises. It takes a strong coffee mind and often a brave one to attempt this because you do risk alienation, in the coffee world two specific ones come to mind.
Maxwell Collonna and Smalls: very much a signature coffee experience built by 2 time UK barista Champion and 5th place World Barista Champ 2015 Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood.
Upon ordering an espresso you will be treated to a lungo, a 19gr shot of coffee run on a coffee machine that’s been dropped to 6 bars to pull more sweetness out at a long coffee brew ratio of 1:3.
Its super sweet and roasted to correspond with their Flagship cafes needs. This is clearly not the old Italian thick, caramel –like espresso but neither is it something you see in alot of specialty shops either. Its Maxwell’s favourite way of drinking espresso and when you come here the coffee menu and coffee selection has all been curated and endorsed by Baths finest. Due to the pump pressure on the machine being dropped you will also be disappointed if you request a ‘proper’ espresso (brew ratio 1:2) because its literally impossible. The coffee roast, machine specs and recipe will only cater for these lungo badboys here.
Another interesting example of this is the Iconic Norwegian café: Tim Wendelboe. What a ripper, upon entering this small and very fashionable space we are hit with a signature experience. This is 2005 world champion Barista Tim Wendelboe’s baby and the drinks are built accordingly to his tastes. Highly recommended is the iced cappuccino. A delicious and well blended mix between a high end non alcoholic Irish coffee and a slushy. Its been lightly blended with ice and then strained into a martini glass with a light dusting of cinnamon. Also on the bar is a cascara made out of coffee fruits sourced from Tim’s favourite Colombian farm Finca Tamara.
But the real talking point here and ultimate ‘name’ café move is the lack of pour overs. Yes that’s correct. Tim Wendelboe has no pour over coffee brewers, no v60’s, batch-brewers or Chemex in the building. This venue only serves Aeropress. The Aeropress’ ability to achieve an extremely even extraction due to its almost instant saturation of the entire dry coffee dose in and its incredibly stable and rapid extraction of the yield out has been widely documented and makes it very easy to get the most out of your beans on Aeropress, Or at least strong consistency. This preference for an efficient piece of gear that delivers consistently obviously being displayed here and showcases Wendelboe’s own sensibilities. It demonstrates through his bar what he as a barista values most in coffee.
Of course just like with Maxwell Colonna and Smalls people wanting an artesian v60 brewed up before their eyes will leave disappointed.
But then, I did say that this kind of signature drinks menu was controversial.
Sometimes taste is not a reason to develop a drink at all, having a ‘house way’ can show off your cultural heritage or background as a business. At St Ali, a café close to my heart (I worked at Clement coffee for a time) the business is built around specialty coffee but with a liberal dollup of traditional Melbourne/Italian ownership. These sensibilities are apparent in every aspect of Ali and Co including little hints of this Melbourne/Lygon street past within the drinks menu.
At Ali upon ordering a cappacino you will receive a Baristachino. In Melbourne Capps are typically served with a dusting of chocolate ontop, its so proliferate that Ali manage to stand out by making their chinos the old fashioned way, full creamy in a 6oz cup with soft fluffy milk capped in a dome. The bigger the dome the better, this milk is too thick for latte art so its usually got a heart with a flat bottom, we used to call it beonce booty. An interesting and surprisingly simple signature move that few in the Melbourne scene can copy for fear of a backlash of customer pressure. But then this is Ali, coffee made perfect right?
Indeed the concept of the house drink is a staple of many a cocktail bar and is considered less remarkable within the nightime drinks industries.
The El Presidente, a Rum, Vermouth based cocktail was created in Cuba sometime in the prohibition era. Its origins and creation are reasonably certain to be the work of Jockey Club bartender Eddie Woelke, the Jockey Club was in Havana and its speculated the drink was named after Gerado Machado of Cuba (El Presidente).
It didn’t become a staple drink until it earned a place at Club El Chico in New York run by a Spanish migrant. The drink by this stage had a special Cuban rum used in its creation and a specific El Chico recipe. In much the same way the Baristachino became the Melbourne St Ali signature milk coffee the El Chico version of El Presidente became the ‘standard’ recipe for the drink.
I love drink development stories like this, showing a creative readaptation of a drink is much like covering a famous song, and just like with covering a famous song if you can make it interesting enough you can make it your own. Here is one of my favorite stories about a drink that draws inspiration from an altogether different cocktail:
Simon Toohey of NSW based Mr Black Coffee Liqueur once showed me a variation of an espresso martini that was deliberately getting back to a cappuccino theme more than the ol espresso martini ever did. Its one of the greatest coffee cocktails I’ve ever had and it wasn’t based on a coffee drink at all!
His theory was that a cappuccino is a soft, creamy and ultimately fluffy beverage and to replicate these characteristics in a cocktail he took the concept of a Brandy Alexander and tweaked it accordingly.
Below is a basic comparison of the three drinks and we can see when stripped back to their basic components they do indeed share many attributes. Their similarities identify them as fair game to cross pollinate with each other into drink hybrid territory.
In fairness it must be noted the Espresso Martini was developed not as a celebration of coffee flavours but to keep party revellers awake well into the night. Of course espresso martini was developed well before party drugs made the need for espresso to fuel late nights redundant. The common misconception is that the drink is centered around coffee tones when in reality it has way more vanilla flavour and is comprised typically of poorly made commercial coffees and syrups.
By this you can clearly see Simon Toohey’s drawn the conclusion that a more successful cappuccino themed cocktail would be based around a drink that shared more of its common traits with similar textured drink as inspiration. This sort of creative drinks development can only happen after years in the industries and an encyclopaedic knowledge of drinks both coffee based and alcoholic is needed to be able to recognize similarities running through different drinks.
Sometimes themes can be the linking aspects to drinks.In my 2017 Australian Barista Nationals performance I used a drink as a metaphor for a wider coffee concept I was demonstrating. I chose to explore balance and the interplay between Acidity, Sweetness and Bitterness within drinks. The coffee I was using was a washed Burundi from the long miles coffee project called Munyinya. Munyinya had tasting notes of a high black berry acidity, a creamy cherry soda sweetness and a rich mulled wine finish.
I was trying to demonstrate how we perceive a drink more positively if all three of these elements have a hand in the beverage, for the espresso I had achieved a strong level of balance by boosting an initial impression of clean singing sweetness while having a heavy juicy weight.
For the signature drink I didn’t just want to show another drink with me explaining my choices leading up to what I perceived as well balanced, I had done that in espresso course. I wanted to break down the three elements of Acidity, Sweetness and bitterness and show how their interplay was crucial. To demonstrate my concept of balance I chose to not just allude to it in the finished drink tastewise but to visually represent it aswell.
I created a multilayered beverage with a thick layer of lemon/honey infused egg microfoam on the top. Followed by sweet ingredients of grenadine and gum syrup to boost the velvety texture finally blackberry vincotti to introduce a final aftertaste that worked with my coffee.
Upon bringing the glass up to your nose the aromas would hit you with the lighter aromatics of the espresso, honey and citrus. The sip that followed the aroma assessment was the opposite end of the spectrum, the sweetness, it covered mid palate and back palate. All the bitterness and sweetness and heavy syrupy finish without the initial acidity.
Two ends of the spectrum acidic aromas and sweet and bitter liquids, the trick was in the fact that the microfoam was almost impossible to reach. As you tipped the glass back to taste the foam physically separated the three elements of balance perfectly. The liquid was unbalanced at this point, without the boosted acidity of the foam. The grenadine and vincotti boosted bitterness and sweetness beyond the Munyinya’s own range and tipped the scale. to rebalance I then instructed the judges to swill the napoleon brandy glasses containing the liquid until the foam had mixed and created a finished product.
You can see by my last example how we can use a single creative drink to prove and demonstrate a concept to a consumer. Writing this down I realized it gets complicated and wordy but communicating to a customer who may not care as much as you do about the science is easy when the drink is interactive and visually demonstrative.
To finish I would like to go back to Simon Toohey for one last delicious drink, this one is another alcoholic coffee based signature drink but its premise wasn’t to prove a concept. It was to be a ‘third wave espresso martini’ a drink that can celebrate a specific set of traits favored by modern coffee drinkers. Its full of fruits, light body and delicate acidity and aromas. It’s also not as dairy heavy as the martini/brandy hybrid previously discussed and seems to be a cross between a sassy Christmas punch and a filter brew.
Its got a Kenyan batch brew as its base. This ones has been brewed by in a pot at a litre so plenty of batch, as this cools it will bring out more sweetness and more of that gorgeous orange citrus. Combining with the batch brew is Mr Black Coffee Liquier, this is effectively a cold brewed toddy done in a huge vat with a dry 60% non aged spirit. Like what you would use to start off a Gin before adding botanicals.
The other components are tried and tested beverages that work well typically with fruits. We have Aperol Luxetico some soda and a squeeze of lemon just to push that citrus home.
Keeping this drink simple has worked brilliantly in this case: if Soda and Aperol work so well when directly added to cut fruits (as in punch, Aperol spritz etc) then why not use them for a coffee drink that has Kenyan coffee that exhibits fruit focused flavors? Remember with everything in this post we had a single central ingredient as a starting point and it was always something enjoyable to drink already. A good base is important for the other ingredients to respond off. See Blog #3 Balance: the basics for more on responding ingredients and base line components.
To shift a customer’s focus onto a beverage you love so much is to show them a part of you. That is what we are doing each time we change a drink to suit our own preference’s and then offer it in a menu. Be it with specific in house cups, cocktail inspiration or via problem-solving a theory, at the end of the day coffees come and go but special experiences at cafes do not. Try and create these were-ever you can.
The only thing the bar has consistently year after year is you and your distinct and personal approach to drinks. So shouldn’t that be the thing you try and showcase?