How about Coffee Lemonade?

I still remember my first espresso years ago. It was at the Colombia restaurant on St. Armand’s Circle on Siesta Key (Sarasota, Florida). It arrived with a thin slice of lemon. Now, it turns out, baristas have taken the lemon with your coffee thing a big step farther. How about coffee lemonade? Eater reports that you need to try coffee lemonade.

If life hands you lemons – and iced coffee – well, then you’re primed to join the throngs obsessing right now over iced coffee lemonade. The acidic, sunshiney flavor combo rose from a few quiet sleeper cells to a flash food blog phenom, all when bowl-cuisine expert Lukas Volger Instagrammed an unusual beverage this past June. It was an Almond Palmer iced coffee lemonade served by Stand Coffee at Brooklyn, New York’s weekly Smorgasburg outdoor food market, and suddenly everyone wanted a sip.

The beverage, says Stand co-owner Bryan Hasho, is “nothing fancy.” Built of lemon and vanilla simple syrup, cold brew coffee, and a splash of almond milk over ice, the drink has been on offer beyond Smorgasburg, at Stand’s mobile coffee setup, and at their Manhattan coffee bar inside the Meatpacking District’s Samsung Experience building since Stand’s debut in March 2015.

As new and exciting as this sounds there is a longer history of coffee and lemons. Although both coffee and lemons were expensive and hard to get the old Soviet Union coffee with lemon, plus a little cognac or other liquor was common when the ingredients were available. Yahoo Answers provides a note from a native born Russian.

This is recipe from book “People’s commissariat of USSR to Housewife”, 1939

(word-by-word translation)

Black coffee with lemon, cognac or liquors

Boil black coffee in regular way, but increase quantity of grinded coffee up to 1,5 tea spoons per cup. Serve prepared coffee into cups. Separately serve cut lemon pieces, cognac or liquor.

So add a little lemon to your espresso and say, vashe zdorovie which means, to your health.

But Not Too Much Lemon

Eater quotes New York City barista, Sam Lewonthin.

“Coffee is chock-full of flavor compounds called Maillard saccharides, which are created when sugars and proteins are heated together,” as during roasting, Lewontin says. “As a category, Maillard saccharides are complex and nutty, and just about everybody loves them -and the best coffees have plenty of intrinsic fruitiness complementing their nuttier and more caramel-like qualities. These fruit flavors are often quite delicate, though; when we make drinks in which coffee is only one of several ingredients, they’re easily overwhelmed. In the right quantity, lemon juice can support those delicious fruit flavors, and balance out all of the sweet, nutty goodness of those Maillard saccharides, leading to a drink that’s refreshing and complex, and reflects the very best of what great coffee can be,” states the barista.

So add a little lemon to your coffee, make coffee lemonade and don’t block out the natural flavors of  your healthy organic coffee.




Leave a Reply