Turns out, the drinks you enjoy at your local coffee shop are just as easy to make as the coffee you brew every day. So, we're asking our roasters to share their favorite café recipes that you can whip up from home - like a delicious espresso martini! Today, we're stopping by Nashville, Tennessee's Stay Golden Coffee Co with something to kick up your day.
Something we at Stay Golden invented (at least to our knowledge) is what we call "rested espresso". Nathanael Mehrens, one of our founders, created this years ago as a way to incorporate freshly brewed espresso into a cocktail and other beverages. Essentially, you pull shots of espresso and then pause their oxygenation by preserving them in sugar.
Stay Golden's rested espresso recipe calls for 10 grams of white sugar per shot of espresso, and just let sit in the refrigerator together for at least 24 hours. There's a lot of science we don't understand about rested espresso yet, but from what we can tell the sugar helps mellow out the acids and bitter taste we can experience in an older shot of espresso coffee.
The sugar pauses the shot at that perfect spot, only adding sweetness to the coffee beans, but no new flavors. We also think something is happening with the amino acid chains, because over time we experience more complex flavors than we started with.
Our coffee cocktail recipe called "A Better Morning" utilizes this method and we're sharing the recipe with you here today.
Ingredients:
- 5 ears of corn on the cob
- 1 l filtered water
- 8.4 oz sweetened condensed milk
- 25 ml Early Times bourbon
- 25 ml Pellegrino Amaro
- 25 ml rested espresso
- 10 ml cream
- 3 drops saline
- 1 dash mole bitters
- nutmeg (for flavor)
Instructions:
- To prepare corn milk, decob corn, cover in filtered water, and bring to simmer on stove
- Simmer for 15 minutes and allow to cool overnight in refrigerator
- Strain out corn and reserve corn liquor
- Add filtered water to liquor until volume is one liter. Blend corn and water together in batches and strain through chinois
- Add condensed milk
- Fill a cocktail shaker tin with ice cubes (not crushed ice) and add 35 ml corn milk and remaining ingredients
- Serve in a chilled martini glass or coupe and enjoy the drink!
It is a unique and flavorful espresso recipe (think: just like a martini) that does not call for any simple syrup, vanilla syrup, or coffee liqueur or rum — just fresh espresso in a cocktail glass!
