Kick Start Your Afternoon: Portuguese-Inspired Coffee + Apologue Persimmon

If you’re like us, when 5 o’clock strikes, you’ll face the dilemma of whether to enjoy an afternoon cocktail to celebrate a hard days work or to have that fourth cup of coffee to keep yourself going.

But we see no reason why you shouldn’t have it all with this Portuguese-Inspired Coffee + Apologue Persimmon cocktail.

Complementing Flavor Profiles

Though mostly enjoyed by the Portuguese and Russians, citrus and coffee is a relatively unused combination in American culture. Coffee, however, contains unique a compound that presents itself upon roasting called Maillard saccharides.

These compounds provide a complex flavor comprising of acidic, bitter, and nutty qualities, perfect for complementing with the acid of lemon and the bittersweet tasting notes of Apologue’s Persimmon Liqueur.

Ingredients

2 oz Your Favorite Cold Brew

1 oz Apologue Persimmon Liqueur

.5 oz Fresh Squeezed Lemon Juice

.5 oz Simple Syrup

½ Orange, Sliced and Muddled

Orange Slice Garnish

Recipe

  1. In the small end of a shaker tin, muddle your orange enough to not only release the juices but to get some of the oleo saccharum (oils) from the peel of the orange
  2. Add your Simple Syrup, Fresh Lemon Juice, Persimmon Liqueur, and Cold Brew Coffee to the shaker.
  3. Prepare your garnish and glassware
  4. Add ice to your shaker. Shake hard until condensation forms on the outside of the shaker.
  5. Strain into a glass with ice.
  6. Add garnish. Feel simultaneously pepped and relaxed :-).

Enjoy!

Tips on Simple Syrup

Simple Syrup should live up to its namesake - simple.

For a syrup to be truly ‘simple,’ it requires one part sugar (refined or not), and one part water.

The easiest way to make simple syrup is to heat up your water until it’s warm, but not boiling (boiling can reduce the water to a smaller amount, making it less than a 1 to 1 ratio), then add your sugar. Mix until all sugar is dissolved into the water.

Using a sterilized container, as well as purified water will help you keep your syrup fresh indefinitely. Sugar is a natural preservative, and if your container is sterile and your water purified, you should be able to keep your syrup good (in the fridge) for quite awhile!

Tips on Shaking

One of your biggest goals when shaking a cocktail like this one is to properly aerate the drink. That means that once all of your ingredients are in the shaker and you’ve added ice, you want to shake very hard for a short period of time to ensure that all of the ingredients are properly mixed and that there is a good amount of effervescence to the cocktail.

If you have larger ice cubes they’ll work best to properly aerate your cocktail as their increased weight will really shake things up.

Garnish

This drink is best served over ice in a tall glass, garnished with an orange peel or slice of orange.

The orange helps to ‘connect’ the sweeter flavors of the coffee and syrup to the acidic flavors of the coffee and lemon. The bitterness and stone fruit flavors of the coffee should be increasingly offset by the Apologue Persimmon.