Recipes: Cold Brewed Mocha Coffee

Last year around this time, we went to a cottage and I tried making a New Orleans Style Iced Coffee.  It worked out great. It was a cold brewed style which is just a fancy way of saying left out on the counter overnight to brew without adding any heat.  It tasted of chicory and coffee with no bitterness that you often experience with iced coffees found in cafes that use hot coffee and ice.  It was kind of like Camp which you can still buy in select locations.  Being from a possible slavic background (it's complicated), means enjoying a roasted chicory flavour.  They did it for economy -- couldn't grow coffee in Eastern Europe and too expensive to buy it from Ethiopia.  So, the history of the English based Camp and the French based New Orleans style are a result of colonial times.  Coffee was short and so they found ways of adulterating it.

So what does this have to do with the title and mocha... whatever it says up there? Well, the chicory based one worked so well that I substituted or adulterated coffee with some cacao nibs and some vanilla.  In order to make the most of the chocolate flavour, I had to mix half milk with the resultant filtered liquid.  It tasted like a mild mocha with a little cacao bitterness and no coffee bitterness.  It was even better than the chicory one.  I think that varying the adulterants along with the coffee beans could provide some interesting options.  Using a bright Kona and accenting the citrus notes with ginger or an Ethiopian Sidamo with pronounced vanilla to raise the blueberry notes...an so on and so forth, etc, etc, etc.

It is so easy to make and requires very little extras that it is a good summertime drink.  And if you add booze then you are going so many other places.