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Originally Posted by D as in David
Thanks for sharing! I drink my morning coffee black partly because I don't want to break my fast until lunchtime so I'm curious about options for flavour enhancing. Cinnamon or cocoa isn't cutting it.
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My memory is a little foggy and I didn't get a repeatable flavored cold brew I liked (winged it, couldn't replicate it), but if I recall correctly... I started off by emulating things that had been combined with coffee successfully in other recipes and extrapolated from there.
The challenge is there's little in between even with very sensitive and very basic palate. Either the taste is barely noticeable/barely varied or there's some seriously clashing flavors/an added layer of a missing part of the taste. You can add stuff to the brew process, but that's more challenging than figuring out how to create these flavors in a separate cold liquid and combining it with a completed cold brew (ie: old fashioned type simple syrup or boiling a flavor in water and cooling the strained liquid).
If emulating the autumn spice flavors like nutmeg, cinnamon, cocoa, ginger, cloves etc. Over spicing and under spicing is a challenge, but also having it differentiate from the black coffee is part of it too. It was more noticeable if combined with milk and sugar (ie: Horchata, pumpkin spice, hot chocolate/mocha) or sugar (ie: Cinnamon sugar donuts). It kinda needed milk and/or sugar to make those flavors stick out and synergize with the coffee.
If adding flavoring with tea leaves, again you need milk and sugar to enhance and balance the flavors on each side. Basically, I was emulating Hong Kong styled coffee milk tea. How concentrated the tea flavor was (ie: Steeping/temp and duration in water) or strong (ie: amount of tea leaves) heavily affected one side and the way the coffee cold brew concentration and strength was affected the other. But because these two flavors seem to be so similar yet different, it's like attempting to pick out the flavors on each side after mixing rum and whiskey together. You might be able to pick out flavors associated with a specific side, but it's not really a varied amount of flavors going on. But add in the milk, sugar and aeration (tannins) and then the drink can be a lot more varied in flavors. It feels like the sugar and milk allow you to go back and forth between the taste of a latte and milk tea which is nice. Aeration and sugar can allow for you to notice minute flavors and also occasionally whether the taste is just in your mouth, or if it can end up lingering in the throat. Keep in mind that tea is a very light flavor vs a strong flavor of coffee. You really need something strong or unique in tea flavor to kinda peek around the gaps where the coffee flavor doesn't fill up your palate.
Crazy enough, it can get even more complicated if emulating a chai spiced coffee since you're basically combining both of the above.
Your situation might be quite a bit more challenging if you're trying not to break your fast but are trying to add flavors. I don't know if you mean breaking a fast in terms of no calories (ie: zero calories sweetener etc. is OK) or basically nothing at all (ie: intermittent fasting).
If no calories, then a milk or whitener is probably out, leaving just toying with sweetener, salt and aeration to experiment with. If intermittent fasting, then I guess aeration and salt are what can be experimented with.
Playing with spices, perhaps look up pumpkin spice latte, cider etc. recipes and look at the specific spices and quantities vs liquid ratio to try?
For tea, brew a hot tea, chill it then kinda play around with ratios with the cold brew to see what happens? Worst case, add sugar, lemon and ice (rum optional) and enjoy that?
If zero calories (ie: 16/8) vs IF(ie: eat stop eat), maybe combine with zero calories cola? (Coke has a cola coffee beverage for sale in the energy drink aisle). Cold brew coffee soda is also apparently a thing.
If IF, if citrus is allowed, a little bit of lemon juice and salt and aeration/soda water might be able to help amplify or mute the flavors in the cold brew and/or the spices you add to it. I don't really have advice on figuring out ratios. But I did do a brew that tasted pretty good that had ginger peel and cinnamon in it. I couldn't emulate this one though. I don't know which grinds I use (flavor profile) and ratio I used. Ginger lemon was something that was recommended to me to try, but I didn't like it, or I just messed it up so bad it was disgusting.
Basically, if someone enjoys the taste of some of the crazy health drink flavors (ie: kombucha, tumeric health drink etc.) I think such an individual might run into a lot of stuff that wasn't as bad as expected. Most of us though will probably invent a whole bunch of terrible ways to mess up a cold brew trying to add different flavors to it.
Good luck though. If you do succeed in finding something that works, definitely share what you discovered.
