Ok, so I know I just posted something, and this is kind of a followup to that post. I have this AMAZING little coffee shop just a few blocks from my apartment called Kitchen Sink. They are a little independent place with decent prices, great food, and great coffee. For my readers in Bloomington I can eat their bagels. After years of conditioning by BBC I am in fact capable of eating the bagels at this place. Enough said about how much they care about quality.
So the other day I was in there talking to one of the baristas and lamenting all the tossed out espresso grounds. Why do they throw out espresso grounds? Well note what I said above about quality. To pull a perfect espresso shot you must use exactly the same amount of grounds every time. That means carefully settling the grounds to just fill the mechanism, brushing off the excess and tamping properly. That excess gets discarded. Sad Face. :( It makes great espresso Happy Face :D
So I commented a couple weeks ago how that was a shame, and the barista working said "Yeah, but it's just part of pulling a good espresso shot". Fast forward a week, I've been thinking about this and I'm in Kitchen Sink again with the same barista and I say "You know, I think I mentioned this to you before about the wasted espresso grounds, but they'd make a mean liqueur." To which she offers them to me. She just says, "You want em?" A plastic bag later I'm walking home with maybe a third of a cup of espresso grounds, all ground that day and home I go to some rum and a mason jar.
The delightful barista, who's name I did not get (again sad face :( I need to fix that) said I could claim them whenever I wanted. Which I probably will.
Moral of the story, patronize local businesses and chat up the workers. You never know what might happen, and specifically ask your local cafe for their discarded grounds. I'll comment on here in a week or so when I have a good extraction and tell you all how it turned out.
In the mean time I LOVE KITCHEN SINK!!!!
A friend of mine turned me on to your blog. Thank you so much for the liqueur information in this blog and the previous one. I think I'm going to try this for the holiday season! (I am already pondering the use of Orange, Cinnamon, and Cloves in mine.)
ReplyDeleteAlso, thank you so much for standing in solidarity with the 99%. As a participate in the Occupy Indianapolis movement, its so nice to hear outside voices standing together with us.
Keep up the awesome blogs! I'm loving all the nifty tips.
Null_Entry: That is awesome and I hope your liqueur turns out wonderfully.
ReplyDeleteIf you're going to do clove I recommend trying a small batch, like maybe 1 mason jar's worth just because clove can overwhelm everything else really quickly. The other thing you can do that I did last year is do each flavor separately. Have a bottle of orange peel infusing, a bottle of cinnamon and a bottle of clove. Then if one ends up being WAY more powerful than the others you can just not use all of it. Use way more of the orange than you think you'll need and way less of the clove and cinnamon.
Also with the cinnamon don't infuse it very long. I infused it for like a month last year and learned the hard way that the alcohol will dissolve the sap right out of the bark. It thickens it, which isn't unpleasant, but it also fills the liquor with tannins. Try your cinnamon infusion after a day or so and if it seems strong go with it. The woody tanniny flavor, while not necessarily "bad" can be problematic to balance flavors around.
Thanks for the tips! I would have ultimately gone about it very similar to what I do with my hot apple cider (which is to say, I put in three or four sticks of cinnamon and a healthy palm full of cloves). Now I'm seeing that would likely be overkill and awful. Thanks!
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