The BEST Summer Coffee Drink You Can Make (and it’s quite easy)

It's like if you were Superman and you were flying through a cloud made of oranges and you just like opened your mouth for a couple seconds. So I'm making three espresso tonics today, increasing in difficulty, and I have an idea for the last one that I think is gonna be really good. So let's go do our grocery shopping. Let's go make them. Hello there. Today we're gonna be making three different espresso tonics at three different levels. We're gonna start off with the gosh dang simplest espresso tonic you have ever seen. We're gonna move somewhere in the middle and we're gonna end up with something that is a little bit extra, a little bit complicated, but very, very, very tasty. So if you aren't familiar with what an espresso tonic is, let me give you a very brief summary. Espresso tonic is a pretty classic summer cafe menu item. It's in the name. It's tonic water and it's espresso. Now tonic water is unique. It's not interchangeable with club soda or sparkling water or what have you. It has some additional ingredients, most notably quinine, and then also sugar. Quinine is like a medicinal, uh, bittering ingredient. So tonic water ends up being kind of sweet, kind of bitter, and ultimately pairs really nicely with coffee. So without further ado, let's, uh, let's get into this. Let's start with our simplest rendition of one that does not actually need, scandalously, an espresso machine. For this, of course, we will need tonic water. I have some generic Kroger brand tonic water right here. Now we will, of course, need espresso. However, for our simplest version, we will be using instant espresso. So we will start off with these little granules right here. Now I don't know the health ramifications of this, but I suppose if you wanted to go even simpler, you could just like snort the granules and then take a sip of soda water. I don't, legally, I cannot recommend that method though. A good amount of ice as I spill it everywhere. And finally, some hot water to finish making our espresso. I need, I need a tiny spoon. I do not have any available to me. Okay, this is an excessively tiny spoon. I bought this for scooping salt, I think is its intended purpose, but I just, I love tiny spoons so much. I have like a whole spoon collection. It's a whole thing. I'll just use this today. First one I could find. Prepare our instant espresso based on instructions. Now I've talked about the assembly and the kind of tips and tricks with espresso tonics in a past video. I'll link it down below. But long story short, temperature is a really key component in building these. Also, order of operation. So first thing we're going to do is fill this cup full of ice. Your ratio preference of tonic water to espresso might change. It's kind of like a whatever you prefer version. Typically, I will use about four or five ounces of tonic water to about two ounces or a double shot of espresso. Just pouring gently over the ice. Now we're going to pour our hot espresso over the back of the spoon. This is going to both layer our drink and also avoid any like sudden nucleation that's going to cause all of our bubbles to explode upwards. And there you have it. The gosh darn simplest espresso tonic you could possibly make. Let's taste it. It's tasty. All in all, this is a very simple beverage. Usually with these instant espressos, these are very, very dark coffee profiles. So the coffee flavor is like very chocolatey, kind of like baker's chocolate, dark, roasty. It's not unpleasant, but it's not very complex. This is just like a carbonated semi-sweet coffee drink. I think we can do better. Let's move on to level two. I want to give a huge thank you to Trade for sponsoring today's video. We may be in the last half of summer, but that doesn't mean that cold brew season is anywhere near done. Frankly, for me, cold brew season is most of the year, but to each their own. Trade Coffee is a coffee subscription service and the number one destination in the US for both hot and cold coffee drinkers. But for now, let's talk about all you fellow cold ones. Trade has partnered with 15 fantastic roasters to create a special cold brew coffee collection, ensuring that the roast level and profile is specifically tailored to cold extraction. They've also done all the work of curating the equipment you'll need if you've never dipped your toes into cold brew, but are ready to now. All you need to do is select the delivery cadence that works best for you and your coffee will be sent freshly roasted to your front door. And it's worth mentioning that Trade also has a wide range of coffees for brewing hot as well. However, for a limited time, Trade is giving you 50% off a month of cold brew. That's about 60 cups of cold brew for 50% off when you visit drinktrade.com. Again, that's the top link in the description for 50% off. Thank you again to Trade for sponsoring today's video. Moving right along, we have significantly more ingredients on our tray. Now, you do not need to have every citrus that I have in front of me, but for a minute, let's talk about our citrus and then we'll talk about our other ingredients. Of note, this espresso tonic build that we're about to do is probably the most popular version of an espresso tonic. It's also the one that I think is most attainable at home. So if you're looking for an everyday daily driver recipe, I suppose, this is probably the one for you. However, you do have some choices to make. We are going to be expressing citrus oil over the top of our drink. This is going to add, first of all, a nice garnish, enhance the visual a little bit. It's going to add a really nice aromatic quality to it on the nose when you take each sip. And additionally, it's going to give the flavor a little bit more of like a citrus tone rather than just being coffee and tonic water. There are a lot different ways you can do this. You can really use any type of citrus you want. Some that I prefer. I really love using oranges on my espresso tonics. Meyer lemons or just regular lemons are really nice. Grapefruits, super oily, super aromatic. It's a good choice. Or you can even do lime, which is kind of nice. Typically, what I will do with whichever fruit I am using the oil of, I will also cut some sort of wheel to use as a garnish. So we'll do that as well. Pick your poison when it comes to citrus. One of the things I like to do when choosing what citrus fruit I'm using is to think about what coffee I'm using and pairing the citrus to the coffee. So with that being said, let's talk about our next coffee. Now for my level two espresso tonic today, I'm using a naturally processed Ethiopian coffee and it's a pretty classic flavor profile. You get a lot of those like fresh berry notes. You get a little bit of black tea and a lot of really nice summer citrus. So this is going to pair super well with tonic water. Anything in this range, kind of a fruitier daily driver, is going to work great. I've really figured out how to say daily driver twice already in this video. I feel like that's like not a phrase that I commonly use. I don't know. Maybe it's just a today thing. For our level two espresso tonic, we are also going to use a higher quality tonic water. Now this one is from Q Mixers. I really like this brand. I also really like Fevertree if you've tried any of their tonic waters. Something that's a little bit more crisp, a little bit more balanced in the quinine to sugar ratio. We of course need ice. Let's just make this thing. Okay, that is some espresso. Let's build our drink. Love a tall glass. If it could be even taller, I would love it even more. Once more, we're going to gently layer our espresso using the back of a Gentle, slow and steady wins the race here. We're going to peel a nice long strip of lemon. We are going to aim the peel over the surface of the drink and then pinch it shut. You can do this one-handed. I usually use two. Just kind of push it over. As you pinch it, get all of that lemon oil over the top of the drink. Additionally, you can take this pinched peel, rub it around the rim, continue transferring that remaining oil. And as our final piece, a nice wheel of lemon. Okay, now while I was simply ready to drink the last espresso tonic, I am excited about this one. Balanced, refreshing, delicious. It is summer in a cup. There is nothing wrong with this beverage. Now you could stop at this level and be a very happy camper, but me being me, if I had full creative freedom on an espresso tonic, let me at the very least show you what I do because it's extra work, but it's also extra tasty. All right, on to our final level of espresso tonic. You will note that there are significantly more ingredients, but also just things on this tray than the last one. So let's start with our base ingredients, then I'll explain what's happening here. First things first, we're going to be making our tonic water in a slightly different way. We're going to be using a syrup and club soda combination versus pre-bought tonic water. Now, I personally like doing this with coffee for a couple different reasons. First one is it means I don't have to stock tonic water alongside club soda or sparkling water that I keep in the studio. Additionally, this is one of my favorite tonic syrups and it allows me to increase or decrease the sweetness of my tonic water depending on my coffee's needs or my personal preference for that day. Super tasty, I love using this. Let's talk about our coffee real fast. In our last level, we used a pretty standard everyday natural Ethiopian coffee. For this one, I'm using a very special coffee, one that is fantastic on its own, but also works so well in this drink. I'm using a Colombian thermal shock geisha. So this is a coffee that is very floral, but also due to its processing has a lot of kind of more powerful like mandarin, almost orange notes to it. So it's incredibly delicious. This is a lot lighter than our previous coffee. So with this profile of coffee, we're going to be using a shorter ratio of tonic water to coffee. Very excited about this. I love this coffee so much. This coffee, by the way, is from Diego Bermudez. It's Leti. It's from El Pariso is the farm. Now, here's where things might get a little bit funky. I wanted to take that initial concept we had in the last drink with the expressed citrus oil and take it a little bit further. I wanted something that was still aromatic, still kind of citrusy to cut through the sweetness of the tonic. But I additionally wanted something that could maybe add some texture to this drink that is otherwise just kind of sparkling all the way through. And I also wanted to add a little bit more visual flair. So we're going to be making an aromatic citrus air to go on top of our drink. If you haven't made an air before, they are pretty popular in like modern cocktails. We're going to be making something that is essentially like a really bubbly foam. It's gonna be very light. It doesn't have a lot of consistency to it, but it has a lot of light air bubbles that will pop that will be very light and flavorful at the beginning of each sip. It also looks really dang cool. For our air, we will need 200 mils of no pulp orange juice, 40 mils of freshly squeezed lime juice. Depending on your sweetness preference, you can use between 15 to 20 mils of rich syrup. So this is simply a 2 to 1 ratio syrup of sugar to water. We're going to use orange blossom water, approximately 4 to 5 mils. It's like half a cap full is how I measure this. And lastly, as our emulsifier that will allow these bubbles to stabilize and hold their shape for a while, we're going to be using soy lecithin. You can use sunflower lecithin if you want. I tend to primarily work with soy. I kind of like the flavor profile a little bit more, but a lecithin. Okay, into a nice large carafe, we will simply add all of our ingredients. I'm using two and a half grams of soy lecithin for this amount. Okay, now I'm going to take a handheld milk frother and we're going to emulsify all of this together. Soy lecithin is cold soluble, so we don't need to really worry about dissolving it. We're just making sure it's evenly distributed in the liquid. Just give it a nice zhuzh there for like five to seven seconds is more than enough. Now, you might be wondering what this and this is. And no, this is not a tiny microphone, although that is very adorable and I might have to get one now. This is in fact a small aquarium bubbler or an aerator. So essentially this is just going to pump air out and we're going to use this to form our foam. So drop that in there and then turn your little aquarium aerator onto low. There are also plenty of methods of making foam that don't use these. You can make foams and airs with immersion blenders if you prefer. There's plenty of resources online that show you how to do that, but this is kind of fun if we're being totally honest. Now, very quickly you will see the surface of our foam is going to start to bubble up. What this is turning into is a fun pseudo-stable citrus foam that we can then scoop and layer on top of our drink. It's like if you were Superman and you were flying through a cloud made of oranges and you just like opened your mouth for a couple seconds. Let's build our drink. Starting here with half an ounce of our tonic syrup. Very gently with a bar spoon, just lightly stirring to incorporate the syrup, but not to disrupt the bubbles. Now this is not normally what people think of when they think espresso tonic. I think you'd be pretty hard-pressed to find one of these in a cafe, but let's give it a try. I say try like I haven't already had approximately three of these today. This is very much a Morgan style beverage. To describe the texture to you, the bubbles really like you can feel them pop against your lip as you take each sip. They're very aromatic. They're orange first. More of that lime comes through in the flavor and you get that kind of like very aromatic orange blossom quality, which is very floral and not so much citrus. The coffee underneath is lovely. With dialing back the tonic sweetness a bit, you get something that is still balanced, but very coffee forward. This is just, it's so good, you guys. You just have to trust me on this or you have to make it yourself. Regardless, these were three espresso tonics at three different difficulties. I hope one of these is one you will try in the future and probably that it should be the middle one. This one is ridiculous, albeit delicious. And the first one, the first one is good in a pinch. My name is Morgan. You can find me here on YouTube usually about once a week, sometimes a little bit less, plus shorts. You can also find me on TikTok or Instagram almost every single day. And you can find me on Substack with a newsletter coffee for here. If you want more of my coffee writing, this is, this has been a whole lot of fun. It's been good to see you all and I'll see you next time. Goodbye, everyone.