Made with just brewed coffee, sugar, and seltzer, coffee soda is a delicious and refreshing way to have your coffee when it’s too hot for coffee!
Saturday and Sunday afternoons around here call for afternoon coffee. Every. Weekend. Afternoon. If we’re off during the week, sometimes we have afternoon coffee then, too.
Problem is, it’s been in the eighties around here. Now, I can usually drink hot coffee no matter what the temperature outside…but sometimes a cold drink is in order. We could go with the usual suspect and have iced coffee, but what’s the fun in that when you can have….
coffee soda.
I’ve written more than once (here and here) about how much I love Pure Sodaworks (and one of these days I’m going to get by there to take some photos of their bottling operation!) but it’s kind of far from my house and it’s not really feasible to go there as often as I’d like (which is pretty much every day). About a year ago I saw the book Homemade Soda at Books-a-Million and knew that eventually it would be mine. I held out for a long time, but a couple of weeks ago I finally caved and used some of my Amazon points to buy it. So far I’ve made strawberry cream soda, creme brûlée soda, and now….coffee soda. This is an adaptation of an espresso soda in the book…I don’t have an espresso maker so I made the recipe with really strong coffee instead.
If you recall my farmer’s market posts, you know that one of my weekly purchases is Velo (pronounced Vehlo) coffee. It pretty much ruined all other coffee for me; now the whole bean coffees I used to buy at the grocery store taste burnt, and forget ground coffee (though I haven’t purchased ground coffee in years anyway). Of course, I’m not the first to make soda from Velo. If you visit their shop or their cart at the farmers market, they’ll happily make you a coffee soda with their cold-brew coffee concentrate. Likewise, the good folks at Pure Sodaworks regularly offer the Chattanooga Special, also made with cold-brewed Velo, and they bottle Café Cola, which is a cola that contains Velo coffee. I can’t go there all the time, though…so this is a pretty worthy substitute that I can make at home pretty much anytime!
It tastes a little like coffee ice cream. No need to add cream, half-and-half, milk, what have you….it’s plenty sweet enough. I won’t lie….there’s a ton of sugar in this recipe. Soda is sweet, though, and in my house it’s definitely an occasional treat. I’m interested to experiment with different amounts of sugar as well as natural sweeteners (like honey, which is what I use to sweeten my hot coffee). So, if you’re craving coffee but you think it’s just too darned hot…how about a…
(The pictures would have been a whole lot prettier if I had realized that all of our ice trays were empty a whole lot earlier than I did.)
Mary
Yield: 4 servings
2 minPrep Time:
10 minCook Time:
12 minTotal Time:
Save Recipe
Ingredients
- 2 cups strongly brewed coffee
- 1 1/3 cup cane sugar
- seltzer (not tonic or soda water!)
Instructions
- In a medium saucepan, heat the coffee and the sugar over medium heat until the sugar dissolves.
- Pour the coffee syrup into a jar and chill. It will keep for up to a week in the refrigerator.
- To make the soda, pour 2/3 cup of the syrup into a glass. Pour over 2/3 cup cold seltzer and stir. Add ice if desired and serve.
Comments