How to Make Flavored Coffee Drinks at Home
Your homemade drinks won’t be exactly the same as you get at the coffee bar. You’d need an espresso machine and maybe some other equipment for that. However, you can make some reasonable facsimiles without too much trouble. With a little experimentation, they’ll taste just as good as what you buy out. Best of all, they won’t cost nearly as much because you probably have most of what you need right in your kitchen.
To imitate a latte, you need about four ounces of strong coffee, the same amount of milk, and a teaspoon of sugar. Brew the coffee using twice as much coffee in proportion to the water as you usually do. Place it in a liquid measuring cup for easy pouring and set it in a place it will stay warm. Heat the milk in the saucepan or microwaveable bowl until it’s hot but not boiling. Stir in a teaspoon of sugar to sweeten it and add body to the milk. Whip the milk with the wire whisk or mixer until the foam is so fine you can barely see the bubbles.
Continue reading Comments (0) brewed on Feb 13th, 2010
What’s ECGC Anyway?
You hear it all the time, drink green tea because it has EGCG, but what is EGCG really? EGCG stands for epigallocatechin gallate, one of four Oligomeric Proanthocyanidins found in plants. Oligomeric Proanthocyanidins, or OPC’s, are bioflavanoids that help your body fend off free radicals that cause your body to age. Of these four OPC’s, epigallocatechin gallate is the most potent. Amongst the more than 4,000 chemical compounds found in tea, it’s the most important.
From what we’ve seen in the health news the past few years, EGCG is one phenomenal antioxidant. There seems to be more research about the health properties of green tea going on than just about anything else. It’s been connected with everything from slowing the growth of cancer cells to preventing arthritis. But exactly what do these studies show and can we believe all we hear about the benefits of drinking tea?
Continue reading Comments (0) brewed on Feb 12th, 2010
Consumer Report Says Even the Best Coffee Blends are Only Good
Recently Consumer Report rated 37 blended coffees, some of which had caffeine and some of which were decaffeinated. Though the highest ratings were “very good” and “excellent” not one of the coffees they tried scored better than “good”. This was their finding with both the caffeinated and decaffeinated blends tasted. It leaves one to wonder if any of the Consumer Report tasters actually liked coffee. Perhaps it was the opposite and they were all such coffee connoisseurs that no coffee was good enough. Whatever the case, not a single brand tasted seemed to be worthy of the highest marks.
In case you don’t understand what a coffee blend is, the explanation is really very simple. It’s when the coffee producer mixes together coffee beans from two different regions or countries. This can give the coffee more depth of flavor when the beans selected are of equal quality. It can also be a way of adding a few higher quality beans to improve the flavor of cheaper beans. At least that’s the theory, but it takes an awful lot of good beans to make the lesser beans taste good. Most of the time, the flavor of the better beans is just lost in the blend and wasted.
Continue reading Comments (0) brewed on Feb 11th, 2010
But is it Tea?
There’s a heated controversy going on in the chat rooms and message boards of the online tea community. It’s not about the price of tea in China, even though the price for a cup of pu-erh can run as high as $1000 in Hong Kong. In fact, it’s not even about tea itself, but about the English language and the meaning of the word “tea”. Some people don’t approve of some of the ways that word is used.
True tea, that luscious brown liquid that fills your cup and sharpens your brain, all comes from a plant called Camellia sinensis. Whether it’s black, green, white, or oolong, it all comes from either the Camellia sinensis var. sinensis or the Camellia sinensis var. assam. The only difference is the way that it’s processed, the white being not processed of all and the black being the most processed.
Continue reading Comments (0) brewed on Feb 10th, 2010
