Essence of Coffee
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the coffee
Brown the coffee until it is a fine yellow.
Grind the coffee coarsely.
Extract and distill
Macerate the coffee in alcohol for 24 hours.
Distill to draw off 1.2 L of liquid.
Rectify the distillate.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Martinique and mocha coffee
- Provides the core coffee aroma and flavour that the alcohol extracts.
- Alcohol
- Acts as the solvent that draws aroma and flavour compounds out of the ground coffee.
The step that matters
Distill to draw off 1.2 L of liquid. Distillation separates volatile aroma compounds from heavier ones by boiling point. Collecting the stated volume controls which fractions are kept, so stopping early or going too far changes the final essence.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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