Brown Sugar Syrup

If you follow along @intentionallyordinary on Instagram, you know how popular my Things I Make At My Coffee Shop That You Can Also Make At Home reels are!

A few months after working at my current coffee shop, I started recipe testing and developing house made syrups. Many of my creations saved us a ton of money and the quality was way better than the previous store-bought syrups we had been using.

There was one caveat — because of permitting, I had to make all of these syrups without cooking them on a stove (plus we didn’t have one anyway!). If you’ve searched for syrup recipes online before, you’ll find that many of them have instructions to heat the ingredients on the stove and while that is a great method, a lot of times it isn’t necessary to make a syrup!

I found that adding a little less water (that’s boiling hot!) to these recipes helped them maintain a syrupy texture without cooking.

Thus my shortcut coffee syrup recipes were born! And today I’m sharing one of our most popular syrups both in the shop and our most liked and played on Instagram.

It’s easy to throw together and quite delicious to add to your favorite coffee or tea drink. Stay tuned for more blog posts with my favorite ways to use it!

Author: Alisa Jeffus

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Brown Sugar Syrup

add this delicious brown sugar syrup to your favorite coffee or tea drink!

Prep time: 5 MinTotal time: 5 Min

Ingredients

Brown Sugar Syrup

• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/3 cup hot water
• 1/3 cup maple syrup
• 1 cinnamon stick

Instructions

1. Add brown sugar and hot water to a bowl or jar and stir until dissolved.
2. Add maple syrup and cinnamon stick and stir until combined.
3. Enjoy!

Notes

Store in the fridge -- should be good for a few weeks!

Intentional Coffee at Home - Part 2: Making Good Coffee in a Coffee Maker

We’re picking up where we left off in our series, Intentional Coffee at Home. In Part 1, we covered a few of the basics like gathering equipment and sourcing great coffee to use at home (read it here), now we’ll focus in on:

Step 3: Practicing Good Technique

A coffee maker is one of the simplest ways to make coffee at home. And honestly, it doesn’t require too much technique. The best investment you’ll make with this method is in picking out your coffee maker. While there are many models on the market, there are a few that stand out for their treatment of the coffee during the brew.

A few years ago when I decided to get a coffee maker, I chose the Bonavita 8-cup coffee maker with a glass carafe. I chose the glass carafe simply for the look of it, but the model with the thermal carafe is a fantastic choice as well (in fact, it probably holds it’s temperature longer than the glass). The reason I chose this machine was not solely for the looks, but also for the way the coffee is brewed.

I was trained as a barista at a cafe that was known for its pour over coffees, so I learned to take a lot of care and use a lot of intention in making coffee. I wanted a coffee maker that would mimic the pour over coffees I was making every day at work. I didn’t want water to douse the beans and mess with extraction, I wanted a more methodical, careful automated pour of water over the coffee bed just like my pour overs I was making in the cafe. Back when I started as a barista, there weren’t too many coffee makers on the market like this. But since then, a variety of options have come on the market.

Choosing Your Coffee Maker

The Bonavita I mentioned earlier is a reasonably priced option for a coffee maker that closely mimics the pour over method. This machine allows for a bloom (we’ll discuss this more in part 3 of this series when we discuss making pour overs) and automates the water so that the coffee is evenly extracted.

There are a few other options for coffee makers I’d recommend, in case you’re interested in researching what might work best for your home set up. I love the look of the Ratio Brewer, but it is more expensive. And I’ve heard great things about this Oxo Brewer - it brews directly into the carafe which cuts down on heat loss which can occur in the other two brewers I mentioned.

Brewing Your Coffee

Coffee made with a coffee maker needs a medium-coarse grind setting. Looking at your grinder, move the dial a few notches away from the middle, toward the coarse setting. This brewer is resilient – it won’t take much trial and error to find a good grind setting. Always taste and adjust, but you may find that you enjoy the first setting you try.

I like to have 18g of ground coffee per 10oz cup, so a four cup brewer would need 72 grams of ground coffee (my 8-cup brewer makes 8 5oz cups of coffee, which equals out to 4 full 10oz cups of coffee - make sure you look at ounce measurements here instead of cups!). I list out measurements in grams, because for accuracy, we use a scale to measure out our coffee. If you don’t choose that route or don’t have access to a scale that weighs in grams, 18g equals out to a 1.5 tablespoons and 72 grams equals out to 6 tablespoons. I like this ratio for single origin coffee, but you may want to up the dose for coffee blends (try closer to 80g if you like it stronger!)

Now that our coffee is ground appropriately, we can brew our coffee.

The coffee machine doesn’t require too much technique, that’s part of what I love about it!

For an 8-cup coffee maker:

1. Weigh out 72 grams of your coffee of choice.

2. Grind at a medium-coarse setting.

3. Add 40 ounces of filtered water to the water tank on your coffee maker.

4. Place filter in the basket of your coffee maker & add ground coffee.

5. If available, bloom your coffee per the instructions on your machine.

6. Turn the coffee maker on to brew.

7. Once finished, pour coffee into your favorite cup and drink black or with milk!

My coffee maker offers different size brews, so I adjust this ratio for whatever I need (36 grams coffee to 20 ounces water, 54g coffee to 30 ounces of water). The same process applies!

Final Notes

A coffee maker is a pretty easy tool to use at home and it can do so much with so little effort! I love this method when I don’t want to spend as much time on my coffee or when I’m making coffee for a crowd. Figure out what you need for your desired home coffee station and play around with it until you find exactly what you like.

I hope this has been helpful in getting you started with your own home coffee station. If you have any questions about tools, ratios, or techniques, feel free to leave a comment or send me an email! I’d love to nerd out about coffee with you! Happy brewing!

Intentional Coffee at Home Part 1: Setting Up Your Station

Today I’m sharing some easy tips to implement making delicious coffee at home! I’ve been a barista for over six years now and I’ve discovered some key factors to up your coffee game at home.

We believe in bringing intentionality to everything we do and that can be as simple as starting with good coffee! Slow down, create with care and precision, and then savor and enjoy. While some days call for a quick coffee while running out the door, I hope you’ll join us here at Intentionally Ordinary by waking up a few minutes early and savoring your delicious cup of freshly ground, freshly brewed, homemade coffee before you start your day.

Step 1: Source Good Coffee Beans

A lot goes on behind the scenes to get coffee to our homes, so I like to be intentional in choosing beans that support farmers, businesses that put a lot of thought and care into their coffee, products and equipment that make the coffee delicious, and processes that will result in a delicious product to wake you up in the morning.

Coffee is so fascinating, and I’m tempted to give you quite the run down about how coffee is grown and sourced. But I’ll keep it short. Coffee grows on trees in a cherry like fruit in regions around the world, but primarily in Central and South America and in Africa. The beans are harvested from the cherries and washed or dried, then packaged up and shipped to coffee roasters in your neighborhood, across the country, and all over the world. Coffee roasters turn this little green seed into the coffee beans we know and love through a detailed process of heating and cooling to achieve optimum flavor. The roasted coffee is packaged up and delivered to the grocery store, your local shop, or shipped to you. Even though this is an abbreviated version of coffee’s journey, you can see it takes and immense effort to arrive at coffee’s final form.

There are so many people involved in this process and in recent years the specialty coffee industry has highlighted individual farms that are caring for the coffee plant with intention. Because of this highlight on high quality beans, specialty coffee shops also strive to treat the coffee with intention and use products and processes that make these coffees shine.

As an experienced barista, I also want to bring this intention home with me. Many may treat coffee as a vehicle for energy, but for me coffee is meant to be delicious on its own, enjoyed with good friends, or savored in a quiet moment.

Our lives move at a frenetic pace in the modern age and I’m beginning to see the value in slowing down to not only be intentional with where we get out coffee and how we make it, but also in how we spend our moments drinking it.

So our first step to making intentional coffee at home is to source good coffee beans.

Here’s what I look for to know that a roaster cares about where its beans come from: bags are sold in whole beans, bags list country of origin and the name of the farmer/farm, bags list tasting notes, and beans are roasted “medium”. This has some exceptions and I’m sure there’s delicious coffee that doesn’t fall into these qualifiers, but for me this is a baseline evaluation of if I can trust the roaster to make a good product. If the company truly cares for its coffee, it should be highlighting these features in a majority of these products.

I highly recommend doing your research and finding a local roaster near where you live. There are some bigger companies that I would recommend like Blue Bottle, Verve, and Stumptown as starting points. These companies might be available in your grocery store. And of course so many amazing small roasters are accessible online. I love Heart, Good Coffee, Be Bright, Go Get ‘Em, AndyTown, and Saint Frank, just to name a few. But, if you live in a town that has a local coffee shop or even coffee roaster, I’m a huge advocate of supporting local.  

Once you’ve researched and sourced delicious whole coffee beans, roasted from companies that seek out high quality beans from intentional farmers, you’re ready to gather equipment to make that coffee shine.

Step 2: Purchase High Quality Equipment

There are so many products on the market that all claim to make great coffee. I’m sure many of them do, but part of living in an intentional home is only bringing in the items that are necessary and serve you and your goals. I encourage you not to get swept up by the latest new thing, simply invest in the product that will help you make fantastic coffee.

Start by evaluating what kind of coffee you want to have at home – drip coffee or espresso are the primary methods. Do you want to serve coffee to a crowd? You’ll need larger carafes to do so. Is the coffee just for you? Smaller equipment will be sufficient here.

Once you’ve evaluated your needs and your ideal set up, it’s time to purchase essential equipment. Regardless of the brew method you land on, I recommend buying a burr grinder and scale. These can be purchased at varying price points, so I’ll link one inexpensive grinder here and a pricier option here. The primary component you’ll need in a grinder is burrs – blade grinders do not produce an even grind and should not be used in making quality coffee. A kitchen scale can suffice for measuring your coffee, but I highly recommend a scale with a built-in timer if you’ll be making pour overs– here’s an inexpensive option and a splurge option here.

If you’ll be primarily making espresso, I recommend Breville products – the espresso machines come with all the equipment you’ll need like a tamp and a milk steaming pitcher. The machine is easy to program and makes delicious espresso without too much experimentation. I have this model, but there is also a larger version that comes with a built-in grinder (here’s that link). Evaluate what space you have, and which one works best for nourishing your beautifully ordinary life.

If you love the convenience and size of a coffee machine, there are multiple options on the market that make exceptional coffee. I use this one, but I’ve heard amazing things about this one. Both brew large batches of coffee, so they’re perfect for a crowd, but also have some cool features that allows for careful and precise brewing.

And finally, if you’d like to try your hand in pour over coffee, you’ll need to source a few different items. I highly recommend a goose neck kettle and for convenience, an electric kettle that heats water is a huge time saver. I have this one and I love it. You’ll also need your pour over dripper. My favorite dripper is flat bottomed (as opposed to cone shaped) and you can find it here. For larger groups I like to use a Chemex – it can hold up four large cups of coffee!

Step 3: Learn the Process

Your coffee is in hand, your equipment is ready to go – next we’ll learn about technique.

Each brew method can be pretty detailed, so I’m going to split these posts up to make the information easier to digest.

So stay tuned for part 2 - brewing good coffee in a coffee maker, part 3- making pour over coffee, part 4- making espresso, and part 5- steaming milk. It’s going to be a fun journey, so check back on the blog for each part!