Spring Fling — Assume Nothing! A Year of Recipes

by Nate Lumpkin

“Assume Nothing!” A mantra for The Crown as we worked towards opening our doors in March of 2019, the phrase became a Menu section, encouraging our visitors to drop their preconceptions and be open to new and delicious experiences. And now it’s the title of a recipe series, for you to recreate at home. Here’s to a year of assuming nothing!

Spring Fling

This is a nitro cold brew, sweetened with orange blossom syrup and concentrated orange juice, and served over ice with milk.  

Description:

Spring Fling is a sweet and creamy nitro cold brew infused with orange and the light fragrance of orange blossoms. The combination of citrus, coffee, and milk gives it a quality like a creamsicle, and the orange blossom fragrance gives it a surprising lift. Its name is meant to remind us of the possibilities of spring — we’ve all been in quarantine so long now that the arrival of spring feels like it could be a fresh start. The new sunshine and clean air are combining with the hope for a better year. Maybe a little spring fling is just around the corner? 

In creating this drink, I started by wondering: what would happen if we combined orange with nitro cold brew? I remembered the time-honored tradition of adding a slice of citrus to a bottle of beer and thought, maybe something similar could be achieved with coffee. In the late winter and early spring, citrus comes into season, and at the same time, many coffees that arrive at the port have a similar flavor of orange, tangerine, mandarin, and lemon. To balance out the tart acids, I settled on orange blossom, a sweet fragrance that sits like a tenor note between the bright orange and the heavy coffee.  

 For the coffee, we chose to use the Peru Challhuamayo Finca Tasta Honey, which has notes of citrus and dark chocolate that combine really well with the orange and orange blossom. I recommend using a coffee with some heavier notes–I tried this drink with a brighter coffee and found that the orange was overwhelmed. 

Ingredients:

• Cold Coffee – 9oz
• Orange Blosson syrup – 1.5oz  
• Concentrated Orange Juice – 1oz

Directions:

You can make your own cold brew with any of the recipes here. We chose to nitrogenate our coffee to give it a frothy body, but I’m sure it will taste good still as well.  

Orange Blossom Syrup:

• Water – 1 cup
• Sugar – 1 cup
• Orange Blossom Water – 1 tsp

Combine the water and the sugar in a pan. Heat until the sugar is fully dissolved. Remove from heat, and then add the orange blossom water. Avoid simmering the syrup very long: on one test, I found that a longer cooking time gave the syrup a caramelized flavor that overwhelmed the orange blossom. 

 Orange Juice Concentrate:

• Orange Juice – 1 cup
• Sugar – 1/3 cup
• Dried Orange Zest – 1 teaspoon

Combine the orange juice, sugar, and orange zest in a pan. Simmer the sweetened orange juice with the orange zest for about five minutes, or longer if you’d like, and then pass it through a sieve to remove the solids.