Coffee cocktails and tea

After hours: coffee cocktails and tea drinks

Most of CupTune is about coffee in a cup: dose, water, time. This section takes the same habits to drinks that sit at the edge of that catalogue. Two are cocktails that use coffee as an ingredient. Four are tea drinks, including one that adds an espresso shot. Each page gives amounts in grams or millilitres, a numbered sequence you can run on the timer, and a plain note on which numbers come from a source and which are CupTune's own starting points.

The drinks

Cocktails

Tea and milk drinks

Why they have their own section

The coffee recipes are built around a brewer and a ratio. Here the brewer is often a saucepan or a shaker, and the variable that matters is a tea leaf, a spirit or a spoon of syrup. So the recipe catalogue keeps them in their own After hours section, below coffee brewing and coffee drinks, rather than among them. The coffee tools stay about coffee. These pages borrow only the method: weigh it, time it, say how sure you are.

A note on the cocktails

The two cocktail pages describe drinks that contain alcohol. They are for adults of legal drinking age. Both follow the published International Bartenders Association (IBA) specification, and each page says where CupTune departs from it. Amounts are in millilitres, one serving at a time. If you do not drink alcohol, the tea pages are the half of this section for you, and the coffee catalogue is next door.

How the tea pages use sources

Tea has two useful public references. ISO 3103:2019 describes a standard way to prepare tea liquor for sensory testing: 2 g of leaf per 100 ml of boiling water, with set brewing times (6 minutes for black tea). It exists so laboratories can compare samples, not to tell you how to enjoy a cup, so the tea pages use its leaf-to-water ratio as a reference point and say when they leave it. For matcha we found no Japanese government or tea-association source with preparation figures, so its dose, water volume and temperature are labelled as authored, in line with what tea sellers commonly publish. Everything else in these recipes, including milk volumes and spice quantities, is labelled as authored too.

What to expect

The timers run from about a minute and a half (espresso martini) to seven and a half minutes (chai latte). Most pages need only a scale, a kettle and a thermometer. The espresso-based ones need a machine, the martini a shaker and the Irish coffee a pour-over cone. If a value does not suit your taste, change one thing at a time and write down what you changed.