BTS: Cafe Exclusive Drink Development
When you walk into Tala Coffee Roasters, there are three notorious features–just like the North Shore Roaster’s three café locations. Whether you’re in the renovated firehouse of Highwood, Libertyville Headquarters, or the revamped Winnetka gas station, Tala boasts a wide variety of drink offerings ranging from traditional coffee house wares to seasonal and specialty drinks.
A standard seasonal lineup includes four unique lattes drafted up by the minds at Libertyville or Chief Experience Officer Stefan Tong, which are made available at all three Tala locations. However, the drink that generates the most buzz from staff and has the work chat channels blinking from notifications into the evening is the café's exclusive drinks. If you, like my friend, frequented Tala Coffee Roasters in Winnetka last winter, you might have met the Igloolong Latte, a tea-based drink separate from the traditional chai, boasting rich vanilla flavors perfect for a cold day.
What does it take to make it to the menu and be in print as a café seasonal drink? The process begins with a message from café managers with a call for seasonal drinks. This fall, while the Winnetka café continues to push out the Drunk Canadian, Libertyville the Pom Noir, and Brown Butter? I Hardly Knew Her, staff members were chattering away with ideas.
A pitch meeting amongst a group of coffee lovers and aficionados looks like a few different things. First, the seasonal drink concept is typically soft-launched at all staff cafe meetings, where a gentle reminder is issued that it's time to hit the brainstorm once again. Then the staff receives a prompt anywhere from weeks to days in advance (cough cough Winnetka), where all cafe staff begin tossing ideas around for seasonal drinks.
To some, the chain of group messages might look like a food fight. A peek behind the scenes at Winnetka’s slew of nominations included a Tiramisu Latte, “chocolate hazelnut gingerbread something,” golden milk, and a spicy mocha. The staff favorites are then bracketed into a GroupMe poll where staff members vote until there is a front-runner, typically with a revote issued for the top two before the majority wins. Then off the flavor profiles go to Stefan Tong, Chief Experience Officer, who you’ll often see tinkering with espresso machines or creating mad latte stacks at the café.
If you ever watch Good Eats, Alton Brown’s scientific culinary show, the next step is a little bit of experimentation and randomness mixed with a bit of science. To gain a behind-the-scenes understanding of how the recipes are developed, I joined Stefan in the kitchen for Winnetka’s spicy orange mocha, navidad naranjo, recipe creation.
Drawing from the list of flavor notes, Stefan begins by writing out a rough approximation of ingredient ratios down to the gram to develop the syrup base. For the Tala Coffee Roasters in Winnetka, the spicy orange mocha is similar to a mocha drink, which draws on a base of chocolatey flavors. Utilizing the recipe ratios for the cafés mocha syrup, milk chocolate was swapped out for dark chocolate, typically served alongside Tala’s espressos, along with cocoa powder.
From there, the complementary flavors of orange were added using a variety of methods, including fresh orange zest, followed by a kick of spicy cayenne, a note you might find in Highwood’s Engine 37 drink. From there, with tiny teaspoons in hand, we taste-tested the strength in notes from the syrup.
However, things drastically shift when transitioning from sauce to latte–the prominent orange note, likened to a shout, became a whisper when mixed in with espresso and steamed milk. For the winter drinks during a cold season, milk steaming and latte art became a priority in recipe development compared to a taste test iced.
To ensure the orange peaked through, ratios and grams were then adjusted for another round of syrup to latte transition before a final recipe was developed. The syrup bottles are then sent off to the respective cafés, where staff members taste-test before being tasked to come up with a name. After another food fight debate, Winnetka welcomes the Navidad Naranjo and hopes that all customers enjoy this season’s offerings, Tala-la-la-la.
Mia Rhee
Mia received a BA from Northwestern University and is a contributor at the Chicago Review of Books: she is a firm believer coffee pairs best with reading.