It’s the summertime right now for much of the world, but especially in St. Louis, Missouri, a city on the banks of the Mississippi River that’s home to some truly great coffee bars. Sometimes in the heat of a Missouri summer day, you just want a cool coffee drink without ton of cerebral outlay. This is not the time for someone to curate your herbs; this is a time of blessed simplicity, refreshment, and even a hint of sweetness without too many of those awful calories. This is the right time for Kaldi’s Honey Almond Toddy.
The Honey Almond Toddy is a shaken cold brew and almond milk beverage sweetened with a little bit of that sweet St. Louis honey sauce. If you can’t make it to Lou, make this sweet summertime drink at home! Here’s how.
First, make your cold brew. Kaldi’s is making pretty big batches in a Toddy brewing system, calling for ten pounds of coffee and six gallons of water. If you’re not fixing on serving a football team, we recommend using 225 grams of coarse ground coffee to 1100ml of water in a big old mason jar. Leave the water & ground coffee to steep for 20 hours.
Now you have a nice cold brew coffee concentrate. At Kaldi’s cafes, they’re cutting that concentrate at 1 part Toddy to 1/2 parts water, so for a 16-ounce drink poured over ice that’s 8 ounces of concentrate to four ounces of water.
Add to that mix a simple “honey sauce”, which is just equal parts honey and hot water. Kaldi’s only adds 1 ounce total of the mixture, which is enough to sweeten the entire drink while also keeping it relatively “low-cal”.
The last ingredient is just one ounce of almond milk. You can use store-bought, or you can whip up your own small batch almond milk, depending on scale and prep space availability.
Now it’s time. Take your cold brew + almond milk + honey sauce mixture and put it in a Boston shaker, or some other such bartender-approved shaking apparatus, and shake vigorously.
Serve the results over about 2 ounces of ice, in a 16-ounce container with a straw. Kaldi’s makes a grip of these bad boys each day in the St. Louis summertime, and one try for yourself and you’ll see why. Is the Honey Almond Toddy the coffee cocktail equivalent of rocket science? No. Does the Honey Almond Toddy taste like everything we want in a summer treat? Yes.
Recipe adapted with permission from our friends and partners at Kaldi’s Coffee.
