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Coffee Syrup (Two pounds fine ground Mocha)
Two pounds fine ground Mocha and Java coffee, 3½ pounds sugar, 1½ gallon hot water, enough to percolate.
This is a soda-fountain working formula rather than a domestic recipe: a strong coffee extract sweetened into a pouring syrup, meant to be measured by the ounce into a glass and topped with carbonated water. The wording assumes you already know what a percolator meant to a druggist.
- "Percolate" is the pharmacist's techniqueIn a soda book of this era percolation means packing the ground coffee into a conical percolator and letting hot water drip slowly through the bed by gravity, drawing off a concentrated extract. It does not mean a stovetop pump percolator, which recirculates and boils the brew. A large drip cone or a paper-filtered pour-over gives the same result on a home scale.
- "Enough to percolate"The 1½ gallons is an upper figure, not a fixed one. You draw off extract until the coffee is exhausted, which with 2 lb of grounds will give you appreciably less than 1½ gallons of liquid; the balance stays in the wet bed.
- Mocha and JavaThe names are origins, not roast styles: Mocha for coffee shipped through the Yemeni port, Java for Indonesian. Any medium-roast blend works. Buy whole beans and grind fine yourself, since the whole point of the formula is a heavy extraction.
- Dissolve the sugar in the hot extract3½ lb of sugar goes into the percolate while it is still hot, stirred until fully dissolved and clear. Do not boil the finished syrup: driving off volatiles is what turns a bright coffee syrup flat and scorched-tasting.
- This is a light syrup3½ lb of sugar to roughly a gallon of liquid is well below the near-saturated 6½ to 7 lb per gallon of a standard fountain simple syrup. It pours thinner and, more importantly, it will not keep at room temperature the way a heavy syrup does. Refrigerate it and use it within a couple of weeks.
- Scaling downA tenth of the formula is manageable: about 3 oz (90 g) fine-ground coffee, 5½ oz (155 g) sugar, and hot water up to roughly 2 cups of drawn extract.
- Yield and servingThe full formula makes something on the order of a gallon of syrup, or about 100 drinks. Figure 1 to 1½ fl oz of syrup per 8 oz glass, made up with cold soda water.
Coffee syrup belongs to the period when the drugstore fountain and the dispensing counter were the same business, run by the same person, with the same equipment. The instruction to percolate is a tell: percolation was a standard pharmaceutical process, used for drawing tinctures and fluid extracts out of barks and roots, and the druggist simply turned the apparatus on coffee. "Mocha and Java" was the stock quality blend of the American nineteenth century, named for the Yemeni port of al-Mukha and for Dutch-colonial Indonesia, and the pairing was so entrenched in the trade that the phrase survives today as a coffee style rather than a statement about where beans came from. Coffee syrups like this one also outlived the fountain era in one place in particular: Rhode Island, where bottled coffee syrup stirred into cold milk remains a regional habit.