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Coffee Syrup (May be made by adding boiling)
Coffee syrup may be made by adding boiling water from the apparatus to 1 pound of coffee placed in a suitable filter coffee pot until 2 quarts of infusion are obtained. Add to this 3 pounds of sugar. In dispensing, first put sufficient cream into the cup, add the coffee, then sweetening. Fill with hot water from the draft tube, and stir with a spoon
This is a soda-fountain formula: a concentrated sweetened coffee extract kept at the counter and built into a cup on demand. Two things matter — the brew is far stronger than drinking coffee, and the syrup is finished cold rather than boiled.
- The ratio, in modern termsOne pound of ground coffee drawn through with boiling water until you collect 2 quarts of liquid is roughly 450 g coffee to 1.9 L — about four times the strength of ordinary drip coffee. That concentration is the point; it survives dilution by cream, sugar and hot water.
- "From the apparatus" and "the draft tube"Both refer to the fountain's hot-water tap, which delivered near-boiling water on demand. A kettle does the same job. The "filter coffee pot" is any large drip or percolator basket; a cloth or paper filter over a stockpot works.
- SugarThree pounds (1.35 kg) dissolved into 2 quarts gives a heavy syrup of about 3 quarts finished volume. Stir it into the hot infusion off the heat until fully dissolved rather than boiling the mixture, which drives off the aromatics you just extracted.
- Order of building the cupCream first, then coffee syrup, then extra sweetening, then hot water. Putting the cream in the empty cup lets the hot liquid whip through it; adding cream last to a full cup of hot syrup is likelier to leave streaks and, with older cream, to curdle.
- YieldAbout 3 quarts of syrup, enough for roughly 65 to 95 cups at 1 to 1.5 fl oz of syrup each. Adjust to taste — the recipe assumes a dispenser who is judging each cup by eye.
- Keeping itThis is not a preserved product. The sugar concentration slows spoilage but does not stop it. Refrigerate and use within about two weeks, and discard at any sign of fermentation or surface film.
Hot drinks were a serious part of the soda fountain's business, particularly in winter when ice cream sales fell off, and trade manuals like this one gave dispensers formulas for coffee, chocolate, beef tea and clam bouillon alongside the syrups for cold sodas. The appeal of a coffee syrup was purely operational: a single concentrate, held at room temperature and measured with a pump or ladle, let a counterman produce a cup of sweetened coffee in seconds without brewing to order or letting a pot sit and stew. The habit outlived the fountains in Rhode Island, where bottled coffee syrup stirred into cold milk became a regional staple and is generally traced back to exactly this sort of fountain and diner practice, though the commercial brands there are twentieth-century arrivals rather than descendants of any one published formula.