Home › At the Fountain › Vin-Caffa Syrup
Vin-Caffa Syrup
Coffee Syrup, 3 pints; Rock and Rye Syrup, 5 pints.
Mix and strain.
This is a fountain compound, not a drink in itself: two finished syrups blended into a third that is then drawn by the ounce under carbonated water. Everything depends on the two syrups you start with.
- Yield and dispensingEight pints, or one gallon of finished syrup. At the usual fountain rate of 1 to 1½ fl oz of syrup to a 6-8 oz glass of carbonated water, that is roughly 85 to 128 drinks.
- Coffee syrupPeriod coffee syrup is a strong cold or hot infusion of ground coffee, heavily sweetened and cooked down to a syrup, sometimes with caramel for colour. Bottled coffee syrup of the Rhode Island type is the closest commercial equivalent; espresso cut with simple syrup also works, though it is thinner and will not keep as long.
- Rock and rye syrupFountain books of this era print two versions: one built on rock candy syrup with actual rye whiskey, another an imitation using rye or whiskey flavouring essence, orange and lemon peel, and sometimes horehound. Which one you use decides whether the finished syrup is alcoholic. The book does not say.
- Rock candy syrupThis is simply a saturated sugar syrup — sugar dissolved to the point of near-crystallisation, traditionally clarified rather than boiled hard. It is not a flavour of its own so much as the body and sweetness the whiskey and citrus sit on.
- Mix and strainThe straining is not decoration. Coffee syrup throws fine grounds and sediment, and citrus-peel syrups leave oil and pulp, and a clouded syrup would not have been wanted at the counter. Pass it through several thicknesses of muslin or a coffee filter.
- Keeping itSugar concentration is what preserves these syrups. If you thin either component below true syrup density it will ferment or mould within days. Store cold and in glass, and discard at the first sign of gas or ropiness.
- RatioAt 3 to 5 the rock and rye dominates; the coffee reads as depth and colour rather than as a coffee drink. If you want the coffee forward, that is a different syrup, not this one.
The American soda fountain of the early twentieth century was a pharmacy counter before it was a lunch counter, and its syrup book reads like a dispensing formulary: everything measured in pints, everything strained, everything shelf-stable. Rock and rye — whiskey sweetened with rock candy and dosed with citrus and bitter herbs — had a long life as a cough and cold remedy sold across that same counter, which is how a whiskey flavour came to sit respectably in a soda syrup list at all. The name here appears to be trade coinage rather than any established dish, the sort of invented label fountains used to give a house blend an air of the apothecary; its origin is not recorded. Compound syrups like this one were a dispenser's way of getting a signature drink out of stock he already had on the shelf, and many such blends were printed, sold for a season, and forgotten.