What to Add to Freshly Ground Black Coffee to Make It Taste Better and Less Bitter - Adding Chili Sauce to Pure Coffee for a Delicious and Healthy Drink

The Rise of Coffee Additives: From Chili Sauce to Sweet Innovations

Young people today seem to enjoy adding ingredients to everything they drink. This April, a trend emerged online of adding chili sauce to coffee. At first you might wonder: what kind of chili sauce? The sort served with fish balls? Or perhaps Lao Gan Ma?

On digging further, I found a chili sauce called "Ujjo" that had launched a crowdfunding campaign on the KICKSTARTER platform.

Surprisingly, the project reached its funding goal on May 15th, which left me quite astonished.

Looking deeper into the story, I found that the founder of Ujjo was challenged by a friend to add chili sauce to her coffee. As you would imagine, the result was less than pleasant. She took the experience seriously, however, and realised it was not the spiciness that was the problem but the acetic acid and garlic flavours in the chili sauce clashing with coffee. That led her to develop a chili sauce made specifically for coffee, one without acetic acid or garlic, carrying only spiciness and a hint of sweetness from a sweetener called xylitol.

She even created two formulations based on coffee roast level: one for light to medium roast beans and another for dark roast coffee. According to the product information, the chili sauce is not only for coffee; it can be added to tea, alcoholic drinks and even ice cream.

Traditional vs. Innovative Coffee Culture

At this point you might find this fascinating and want to try it yourself. While the approach seems innovative, to some traditional coffee connoisseurs it might count as an insult:

"This coffee is brewed from premium Esmeralda Geisha beans. I want to taste the diverse flavours of its origin, not have random ingredients thrown in."

In most cases, adding ingredients to coffee serves to mask unwanted flavours. That is exactly what happens with Vietnamese drip coffee, where large amounts of condensed milk are added to balance the heavy bitterness of Robusta beans.

The Evolution of Coffee Culture in China

Back in China, before the third wave of coffee culture arrived, most Chinese coffee drinkers added milk and sugar to their black coffee. With the specialty coffee boom, inspired by Starbucks' Frappuccinos and the rise of new-style tea drinks, more and more innovative coffee drinks have appeared.

Today the competition has intensified beyond new-style teas, and even coffee has entered this race. In tea, Nayuki introduced its Baqi Yu You Gan, while HEYTEA launched its fleshy yellow-skin nectar.

In coffee, Starbucks' nitrogen cold brew merely changed the texture. Some brands, aiming to mask coffee's natural flavours, seem to have learned the essence of Vietnamese drip coffee, namely sweetness. Others have shown real ingenuity: simply changing the syrup flavour creates an entirely new beverage.

The Question of Coffee Innovation

There are genuinely innovative people who have put considerable thought into coffee-based drinks, incorporating widely accepted ingredients such as fresh fruit and crunchy nuts. Their goal is clearly to encourage more people to taste, understand and even fall in love with coffee.

What troubles me, though, is whether this helps people appreciate pure coffee or merely the novel elements in a coffee drink. Making more people genuinely love coffee still looks like a long and difficult road.

So what do you think? Is it necessary to add ingredients to coffee, and why?

Sources and Further Information

Image sources: UJJO, KICKSTARTER, Seesaw Coffee official Weibo, internet.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

If you would rather taste the coffee itself than add something to it, a balanced medium roast is the easiest place to start. FrontStreet Coffee Brazil Queen Estate is a rare Yellow Bourbon from Mogiana, and a medium roast brings out creamy peanut, chocolate, toasted bread and sugarcane sweetness in a cup that is sweet and clean, whether brewed as pour-over, in a moka pot or on an espresso machine.

For a sweeter, fruit-forward medium roast, FrontStreet Coffee Strawberry Candy combines a honey-processed Costa Rican coffee with a washed Panama Geisha. The medium roast keeps both the orange-blossom honey depth of the honey process and the rounded sweetness of the Geisha, and it works for cold brew, pour-over and espresso alike, opening with a soft, refreshing sweetness.

If you want a local specialty coffee as a daily cup, FrontStreet Coffee 2013 Sun-Dried Typica is the Chinese representative: medium roasted to restore a balanced, gentle character, with nut, brown sugar, black tea and dried apricot notes, suited to pour-over, cold brew and drip machines with excellent value. And for the most classically balanced profile of all, FrontStreet Coffee Jamaica Blue Mountain No. 1 is medium roasted so that its acidity, bitterness, sweetness and aroma fuse into an elegant whole, with chocolate, roasted nut, cream and caramel flavours that few other coffees can match.