What Goes Into the Cup

Coffee is around 98 percent water by weight, and tea more still. That makes water an ingredient rather than a neutral background, and its mineral content measurably changes what you taste.

The same goes for the things people add without thinking: the milk or plant drink, the sweetener, the syrup. Each one changes body, sweetness, and how the other flavours read.

Sweeteners are not interchangeable, and the difference is rarely sweetness. Where they part company is how they dissolve, what body they add, and whether they carry a flavour of their own.

Temperature decides which of them work. Granulated sugar will not dissolve in a cold drink and syrup will, which is the whole reason simple syrup exists.

Acid does more than sour. Citric and malic acid lift aroma and sharpen a drink that reads flat, and the same acidity is what makes a plant drink split against a hot shot of coffee.

Aromatics live in oils rather than in juice.

The smell of lemon sits in the peel, not the flesh, which is why a strip of zest does more for the impression of lemon than another squeeze does.

Spices behave the same way and fade the same way. Whole pods and quills hold their oils for months where ground spice loses them in weeks.