Say Hello To Café Con Leche Y Hielo!

Or rather say hola! Café con leche y hielo (coffee with milk and ice) is a staple of Spanish coffee culture that combines espresso (or café solo to be precise) with ice, sugar and cold fresh milk for a cool coffee treat on a hot day. We made this one with some gorgeous panela from our friends at Bonraw.

The Recipe

• Fill a glass with ice.
• Pull a double shot of espresso. If you don’t have an espresso machine, Moka pot coffee or a very strongly brewed AeroPress coffee will do.
• Add your panela or sugar to the coffee. Up to two teaspoons is normal. This just depends on how sweet a tooth you have!
• Pour milk over the ice, around 100ml is about right, but this is all personal preference.
• Carefully pour your espresso on top.

Enjoy!

No leche, no problem!

Fancy it without milk? Go for a Café con hielo – a classic of hot espresso poured directly onto ice. You get two cups, one with café solo and a bigger one with ice. Add sugar to taste, then carefully pour the espresso over the ice cubes. Doing this without spilling a drop is the mark of a true coffee aficionado.

What is Panela?

We made our café con leche y hielo with this gorgeous panela from our friends at Bonraw. Panela is a form of unrefined whole cane sugar found across Latin America. Crushed sugarcane juice is collected, boiled, and then poured into moulds to set. Sold in blocks or beaten to create granulated panela. Bonraw panela is handmade by farmers in the Quimbaya region of Colombia. It’s 100% organic and has a GI of only 35, compared to table sugar’s 65. You can find out all about Bonraw here!

The key difference between panela and sugar you might find in your cupboard is that such sugars are often refined in a centrifuge, meaning that the crystals have been separated from the molasses using a machine not unlike a spin dryer. By contrast, panela becomes refined through evaporation. This process removes the water from the cane juice but leaves the natural molasses intact, giving panela its beautiful brown colour and flavour.

Colombia is the primary producer of panela, where the industry is an important source of employment. Sugarcane is Colombia’s sixth most farmed crop, after coffee, corn, rice, bananas, and cotton, and the panela industry employs over 350,000 people across the country.

The Full Colombian

Why not double down on Colombian sugarcane and combine Bonraw’s Colombian Panela with our Colombian sugarcane decaffeinated coffee How Long Is A Piece Of String? A delicious coffee grown on several small farms in the Huila region, How Long Is A Piece Of String combines smooth chocolate with rich malt loaf, warm from the oven and sticky with fruit, and a crisp apple finish.

During sugarcane decaffeination, green coffee beans get steamed to open their pores and extract the caffeine. The beans become submerged in a solution containing a compound extracted from crushed sugarcane, which bonds with the caffeine, removing it from the beans whilst leaving all the great flavours intact. Awesome!

Grab a bag in our webstore today!