Interviewer: Apple season is coming! Why did you make this drink menu? 

Chef Mike: So we started doing these bottled drinks two years ago, trying to think of ways we can optimize the kind of ingredients we had and different things we have at the shop. So we decided to play around with apples in the fall season. Apples or apple cinnamon flavor is always the best. So we decided to try some new drink items.

Interviewer: What are apple cider and apple cider spice tea? What are the flavor and the texture like? 

Chef Mike: So we want to make our apple pies. We cook the apples in a cinnamon caramel sauce before we put them in the pies. So the liquid that remains after the apples are cooked has all the natural apple juice and the cinnamon and sugar from the cooking of the apples. So we strain out this liquid, and we use that for the base and the iced tea. So it’s got a really good cinnamon flavor and a little bit of caramel. And we also use a little bit of rum in the cooking liquid, which the alcohol is cooked off. So it’s not an alcoholic drink at all, but it still has a flavor of a little bit of the spice route flavor.

Interviewer: Is it for the Thanksgiving and Holiday season limited menu? 

Chef Mike: This is a fall season menu, so we’ll have it through the end of the year at least. So as it passes, Thanksgiving and Christmas will still keep the menu as long as we’re doing apple pies. So after a few more months.

Interviewer: What are the recommended points? 

Chef Mike: I think the apple cider is a good kind of warming thing, especially as temperatures are getting lower here. I think it was around 40 F this morning when I went to work. But it’s good with a nice warming drink. Cinnamon kind of gives your body a warming kind of upload a little bit. And then the iced tea with a little bit of sweetness from the apples and the caramel is really good. 

Interviewer: When are you going to release this drink menu? 

Chef Mike: We’ve already started the drink menu, so it’s on our menu online ordering it’s been for a couple of weeks.

Interviewer: Which pastry menu is good with those drinks? 
Chef Mike: I think the iced tea and cinnamon go well with most of the items, like the cafe menu, crepes, and those things. With the cider, probably it’s more like the cheesecake or the pumpkin cheesecake. A little bit of cinnamon flavor. It’s a little bit of a kind of heavier flavor for the apple cider. So it kind of goes better with something that will kind of hold up a little bit more than, like, maybe the strawberry shortcake that might be a little bit too light flavor to match with cider. Other items that we use to kind of maximize our ingredients are so when we take the liquid from the apples after it’s cold, it sets the butter that we use for the caramel to rise to the surface. So we scoop off the butter with some cinnamon in it, and some of the flavors from the apple liquid, and we use that to make snickerdoodle cookies. So there will be butter, kind of like seasoned butter. The cookies add a lot of flavors, and it has a little apple cinnamon flavored cookies as well. So we try a lot of things at the shop, and we make everything there ourselves. We like to try and maximize that do not have too much leftovers and minimize the waste in a good way.