“Uninspired by overly sweetened liqueurs, we decided to take a bold new approach to combining coffee and spirits.”
We say that coffee is a beverage for everyone but nowadays in a world of the millennials, coffee is hard to define for which most of the time millennials need to be pleased to be on trend for they are the target audience in today’s business.
A lot of coffee shops today are slowly revolutionizing their coffee game not just to be on trend but also to be a certified millennial drink.
Here comes a new coffee drink that targets the millennials and it is called the Black Twist.
Black Twist is a combination of 25 percent ABV (alcohol by volume) craft spirit drink that blends single origin Kenyan Arabica coffee and Irish whiskey. It sounds like it will give you a good punch when you drink it! This millennial coffee drink is created by Conor Coughlan who has brought his background in chemistry, and food science to bear on his love of artisan coffee, and an interest in brewing techniques.
This coffee drink is not your ordinary Irish Coffee because of the process of making is delicate allowing the product to mature for seven days before the coffee is filtered out. It comes in a 700ml bottle and is being pitched as a premium product.
Black twist is the brainchild of Coughlan after joining Kerry Group from college as a new product development graduate and stayed there from 2008 until 2015 when he began working on the idea for Black Twist. He described his innovation as “hard coffee” having a stronger punch of brewed coffee in hard liquor to produce a less sweet and more authentic taste.
“Recent trends in both coffee and spirit consumption are moving away from sweet products to real flavours driven primarily by millennial consumers,” he says. “This in turn has been driving the growth of premium craft products in both the coffee and whiskey sectors globally.”
“The popularity of the espresso martini cocktail, coffee stouts and the continued blurring of lines between bars and coffee shops suggest the millennial consumer is more than comfortable combining coffee and alcohol,” Coughlan adds.
“Despite this, the only products on the market both together are coffee liqueurs – highly sweetened products that are not reflective of the way consumers enjoy their coffee or spirits today.”
The increasing popularity of cold brew coffee all over the world is what made Coughlan interested to create his own product.
“Cold-brew coffee is typically enjoyed neat over ice and I thought it would be really interesting to explore the effect of cold brewing top quality coffee in Irish whiskey instead of water. I contacted the guys in Khanya Craft Coffee and Teagasc, Moorepark, to get the ball rolling and after many, many trials with different coffees, recipes and brewing conditions, Black Twist was born.” said Coughlan.
The black twist is not yet out to the public, but Coughlan’s team is getting as many people to taste the Black Twist as quickly as they can so that they can roll out the product in Ireland and will soon breaking into the UK and US markets.
Coughlan says the product can be used by bars as a cocktail ingredient and also by gastropubs and other licensed premises to create drinks such as the Iced Latte Twist, which combines Black Twist, cold milk and a dash of condensed milk or syrup. “I definitely view Black Twist as a disruptive product and the main target are millennials who are social, adventurous and regard food and drink as a hobby.”
We think that this new coffee drink will be enjoyed by the millennials, and we can’t wait that Black Twist will reach the US market soon.
Source: The Irish Times
