Alfred Coffee Vanilla Latte
Tracee Hsiang
Like many of us, I'd gotten into the habit of getting my lattes from my neighborhood Starbucks. But splurging on a daily coffee drink is not a sustainable practice for me, especially when I can technically make it at home. The only snag: I love the taste of toasty vanilla in my coffee, and Starbucks does this very well. Surely this could be replicated at home, I thought. And so began my quest for the perfect vanilla syrup.
I cherish my morning coffee ritual. Before the rest of the house wakes up, I head to the kitchen, pull out my canister of espresso beans, and begin the process of grinding, tamping, and pulling the shot. Then, I steam the milk (oat is my preference these days) and pour it all into my favorite ceramic mug. I didn't think the process could be improved. That is, until I found Alfred's World Famous Vanilla Syrup.
The product is as delicious as it is straightforward. With just three ingredients (vanilla bean, pure cane sugar, and a bit of Vitamin C to help preserve things), this syrup doesn't have the distinctly artificial tinge of others I tried. Jordan Hardin, Alfred's Director of Food & Beverage, explained to me that while pretty much every coffee shop has a vanilla syrup, most source it from a large manufacturer because it's generally more affordable. Alfred's choice to use quality ingredients and produce smaller batches means a slightly higher price tag ($12.50 for 12.6 ounces), but the difference in taste is notable.
Beyond your everyday cup of coffee, there are lots of other potential applications for the syrup. I've been mixing it into my overnight oats, smoothies, and even my go-to pound cake recipe to great success. If using it for baking, I'd suggest reducing a teaspoon of sugar for each teaspoon of Alfred's stirred into the wet ingredients.
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The Los Angeles-based coffee shop chain unveiled its newest Westwood location Monday. Located across from the Hammer Museum, Alfred Coffee brings well-crafted beverages and vibrant interior decor to Westwood Village. Though the area is already saturated with a variety of coffee shops, Alfred provides Bruins with distinctive menu options that are otherwise unavailable.
Though packed with older adults in the earlier hours, a more youthful atmosphere develops the second UCLA students file in. Customers can choose from a variety of seating options such as single-stooled bar seats, two-person study tables or a large communal table at the center.
For customers who do not prefer coffee, Alfred also offers a caffeine-packed matcha latte. The barista recommends substituting in oat milk, an alteration that balances the bitterness normally found in powdered matcha. The latte tastes earthy but subtly sweet, which highlights the grassy-flavored undertones of premium quality matcha.
While Alfred offers top-quality coffee and tea, the location, lack of power outlets and prices are potential cons for UCLA students. Situated more than a mile from Hedrick Hall, Alfred Westwood Village is not as easily accessible for on-campus Bruins as Upside Down or the Starbucks on Weyburn Avenue. And in terms of pricing, a standard latte ranges from $5 to $6, but additives such as milk alternatives and syrup can skyrocket the cost up into the $7 range.
Slice open a vanilla bean in half lengthwise. Spread open the vanilla bean pod and use your knife to scrape out the vanilla bean seeds. Add the seeds and the vanilla bean pod to the saucepan and stir.
Freezer: You can store vanilla coffee syrup in the freezer! Remove the vanilla bean pod and pour the syrup into an airtight plastic freezer bag or container before placing it in the freezer for up to six months.
A local coffee shop makes a Lexington coffee drink I enjoy and has both house-made bourbon reduced and house-made vanilla. Do you think I could reduce the bourbon and add it to this syrup or substitute the water?
You can get a lot of use out of the jar, which makes it more economical than purchasing pods in my experience. Use it in recipes where the vanilla flavor will shine (general no-cook recipes like this fruit dip) for the most bang for your buck.
It will last up to 2 weeks in the fridge, sometimes longer. Flavored syrups do tend to spoil faster than plain simple syrup but still have a pretty significant shelf-life. Check for any moldy spots or an off-smell if you are storing it for a long time.
The sugar should dissolve after about 2 minutes of simmering. Add the scraped seeds from the vanilla bean pod after it simmers. If you cannot use vanilla bean paste, use vanilla extract. Hope this helps!
our homemade vanilla syrup is a game-changer! As a former vanilla latte enthusiast, I can totally relate to the struggle of artificial flavors. Your recipe not only brought back the joy of vanilla but took it to a whole new level. The perfect blend of sweetness and real vanilla flavor makes every sip a delightful experience. Cheers to a vanilla revival!
I used pure vanilla extract and it worked very well! I was skeptical if I would work and taste good. I had ordered a sprite from a fast food place and it came with no syrup unfortunately. I put this in and it tasted great! Definitely would make and use again.
I know that vanilla extract and paste taste very bitter when I use them to make French Vanilla Creamer. Does making the vanilla simple syrup have a similar bitter taste or is the bitterness lessened/removed?
Think back to a year ago. You woke up, got ready for work and stopped in at your local coffee shop to grab a coffee and something to eat on your way to the office. Maybe you chatted with the barista. Maybe you sat down and enjoyed a few minutes of quiet before your work day began.
Jeff Fromm: What are some of the notable shifts you've seen since Covid that has impacted people's daily lives and particularly the relationship with home? Where have you found success and what are some of the challenges?
Josh Zad: As a brick and mortar coffee shop so much of our business and success relies upon people physically visiting our cafes. At the onset of Covid when there was a lot more confusion around businesses being open or not, one big challenge for us was how to stay relevant? How do we make money? How do we continue to employ people in the face of this confusion? The first challenge for us was pivoting from a customer service retail business to a much more convenience based retail business. The other challenge was how to be a better part and a bigger part of people's lives at home.
Zad: For people who wanted to continue getting coffee at our cafes, two things really unfolded, the simplest one for us was to build the reliance on Postmates. We have been an exclusive partner of Postmates, which in the beginning was a bit of a crazy idea that people would order something on a delivery app and pay fees that were sometimes 20- 30% of the cost of the actual product they were ordering. But, that relationship really worked out for us over the years and we relied on it as a small steady source of income. When the pandemic hit, people's reliance on delivery apps, like Postmates went through the roof.
Trusted brands, like Alfred, that they had ordered from or had always been thinking about ordering from, were easy for them to shift to. They didn't want to leave the house, but they still wanted their coffee. Postmates was a great way to sort of the jump on that.
Zad: We've worked really hard since we launched about eight years ago to really engrain ourselves with the local LA community. Coffee's such a big part of people's routines and there're so many wonderful options, so why would they come to us? We work hard to continue that bond. The business of Alfred is really based on three principles. Take Covid out of this whole thing. There's quality; we want great products and we'll never settle for anything else. There is the experience; that's everything from the design, to the branding, to the interiors, to the flow of the experience inside. Then there is customer service. With Covid undermining the last two, customer service now becomes communicating through an app. There is a disconnect that we have to address. And an experience really becomes the user interface on this app. It's fundamentally very different for us to navigate in this new environment because two of our three main principles have been undermined, but we try to beef up what we can which has been critical for us to continue the tradition of delivering a great experience overall for our customers that said that they rely on us. I think we've been pretty accurate with that.
Zad: There's some people that, whether it's temporary in the face of the pandemic or long-term, are much more reliant on preparing coffee and tea at home. We took a couple of things that we did really well in our cafes, for example we have a world famous ice vanilla latte, and the vanilla syrup that we use is proprietary, it's made in-house. We started selling that online and in the cafes. We got a massive response from people that this is the missing ingredient that they'd always needed to take their home coffee to the next level. That's been so wonderful for us that right now we are working on bottling it with the co-packer and taking it national in terms of grocery and direct to consumer.
That's been something we probably would've never explored had it not been for the pandemic. Additionally, we've beefed up our offering on our website from the tools to make coffee at home, to the coffee subscription service that we launched with our beans, as well as some kits that we've created, like our do it yourself vanilla latte kit and home boba milk tea kit. It's been a fantastic response from customers that really just needed that edge at home that wasn't available in the grocery store.
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