Various Choices of Sugar and Sweet Ingredients for Your Coffee, Sweet Tooths!

Palm sugar

Have you ever tried palm sugar iced coffee in modern cafes? Generally, these drinks use palm sugar syrup that is ready to be poured. This aims to ensure that the serving process can be carried out quickly and easily. However, if you don't have palm sugar syrup, you can also use solid palm sugar, which is easy to find in almost all traditional markets.

Also Read: 5 Benefits of Black Coffee Without Sugar that You Need to Know

Palm sugar is indeed a product of Indonesian culture. In fact, making palm sugar traditionally has been done for a long time as a livelihood by various tribes that are not limited to certain areas (Saleh, 2014).

As reported in the news on CNN Indonesia, the process of making palm sugar begins by cooking palm juice and putting it in a mold in the form of a coconut shell. After it is dry and solid, palm sugar is ready to be removed from the shell and used in various foods and drinks, including palm sugar coffee.

Honey

Everyone knows that honey has a delicious and sweet taste. But did you know honey generally contains around 70%–80% sugar? (Eleazu et al., 2013) So, it's no surprise that honey tastes sweet!

However, that's not the only thing that makes honey unique. The reason is that this sweet taste is natural because it is obtained by honey bees from the nectar taken from flowers. After that, the nectar is taken to the beehive and processed to produce fructose and glucose. Then, the beekeepers will process it into the thick honey you can buy in many stores. (Asiah et al., 2018)

Cinnamon

Cinnamon is often used as a spice combined in various dishes. But apart from that, you can also add it to coffee as a substitute for sugar. As the name suggests, cinnamon has a pretty sweet taste. But, different from sugar, cinnamon has an alluring aroma; if combined with coffee's aroma, it will be even more delicious! (Rao & Gan, 2014)

You can get it in powder form and mix it into coffee easily. However, it would be easier if coffee mixed with cinnamon powder is a coffee milk drink, such as cappucino and latte. The reason is that cinnamon powder dissolves much more easily into milk coffee than coffee alone.

Coconut sugar

Coconut trees, especially the fruit, can be used and processed in various ways. However, the sugar we are discussing this time is not from the fruit. Coconut sugar comes from the sap produced by the flowers of coconut trees. This sap is then processed to become solid and not contain water. From there, the sap is processed into coconut sugar powder, which you can use when making coffee! (Asghar et al., 2020)

So, those are the various alternatives to sugar that you can add to coffee. The various sweet ingredients above have different tastes. However, they all have one thing in common: they can give your coffee a delicious sweet taste and add a distinctive aroma!

So, before continuing to experiment with the sweet ingredients above, it's a good idea for you to choose the right coffee. For example, you can try NESCAFÉ Classic. This product is made from 100% Robusta coffee, which is formulated in such a way that it becomes instant coffee powder that easily dissolves in water. As a result, you can have a delicious and easy coffee-drinking experience!