You’ve heard of the red-eye, black eye, and the lazy eye, but have you ever heard of the Dripped Eye?
How do you introduce a whole new coffee variant that will catch the attention of the coffee community? Some stories are hard to understand what the motivation must have been, but one underdog of the Uganda coffee empire is looking to change that.
Red Eye, Black Eye & Lazy Eye
REDEFINING EXTREME COFFEE BLENDS
These coffee and espresso blend drinks can carry a pretty hefty kick. Here’s what they all have in common:
Red Eye
This is simply a standard drip brew coffee that will have a single shot of espresso added to the mixture. It’s a great way to wake up if you’re extra tired in the morning.
Black Eye
The usual recipe will recommend two shots of espresso that are poured into ordinary drip coffee. To smooth it out, you can add some optional milk or cream so you don’t get acid reflux or the dreaded coffee burp.
Lazy eye
For those who are looking for the kick of caffeine and extreme coffee flavor, you add 2 or three shots of espresso to decaf coffee. The result is a flavor that’s intense enough not to send you to the E.R. right away.
Now at this point, you’ll have a sneaking suspicion that the Dripped Eye is something similar. That’s absolutely right in this case with this recipe breaking all the rules and potentially giving serious coffee drinkers a real run for their money. But is this recipe worth the hassle? This is where the history of the Dripped Eye takes you on a journey all the way to Uganda, where the mountain range of Mt. Elgon grows some seriously volcanic coffee beans.
Is Ugandan Coffee Good At All?
If you aren’t familiar with coffee, Uganda isn’t a big place that is known for producing top-quality coffee beans. More than often, you usually find Robusta coffee beans are the main export. But for some luck growers on the east side of the volcanic slots of Mount Elgon facing Kenya, there are new ranks of farmers that are increasingly producing excellent Arabica coffee beans.
These beans don’t come with a slew of problems since the weather, labor, and conditions are what make these highly sought-after beans so scarce and usually expensive. This makes it more difficult to tap into a good supplier that will carry beans from a company that cannot supply the demand for continual coffee year-round. Yet the slow rise of interest in coffee grown in Uganda is slowing starting to get out in the world until recently as 2020.
The Mini-Empire Of Sasa Coffee
One of the lesser-known players on the east side of Mount Elgon is Sasa coffee, which is an extremely small co-op operation that is running on fumes. Not only are they hard to find directly, but it also takes a second look to see where they are located upon any internet search. If you can imagine that, their coffee is even harder to track down. That’s where we’ve taken the liberty to give you some helpful info to Ugandan Supermarket that sells their coffee.
If you aren’t up on your Ugandan currency calculations, this amounts to just $3.73 for 250 grams of their whole beans, making it pretty attractive for an Arabica-grade coffee bean. And this is one of the only places where their beans are sold in stores, so you won’t find them being sold in the US unless this coffee has been imported into some specialty shop somewhere…
How Did The Dripped Eye Recipe Emerge?
We started to notice that there are so many ways to make good coffee and we select coffee recipes that are noteworthy for listing. One recipe that seems to spring up like a blue moon sounds like others listed earlier in this article. But when it came to tracking down who invented it, was a real mystery. Many coffee websites that included this recipe never had any link or credit to who was responsible for the Dripped Eye coffee recipe either.
Not until we happened to find a couple of very vague online posts from Facebook posts and Twitter feeds that it started to make sense. It seems that Sasa Coffee was indeed the inventor of this new Dripped Eye that could be applied to any kind of coffee and espresso. But the big disappointment is that nobody bothered to test it with Sasa Coffee at all. Perhaps one day, we’ll see a video emerge, but for now, at least you know where to buy it.
Dripped Eye Recipes
The Original Dripped Eye
Ingredients
- 3 Shots Espresso
- 1/2 Cup Drip-brew Coffee
Instructions
- Brew together 3 shots of espresso and add this to your favorite coffee mug. Now you can top this off with freshly brewed drip coffee so that it’s a half and half mixture. Leave some room for cream and sugar if you like. This is not your typical coffee drink so small sips over the next hour or so are highly recommended. No espresso maker? Try these alternative brewing methods.
Cold Brew Dripped Eye
Ingredients
- 20 Grams Medium-fine Ground Coffee Beans (for espresso blend)
- 1 Cup Water (for espresso blend)
- 5 Grams Coarse Ground Coffee Beans (for coffee blend)
- 1 Cup water (for coffee blend)
Instructions
- For the espresso- Take a measuring cup and add 1-cup of room temperature filtered water and add 20 grams of ground coffee beans. Your beans need to be ground into a medium-fine consistency. Mix the grounds for 10 seconds and then cover the cup with plastic wrap. Allow it to sit for 12 hours total. This will give you the espresso flavor you’re looking for. This is then filtered into a cup with a coffee filter. It will take time to filter, so be patient.
- For the coffee- This is a repeat of the espresso method so cops the same steps using filtered room temperature water. Add your coffee ground and let steep for 12 hours. Also, filter your coffee grounds into a new cup.
- Serving- Grab a large glass cup used for lemonade that’s considered a pint cup. Now you can add half a cup of ice to this. Pour your espresso first and then the coffee mixture. You can pre-flavor the coffee version first with flavored syrup and a small bit of cream. This will give a nice flavor if you mix the coffee with a stir stick a couple times. Not too much but just enough to get a swirled effect. Enjoy!