HOT DRINKS, THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!

Especially in winter, hot drinks have a special appeal after skiing or shoveling or when the heating system is on the fritz. And sometimes just for the pleasure of it.

In areas without easy access to safe drinking water, many people prefer to boil all water. Having a hot drink can be a convenient excuse to boil water before drinking it.

Here, for your consideration, are hot drinks galore, from the routine, tried and true to the truly exotic.

Water-Based Drinks

I have a friend who drinks plain hot water, but she is surely in the minority. Putting aside coffee and tea for separate consideration, here are a few ideas for variations on hot water that don’t even need recipes.

  • Simple additives like a squeeze of lemon, a little sugar, molasses or honey, or some other favorite flavoring such as vanilla, blackberry syrup, etc.
  • Consider heating un-carbonated flavored water.
  • Herbs, spices, and supplements can make for a very refreshing and sometimes medicinal beverage when mixed with hot water.
  • And then there is herbal “tea,” made with water and anything other than Camellia sinensis or Camellia taliensis leaves, such as rooibos, chamomile, or peppermint.  This is very convenient, given that there are many varieties commercially available.
  • Broths and bouillons: water heated with cubes or paste flavored as vegetable, chicken, beef, or whatever.

Coffee-Based Drinks

Coffee isn’t singular. There are over a hundred different types of coffee plants, but only four main types of coffee beans that are commercially produced: Arabica, Robusta, Liberica, and Excelsa. Arabica and Robusta beans are the most popular, making up well over 90% of the market.

The first consideration is black or with various additives. Popular additions include milk of whatever sort, cream, creamer, whipped cream, ice cream, condensed milk, evaporated milk, butter, sugar, sugar substitutes, flavored syrups, or other sweeteners.

A thorough examination of coffee-based drinks is clearly beyond my purpose here. Suffice it to say, the Folgers website alone lists the following:

  • Espresso, 7 versions
  • Espresso with coffee, 4 more versions
  • Cappuccino
  • Mocha
  • Lattes, 2 versions
  • Breve
  • Macchiatos, 2 versions
  • Cortado
  • Dirty Chai
  • Dalgona
  • Dessert Coffees, 5 versions
  • Turkish Coffee
  • Cuban Coffee
  • Galão Coffee
  • Antoccino Coffee

Hot Tea

And then there is real tea, made of leaves from the Camellia plant. Aside from water, tea is the most consumed beverage in the world. There are roughly 1500 types of tea, categorized into a few main types: 

  • Black tea, a fully oxidized tea that can be dark amber to black in color. Some types of black tea include Assam, Darjeeling, Ceylon, and Pue Yunnan. 
  • White tea, a naturally oxidized, non-processed tea that has a floral and fruity aroma. Some types of white tea include Pai Mu Tan and Yin Zhen. 
  • Green tea, a tea that is minimally oxidized to retain its natural green color and fresh flavor. Green tea may have health benefits such as boosting heart health and lowering cholesterol. 
  • Oolong tea, a distinct tea varietal native to Taiwan and Fujian province in China, has properties somewhere between green and black tea. It is a semi-oxidized tea, best steeped for 2–3 minutes at a temperature of 195°F. 
  • Pu-Erh tea gets its smoky, earthy flavor from extended fermentation. After drying in the sun, pu-erh leaves are rolled into a pile and left to ferment for several months, then steamed, compressed, and dried again.

At Oh, How Civilized!, tea and coffee sommelier Jee Choe has provided recipes for a number of hot drinks. Some of these are not tea, in the strict sense, but they don’t clearly fit anywhere else in this blog.

  • Ginger spice
  • Pumpkin spice chai latte
  • Hot citron tea
  • Decadent chai latte
  • Easy chamomile tea latte
  • London Fog (Earl Grey tea latte)
  • Decadent hojicha latte
  • Matcha hot chocolate
  • Decadent Earl Grey hot chocolate
  • Easy matcha latte (using green tea powder)
  • Chocolate mint tea latte
  • Milk tea
  • Rooibos tea latte (this “red tea” is a South African herb)
  • Quick and easy Moroccan mint tea
  • Jujube ginger tea (jujube is a Chinese red date)

Juice-Based Hot Drinks

At its simplest, just heat your favorite juice, such as orange, apple, prune, or whatever.

Hot lemonade (hot water with honey and a bit of lemon) has been a common treatment for sore throats and stuffy heads for centuries.

Hot apple juice is not terribly popular, but its unpasteurized and unfiltered cousin, apple cider, is a very popular hot drink in the fall and winter.

Simply mixing boiling water with a bit of fruit preserves or compote makes a type of hot juice drink, warming and mildly sweet.

Or fancy it up a bit, for example, tomato juice with a dash of Worcestershire, or prune heated with a bit of lemon peel.

Milk-Based Hot Drinks

While some drinks already mentioned might arguably be lumped in with “milk-based” hot drinks, the ones that follow are undoubtedly so.

There is the classic, pure cup of hot (dairy) milk, especially appropriate for nighttime because it contains tryptophan. The brain uses this essential amino-acid to build both serotonin and melatonin, compounds that help us relax and prepare for sleep. Although the amount of tryptophan is small, don’t discount placebo effects, plus the effects of warmth and a full stomach!

Salep in Ankara

Now there are numerous non-dairy milks available: soy, oat, almond, cashew, macadamia, pea, quinoa, rice, and maybe others I don’t know about. Consider these alone or in the options listed below.

You can find the following recipes at Through the Fibro Fog:

  • Honey ginger warm milk
  • Turkish salep drink
  • Cardamom milk
  • Nutmeg milk
  • Spiced milk
  • Turmeric latte
  • Golden turmeric milk
  • Plus 2 recipes for steamers and 2 for sweet drinks

Looking farther afield, you can find recipes like hot spiced vanilla custard milk (at The Peasant’s Daughter).

Hot Cocoa and Chocolate

Last but not least, hot chocolate and hot cocoa!

Last because you probably thought of it immediately; not least because it’s such a favorite. The basic questions are, with or without marshmallows, with or without a sprinkle of chocolate or cinnamon on top. Beyond that, what are your favorite flavorings? Peppermint? Maple?

Hot cocoa and hot chocolate are technically two different drinks! Mixing hot water or milk with cocoa powder and sugar will give you hot cocoa, which is what most of us in America think of. However, melting solid chocolate and mixing it with hot milk will give you hot chocolate, a thicker and richer beverage.

If you need a recipe, consult any cocoa tin, any comprehensive cookbook, or go online. Or, for a very simple recipe, you could just heat pre-made chocolate milk.

Try Mexican hot chocolate, with cinnamon and chili powder. Or, for a French variation, melt chocolate with cream until it is barely liquid enough to drink.

For a lighter take on hot chocolate, consider steeping cacao husks. Martha Washington reportedly enjoyed an infusion of roasted cacao husks with her breakfast!

Hot Alcoholic Drinks

Here again, recipes are everywhere in cookbooks and online. And you might note overlap with some of the preceding categories!

Hot toddy is a wintertime favorite. The classic hot toddy is made with hot water, sweeteners like honey or sugar, whiskey (often bourbon), and a stick of cinnamon or star anise.

Another popular wintertime drink is mulled wine. Mulled wine is dry red or white wine heated and spiced with cloves, star anise, and cinnamon sticks, often with oranges.

Because of the lack of pasteurization, apple cider and perry (cider made from pear juice) ferment and become alcoholic very easily. Hot Buttered Spiked Cider, besides the title ingredients, uses dark brown sugar, pumpkin pie spice, rum, orange peel, and cinnamon stick.

  • Spiked hot chocolate or a hot peppermint patty
  • Bailey’s hot chocolate
  • Amaretto coffee
  • Irish coffee
  • Spanish coffee
  • Hot buttered rum
  • Ginger bourbon
  • Cinnamon and tequila
  • Apple brandy hot toddy
  • Whiskey chai
  • Gaelic punch, using young Irish whiskey
  • Sake

Bottom Line: There are myriad ways to drink yourself warm from the inside out, not to mention warming your fingers as well. Go for it!

Cold

Frozen iceberg blue in color

On Tuesday I wrote about heat. Could cold be far behind? Again, I talked about the effects of cold in a recent blog on weather for writers. Today I want to look at cold in our lives, and it turns out to be remarkably parallel to heat!

 

Cold Snap 

cold snap (or cold spell) is distinguished by cooling of the air. (Big surprise!) Specifically, as used by the U.S. National Weather Service, a cold wave is a rapid fall in temperature within a 24-hour period requiring substantially increased protection to agriculture, industry, commerce, and social activities. The precise criterion for a cold wave is determined by the rate at which the temperature falls, and the minimum to which it falls. This minimum temperature is dependent on the geographical region and time of year. In the United States, a cold spell is defined as the national average high temperature dropping below 20 °F (−7 °C).

house capped in snow

In some places, extreme cold requires that fuel-powered machinery to be run continuously. Plumbing may need to be wrapped, and often water is run continuously through pipes. Energy conservation is difficult in a cold wave. It may be necessary to collect people (especially the homeless, poor, and elderly) in communal shelters. Hospitals prepare for people suffering frostbite and hypothermia; schools and other public buildings are often closed, sometimes converted into shelters.

 

Privately, people stock up on food, water, and other necessities when a cold wave is predicted. Some move to warmer places (think Florida’s snowbirds during the winter). Farmers stock forage for livestock, and livestock might be shipped from affected areas or even slaughtered. Smudge pots can prevents hard freezes on a farm or grove. Vulnerable crops may be sprayed with water that will paradoxically protect the plants by freezing and absorbing the cold from surrounding air.

 

Most people bundle and layer their cloths to go outside—or deal with a heating failure. They can also stock candles, matches, flashlights, and plan how to eat without a working cookstove.

Staying Alive

Once your body hits 82 degrees, you can become unconscious. Death can happen when your body temperature goes below 70. This can take less than an hour. Death can happen faster if you fall into freezing water.

shopper in frozen food or cold storage section of grocery

But cold can also help us stay alive: think frozen food, natural cold used in winter. And that’s even before refrigeration. Today, body temperatures are often lowered during surgeries to slow down metabolism.

Cold is often associated with snow, and snow can be insulation: hollowing out a snow cave or living in an igloo conserve body heat and protects occupants from the colder air outside.

cold survival Inuit-Igloo
Inuit constructing an igloo, November 26, 1924 (Frank E. Kleinschmidt [Public domain])

And After Death

Ice and freezing preserve food but also bodies. During the American Civil War, bodies awaiting transport home for burial were iced for preservation. But consider the human and animal remains that have been discovered in Antartica or other areas where they have remained largely unchanged, sometimes for hundreds of years.

Cold and Humidity

 

Again, paralleling heat, humidity intensify feelings of cold. It might seem paradoxical, but dry air will most times feel warmer than cold, humid air at the same temperature.  A cold day in the southeast U.S. feels colder than a cold day in the southwest.

I remember days in the North Country of New York when I couldn’t breathe without covering my mouth with a scarf, and the damp air frosted my eyelashes.

woman bundled against cold with scarf around face

My father used to say that he’d rather cold weather than hot because he could always put on enough clothes to get warm but couldn’t take off enough clothes to get cool.

 

QUESTION: how does your character cope with cold? Let me know in the comments.

Writing Winter Weather

Writing 101: Winter Weather

Like so many other people affected by the recent extreme weather, I had plenty of time to consider snow. And as with so many other things that I consider, I started reading about it. Yes, Elmore Leonard is adamant that you never start a book with the weather—but that is not to say weather is taboo in your story. Your task as a writer is to make weather interesting. As an exercise, consider the following snow-related facts, and how you might fit them into a story in a way that seems natural, preferably relevant to the plot!

neighborhood with snow
Snow January 2016

 

Chionophobia is a persistent fear of snow, especially being trapped by snow. Winter cold kills more than twice as many Americans as summer heat does. Maybe your character has a reason to move to Key West!

snow drifts by house
Snow drifts during January 2016

 

Some parts of Antarctica have had no rain or snow for two million years. Also, snow has never been reported in Key West, FL.

 

On average, an inch of rain makes 10 inches of snow.

 

winter weather in Richmond, Virginia, January 2016

 

Skiing was introduced to Switzerland by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1893.

 

Handschuhschneeballwerfer is German slang for “coward.” It means someone who wears gloves to throw snowballs.

 

A snowflake that falls on glacier in central Greenland can take 200,000 years to reach the sea.

 

Conventional wisdom holds that all snowflakes have 6 sides. But according to the Huffington Post, there are triangles, hourglasses, spools of thread, needles, hollow columns, dendrites, prisms, and flat plates as well. Asymmetrical snowflakes are more common than symmetrical ones. Shapes vary by temperature and moisture in the clouds. What sort of person would care about the shape of snowflakes?

 

It’s a myth that no two snowflakes are exactly the same; in 1988, two identical snow crystals came from a storm in Wisconsin. But according to physicists, complex snowflakes are indeed unique.

 

According to The Guinness Book of World Records, the world’s largest snowflake was reported to be 15 inches across and 8 inches thick. While witnesses said the flakes were “larger than milk pans,” these claims have not been substantiated.

 

tree covered in snow, January 2016

 

Snow isn’t white; it’s actually clear and colorless. The appearance of white results from absorbing sunlight uniformly over the wavelengths of visible light.

 

Sometimes snow doesn’t appear white. Orange snow fell over Siberia in 2007. Deep snow can appear blue. Snow can also appear pink (watermelon snow). Snow in high alpine areas and the coastal polar regions contains fresh-water algae that have a red pigment that tints the surrounding snow. Perhaps your character made snowcream with pink snow and all who ate it got sick from the algae.

 

Each winter in the US, at least 1 septillion ice crystals fall from the sky—that’s 1 with 24 zeros. The average snowflake falls at a speed of 3.1 mph.
1 septillion ice crystals fall from the sky

 

An average snowflake is made up of 180 billion molecules of water.

 

Besides snowflakes, frozen precipitation can take the form of hail, graupel (snow pellets), or sleet.

 

The most snow ever recorded in a 24-hour period in the US was 75.8 inches (Silver Lake, CO, 1921). The second most fell in one calendar day, 63 inches, in Georgetown, CO, 1913. In 1959, a single snowstorm in Mt. Shasta dropped as much as 15.75 feet of snow in that California region.

 

Mt. Baker ski area in Washington State has the world record for snowfall: 1,140 inches in the 1998-99 winter season (about 95 feet). Who would be happy about that?

 

80% of the freshwater on earth is frozen as ice or snow, accounting for 12% of the earth’s surface.

 

footprint in snow
Footprint in snow

 

A blizzard is when you can’t see for 1/4 mile, the winds are 35 mph or more, and the storm lasts at least 3 hours.

 

People buy more cakes, cookies, and candies than any other food when a blizzard is forecast. And I thought it was bread and milk! What would your character stock up? Wine? Beans? Oatmeal? Dog biscuits? Toilet paper?

 

The US averages 105 snow storms per year, typically lasting 2-5 days and affecting multiple states.

 

An igloo can be more than 100 degrees warmer inside than outside—and they’re warmed entirely by body heat.

 

According to wikipedia, the Eskimo-Aleut languages have about the same number of distinct word roots referring to snow as English does, but these languages allow more variety as to how those roots can be modified in forming a single word. This issue is still debated.

 

Snowboarders and skiers often distinguish different types of snow by labels such as mashed potatoes, pow pow, champagne, cauliflower, sticky, or dust on crust.

 

Ski lift in snow
By Nathalie Gouzée

 

Nova Scotia holds the record for the most snow angels ever made simultaneously in multiple locations: 22,022 in 130 locations in 2011. Bismarck, North Dakota holds the record for the most snow angels made simultaneously in one place:  8,962 in 2007.

 

The largest snowball fight on record involved 5,834 fighters in Seattle on January 12, 2013.

 

The largest snowman ever recorded was 113 feet 7 inches, in Bethel, ME. Perhaps your character wants to break that record.

 

Rochester, NY, is the snowiest city in the US, averaging 94 inches of snow a year.

 

In 1992, the Common Council of Syracuse, NY, passed a decree that any more snow before Christmas Eve was illegal.  Just two days later, they had more snow. But what’s the story there?
tree covered in snow