…and a bonus tip or three.
Use a stick of cinnamon (it’s just a lil dried roll of cinnamon bark) as a coffee stirrer. Nah, you don’t have to add cream and/or sweetener (sugar or other). Just use a stick to stir your coffee for a subtle cinnamon kick.
Update: forgot to mention that if you don’t just use the cinnamon stick as a stirer but leave it in the cup as you sip (you do sip, not gulp, right? hmmm? ;-)), it’ll continue to add cinnamon flavor and it’ll soften enough as it soaks up some of the coffee that you can actually nibble on it. Chewing a wee nibble of cinnamon stick along with a sip of coffee is… nice. And cinnamon is good for both weight control and boosting brain functions, particularly recall.
Bonus hot weather drink: Do add some cream (the real stuff) and some sort of sweetener to some hot coffee in a thermos. Add a stick of cinnamon and leave it in the fridge overnight with the lid cracked open on the thermos. Or, instead of the cinnamon stick, grate some nutmeg into the coffee (I’ve done that into the brew basket when I was making some for just my own consumption). I normally do not like cold coffee, but this lil tip makes it drinkable, even enjoyable, for me. While it’s not “coffee-coffee” in my mind, it’s still tasty.
Try other “bright” spices that come to mind, or add some cocoa powder or whatever for your own unique cold coffee-based drink.
Beats the snot out of buying some refrigerated coffee drink crap from Starbucks or whatever.
BTW, do make sure you buy “food grade” cinnamon sticks/bark. Apparently some is available that’s some sort of manufactured crap for “decorative” purposes (whatever that means). I generally get six-ounce bags for a buck. YMMV.
Oh, and when you think you’ve sucked all the flavor out of your cinnamon stick, think again. Let it dry, then put it through your coffee grinder (we have three: a burr mill for coffee and two blade grinders, one for “sweet” spices and herbs and one for “hot” spices”). Even with the flavor pulled from it by several cupsa coffee (or the equivalent), ground up it’ll probably be more flavorful than the pre-ground crap that’s been sitting, losing flavor, on some grocer’s shelf for who knows how long. Ditto for just about any spice. Buy whole and store well, then grind however much you need a bit at a time.
And (tightwad tip!) always buy bunches of whole spices whenever they go on a blowout sale. If you’re really concerned about preserving them, use a vacuum sealer and mylar bags and store ’em in your freezer (or, with the mylar bags and O2 and H2O absorption packs, just store ’em on a pantry shelf–most folks say the O2 absorption packs are unnecessary with vacuum sealed mylar bags, as in the linked video).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU8W92U37PU