Making Chain Coffee, Syrups and Cold Drinks Yourself

A daily coffee-shop habit is the clearest example on this site of a small number becoming a large one. Five pounds a working day is over a thousand pounds a year. The ingredients in that drink cost somewhere between fifteen and forty pence.

The reason people keep buying it is not the coffee - it is the flavouring, and flavouring is trivially easy to make.

Syrups are sugar and water. Equal weights, four minutes on the hob, then whatever you want in it: vanilla pod, cinnamon stick, hazelnut extract, a strip of orange peel. A bottle lasts a month in the fridge and costs less than a single shop-bought drink.

Sauces are syrups with dairy in them. Mocha, white mocha, caramel brulée and pumpkin spice are sauces, not syrups - they contain condensed milk or cream, which is why they cling to the inside of a cup. Substituting a syrup for a sauce is the most common reason a home version tastes thin.

Cold foam is a technique, not a product. Non-fat milk, cold, aerated for thirty seconds with a £6 handheld frother. It has to be non-fat: the protein does the structural work and the fat interferes with it.

And the honest one: you do not need an espresso machine for most of this. A moka pot or an AeroPress with a dark roast gets close enough that the syrup decides the outcome. The drinks that genuinely need real espresso are the short ones where there is nowhere to hide.