It’s ridiculously tempting and easy to trot into one of Charlotte’s sundry coffee shops and order your favorite mocha-latte-cappu-frappe-espresso goodness, but what about those days when the success of your wake-up/mid-morning/post-lunch mug of Joe depends on your own brewing skills?

• Melissa Oyler

According to David Haddock of Boquete Mountain Coffee, the first coffee hot spot on this weekend’s CLT Coffee Crawl, these are his coveted coffee commandments for a five-star cup of Joe at home.

Commit
Find a roaster that you can trust. There are number of great roasters throughout the country. You just have to look for them. (Trust issue: Folgers uses scented extract to make your coffee actually smell like coffee and leaves it to stale for days before packaging it neatly for your consumption)

This week, we look into the rise (or lack thereof) of creative craft beverages sans alcohol. Mocktails. We asked Kevin Gavagan, owner of the pop-up cocktail concept Haunt Bar, to fill us in on what he uses for tasty non-alcoholic beverages and he talked of shrubs. No, not bushy plant life, but vinegar-based infusions made typically with fresh fruit and herbs.

Gavagan likes to make a sophisticated soda with his shrubs and shared his recipe for Haunt Bar's popular grapefruit shrub which he uses in alcoholic beverages such as the Paloma Paradiso and a Grapefruit gin and tonic.

At home, Gavagan says, he likes to add the shrub to club soda or seltzer for a nice homemade soda. Experiment with additions like cinnamon and clove or add different vinegars for a new twist.

Haunt Bar Grapefruit Shrub
1 Cup Sugar
1 Cup Vinegar (Apple Cider is a good choice)
2 Medium Grapefruit
(Spice or other Additions)

Peel and rough chop the grapefruit
Put vinegar and sugar in a sauce pan, warm and stir until sugar dissolves
Add grapefruit and peel (along with any other ingredients)
Bring to a boil and turn off and cover
Let it steep until cool
Bottle and keep for up to six weeks in the fridge.

Grapefruit Summer Spritzer

Fill a glass with ice
Start with one part shrub to two parts sparkling water
Give it a stir, garnish with a piece of grapefruit peel
Sip, and enjoy.

• Mert Jones

If you ever thought working at Creative Loafing would be the coolest job ever, well, you're right. We are now the home of the first cold brew coffee on tap installation in an office setting in Charlotte, thanks to the good folks at Smelly Cat Coffee.

Look at the head on that brew, man.

It's all a part of our publisher's master scheme to keep us productive throughout the day.

Interested to know more? Fox News was in the offices doing a story. Check it out at 10 p.m.

• Photo by Keia Mastrianni

Cold brewing coffee is a revered process for coffee communities in the know. Since a trendy surge in 2011, all the coffee meccas from New York to Portland to Seattle have been mastering the cold brew and selling it to hoards of coffee enthusiasts. Though the concept might sound counterintuitive to the piping hot nectar of the gods, the cold brew process, which steeps ground coffee for hours in cold water, yields a surprisingly smooth flavor profile next to its heated brethren. Now Central Coffee, the well-loved corner spot off Central Avenue is brewing and bottling its own cold brew coffee and coffee concentrate for grab-and-go convenience.

Jimmy Kleto, the fuzzy-faced owner of Central Coffee, says it's been a project he's been working on for the last eight months. Kleto, a coffee lover since way back in his college days at Appalachian State, is always looking for new ways to elevate coffee culture in Charlotte. For the last four years, Kleto has been building a coffee community in his corner of Plaza Midwood and when the idea of bottling his own cold brew came up, he thought, "Why not?"

He settled on the Toddy Cold Brew method, a trademarked cold brew system that distills five pounds of coffee into crisp, clean, black as night coffee concentrate. The cold brew process preserves the sweet and spicy nuances of the Joe Van Gogh Guatemalan blend that Kleto uses for his brew and it comes in two options, ready-to-drink cold brew and cold brew concentrate. The concentrate is great for those who prefer to exact their own perfect cup. Kleto says, "You can make it as strong as you want."

But, be warned. The concentrate is known to pack an eye-dilating wallop as evidenced by a story of a friend who forgot to dilute the stuff and then sped off to sell insurance to unsuspecting senior citizens. No word yet on whether cold brew makes for a better salesman, but we do know that it does the trick and tastes mighty fine. Order a cup of cold brew in-house or grab a bottle from the to-go refrigerator.

Come summertime, cold brew coffee will be the coolest kid on the block. Ya heard.

Central Coffee Ready to Drink Cold Brew, $4.99 per bottle and Central Coffee Cold Brew Concentrate, $9.99 per bottle. Central Coffee is located at 719 Louise Avenue, Plaza Midwood.

Keia Mastrianni loves to tell stories about local food products and the people behind them. When she's not scouting out local discoveries, she's steadily working in her vegetable garden, spending time in the kitchen and nosing through cookbooks. She maintains a happy food blog called The Sunnysideup where she shares recipes and her culinary adventures.

Tired of waiting around for those print journalism assignments that no longer come your way? Weary of seeing press releases run in spaces that once housed actual news stories?

Did that blogger for welovemusic.com snag your free tickets to Madonna's last tour? When you make that follow-up call for the investigative story you've been working on for the past five years, do your sources just laugh at you?

Never fear. There's a beer for you - a malted barley beer as "dark and bitter as the future of American journalism."