Non-water liquids as beverage media.

I've had this idea before that one could make a cape codder with extra cranberry flavor by starting with pure cranberry juice and diluting it to drinking strength with vodka rather than water. The resulting drink would be as flavorful as a regular cranberry juice cocktail and as alcoholic as a normal bar cocktail. You might want to add some sugar as well.

Anyway, my lover and I were recently discussing coffee brewing. She was a big proponent of brewing methods that keep the coffee hot, so that it doesn't end up being too cold after you add a lot of milk. One solution is to steam or otherwise heat up the milk before you stir it in.

I was mulling this over, so to speak, and it struck me that you could do something similar to my cape codder variation, brewing the coffee directly in hot milk (or a milk/water mixture) rather than water.

You would probably want to use a manual drip brewer or French press so you don't have to worry about getting old milk all up in a machine that's not easy to clean. Then just heat some milk up on the stove and pour it in. You could even try milk in a Moka pot.

This approach is preferable to water brewing and adding cold milk in that it doesn't cool off the final beverage. It is preferable to heating up milk separately in that it only requires one heating step. And it is preferable to either in that it does not dilute the coffee.