Cocktail · Medium strength
Irish Coffee
Hot coffee, Irish whiskey, brown sugar, cold cream — weather insurance in a glass.
How to order it: Lightly whipped cream floated over the back of a spoon. Glass mug, always.
Flavor profile
The recipe
- 1½ oz Irish whiskey
- 4 oz hot strong coffee
- 2 tsp brown sugar
- Float lightly whipped cream
- Glass mug; no straw
The story
The Irish Coffee was born of bad weather. In the early 1940s, chef Joe Sheridan at the Foynes flying-boat terminal near Shannon began fortifying coffee with whiskey for passengers shivering off transatlantic flights; when one asked if it was Brazilian coffee, he reportedly replied, "No, that's Irish coffee." In 1952, travel writer Stanton Delaplane brought the idea to Jack Koeppler at San Francisco's Buena Vista Cafe, where the two famously labored to make the cream float properly. The Buena Vista still serves them by the thousand daily. It endures because it solves three problems at once: cold, fatigue, and sobriety, in that order.
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