The Five Tricks to a Great Irish Coffee

A Valentine’s Day cocktail that shows you care.

The Irish Coffee is an underrated cocktail. You’ll find slapdash versions on the menus of many unimpressive Irish bars, but you won’t find it on very many cocktail bar menus. It’s rarely spoken of in the same breath as the Manhattan or the Daiquiri, and if you’re paging through most modern cocktail guides, you’re unlikely to encounter long lists of riffs and derivations. Unlike so many old cocktail standards that have underdone renovations in recent years, the Irish Coffee isn’t a drink that large numbers of top-notch bartenders have seemed eager to perfect. It’s seen as basic at best, and often just bad. 

For the most part, I suspect, its poor reputation owes to the drink’s generally sloppy construction. Far too many people seem to think of Irish Coffee as “coffee with a lazy splash of whiskey in it,” or perhaps some Bailey’s Irish Cream or (shudder) Kahlua. That’s not entirely  unreasonable because far too often that’s how the drink is served. 

In contrast, a good Irish Coffee — a true Irish Coffee — is something far more exquisite, a rich, complex, and decadent exercise in balancing flavors and texture. It’s a great nightcap for a cold night on a February evening, and while it probably won’t appeal to people who truly dislike coffee, it’s an excellent drink for people who aren’t cocktail geeks. 

But made properly, it is a cocktail geek drink. It’s not particularly complex or difficult to prepare, but as with so many basic drinks that have been reformed and rescued from the dark ages of drinking, it benefits greatly from a combination of thoughtfulness, precision, and higher-quality, often homemade ingredients. 

And that, in turn, makes it an excellent drink for Valentine’s Day. It’s not a hard drink to make well, but if you do it well, it’s a warm, inviting, easygoing cocktail that shows you care. 

Happy Valentine’s Day, folks. Let’s make a warm drink. 

Quality Ingredients and a Warm Glass

There are several tricks to making a great Irish Coffee. 

1. Good coffee. 

2. Homemade whip cream. 

3. Homemade dark-sugar syrup. 

4. Precise proportions. 

5. A pre-warmed glass. 

Let’s take these in order. 

Good coffee. The easiest way to ruin an Irish Coffee is with bad or mediocre coffee. Your Folgers instant won’t work here, and ideally you want to avoid single serve pod coffees. Coffee is the base ingredient in this cocktail, just as whiskey is the base ingredient in an Old Fashioned; the other ingredients are there to modify the coffee. So for this cocktail to work, the coffee needs to be pretty good.

The question then becomes: What’s the best way to make high-quality coffee? 

You may not be surprised to learn that before I was a Cocktail Guy I was a Coffee Guy. I mail-ordered single-origin beans from obscure roasteries before this was easy or common, owned various espresso machines and milk frothers on the affordable end of the spectrum, had opinions about temperature and optimal grind size, and so forth. I am much less obsessive about coffee today; I drink good drip coffee, but I don’t constantly scour for the latest prep hack, device, or interesting beans. I haven’t owned an espresso machine in years.

The point is: Someone could probably write an entire newsletter devoted to the endless pursuit of the perfect cup of joe. That someone, however, will not be me.

Instead, I will just offer the following bits of advice: 

• Use quality coffee beans. I like Counter Culture beans enough that I’ve subscribed for many years. I also like Stumptown and Intelligentsia quite a bit. The latter two are available on Amazon, and both also have some in-store distribution around the country. Whole Foods also sells perfectly good beans both in store and online, and their beans are substantially less expensive.

• If you can, grind your beans fresh. An expensive burr grinder is nice, but a basic electric grinder will do fine. The main thing is to grind your beans right before brewing if at all possible.

• You can invest in an expensive drip coffee maker or obsess over the timing of a pour-over system, but by far the cheapest and easiest method for brewing good coffee is with a French press. You don’t need anything fancy — a relatively inexpensive setup will work perfectly well. You don’t even need to buy filters. Just boil hot water on the stove, pour it in over some ground beans, and let it sit for about five minutes. 

Homemade whip cream: The Irish Coffee is a flavor experience, thanks to the coffee. But it’s also a texture experience, thanks to the boundary between the coffee and the whip cream. You want the heavy cream to act as a kind of intermediary between you and the rest of the cocktail. It’s the first thing that hits you, and that means it needs to be good.

Sure, you can use a spray bottle of Reddi Whip. But why would you? Homemade whip cream is incredibly simple to make. As with fresh citrus juice, you just have to spend a minute or two to make it. 

At core, homemade whip cream is just intensely whipped heavy cream, like we used to make eggnog. Take the cream, then use a mixing device of some sort to literally whip it into shape; the whipping/mixing process gives it body and heft and structure.

Ideally, you want to make whip cream in a stand mixer, but a plug-in beater or stick blender will work here too, or a manual dover egg beater. In a pinch, you can use a whisk, but this is a somewhat physically demanding task — although in this case, you want a cream that is only lightly whipped, so it’s a little less work. 

You can add other ingredients to your whip cream to add flavor and sweetness: I like a bit of sugar and a bit of rum. But you don’t want to add very much. I add about one teaspoon of each for every four to six ounces of cream I whip. 

Dark sugar syrup: Wait, am I recommending Demerara syrup for your dark and wintry cocktails? Again? Why yes. Yes. I very much am. Because it’s good and it will make your cocktails better.

Yes, you can make an Irish Coffee with sugar cubes or table sugar. But the almost cocoa-y richness of Demerara syrup makes an incredible complement to coffee and Irish whiskey. I make mine with Demerara gum syrup for added viscosity.

But you won’t go wrong with a basic, quick to make 2:1 Demerara syrup — just put two parts Demerara sugar and one part room-temperature water in a blender, blend on high for 2-3 minutes, then let it sit in the refrigerator for at least 15 minutes, and ideally an hour, before you use it. 

Precise proportions: The Irish Coffee is a drink that is often made by dumping a bit of this and a bit of that into a coffee mug and calling it ready to drink.

That sort of indifference is a recipe — or, to be more precise, a non-recipe — for a lackluster cocktail. As with a Negroni or a Manhattan, the proportions really matter. Don’t just eyeball it. Just like a Manhattan or an Old Fashioned, you really have to measure each component precisely. 

A pre-warmed glass or mug. You might think this a trivial thing. It’s not. In cocktails, temperature matters a lot.

So just as a chilled coupe glass greatly enhances the experience of a Martini, a warmed mug greatly enhances the experience of a hot coffee cocktail. The trick to this is fairly simple: Just fill the glass or mug with warm water (ideally boiling) for a few minutes before making the drink. 

One final bit of advice: You should use Irish whiskey, not bourbon or rye or scotch. I’m fairly agnostic on the particular brand. The recipe from The Dead Rabbit, which was the inspiration for this one, calls for Clontarf, but I almost always use Jameson, which comes in handy for at least one other cocktail I’ll be writing up soon. I probably wouldn’t use something more expensive, like Irish Redbreast 12 or Tyrconnell. If you have those bottles, sip them straight! 

The Recipe

Now that you have the concepts down, let’s make the drink. 

Irish Coffee

• ¾ ounce Demerara syrup 

• 1 ½ ounce Irish whiskey (Jameson)

• 3 ½ ounces fresh hot coffee 

• Heavy cream, whipped, to top

• Grated nutmeg

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Start the coffee. Like, I said, there are many methods that work, but the easiest and cheapest is a French press. You want the drink to be quite hot, so don’t delay. As soon as you start your coffee, move on to the next step. 

2. Next, start warming the mug or glass. Pour hot water into the vessel and let it warm the mug until the exterior is warm to touch. If you are using a French press you should already have hot water on hand. 

3. Make the whipped cream. Take 4-6 ounces of heavy cream, 1 tsp of sugar, and 1 tsp of rum (I use Appleton Signature) and whip them briefly using an electric beater or stand mixer. You want to try to avoid over whipping the cream — it’s supposed to remain a bit creamy, a stage technically known as soft peaks. However, don’t worry if you whip a bit too long: the drink will still taste excellent, it just may not look quite as good. Unless you are whipping by hand, this should take a minute or so. 

4. Mix the drink. Combine the Irish whiskey, Demerara syrup, and coffee, then gently stir to mix. 

5. Top with whip cream. Be generous. This is no small dollop. You want a thick layer of whip cream across the entire top of the drink. The idea is to consume the booze/sugar/coffee mix through the whip cream. If your whip cream is a bit more solid, it might sink into the mix at first. Don’t worry about this. Just keep spooning it on until you have at least a half-inch thick layer of cream across the entire top of the drink.

6. Garnish with grated nutmeg. I use a grinder, but grated whole nutmeg works very well too.

Upgrade Your Irish Coffee

Want to modify this drink? Give it a little more flavor?

Add a bit of the Bénédictine you’ve been using to make Vieux Carré variations for the last few weeks. This stuff goes shockingly well in an Irish coffee.

That spec looks like this (the preparation instructions are otherwise the same).

Irish Coffee

• ¾ ounce Demerara syrup 

• 1/4 ounce Bénédictine

• 1 ½ ounce Irish whiskey (Jameson)

• 3 ½ ounces fresh hot coffee 

• Heavy cream, whipped, to top

• Grated nutmeg

The Bénédictine adds an herbal spice layer that I think makes the drink even better. Bénédictine is powerful stuff, so as always, just a little bit goes a long way.

This is how I typically make the drink, and how I prefer it. But you should make the core recipe at least once, just to see how good a proper Irish Coffee can be. 

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