The Cocktail Spirit with Robert Hess

Robert, I actually made some Irish Coffee for the first time last night. It’s a nice coincidence that you posted this today. Though I wish I had seen your recipe first. Mine had way to much whiskey and way too much sugar. Also, I used brown sugar, as I thought that was the tradition. Do you have any insight into that?

I’m going to try this again as soon as I get some more Irish Whiskey so I can make a more balanced drink.

I know you’re known as a cocktail person and not a coffee person, but with the constant emphasis you put on balance of flavours, etc., I’m surprised that you didn’t even think to comment on the actual coffee used.

Coffee is a very complicated beverage that must be prepared to exacting standards to taste proper.

However, I honestly can’t think of what kind or style of coffee I’d use for this.  Perhaps I will experiment on this.

Tim, I see this as one of those to-your-own-taste drinks, where everyone’ll have their own spin.  I prefer Powers’ whiskey, raw or Demerara sugar and good ol’ New Orleans dark roast coffee ‘n chicory—very comforting and delicious to me, but hardly what they’d use in Ireland, or even San Francisco. 

Eric Felten has an interesting bit on the Irish Coffee in his new book How’s Your Drink?, in which he debunks the story we’ve all heard about how it as invented by a particular bartender at Shannon Airport.  It seems that bartender got the idea from somewhere else in Ireland ...

That freshly whipped cream is a nice touch ! I regularly roast my own coffee at home. Next batch I make I’ll be giving this drink a try.

Robert --

I love these videos and your drinkboy site . . . you’ve opened a new world for me.

On a purely technical note: for some reason when I watch these videos, your portion of the audio is at a very low volume, while the theme music at the beginning and end is very loud.  Almost without fail I end up jumping for the mute button when you are finished and the music starts up again because it is blasting out my speakers.  Unless this is just me, is there any way to normalize these volume levels?

I’d also like to hear Robert say a word or two on what kind of coffee would be good here. I rarely drink coffee and when I do, I don’t lavish on it, so I don’t know much about it. In short, there’s a good chance I’ll mess up the whole drink by using an inappropriate type of coffee

By the way, I agree on that the theme music is a tad loud. It has me jumping out of my chair sometimes when I forget it’s coming.

Well, I’m not Robert, but as a formerly professional and still committed coffee drinker, I’d suggest that a medium roast African coffee would be good with this, as the chocolate and berry flavors will stand up well with the whisky. And you’ll probably want to use a drip method of brewing so you don’t get much sediment or too much oil in the cup.

I also like the coffee-chickory blend; it also has those earthy tones that blend well with the spirit. If you can’t get micro-roasted coffees like I can in the Bay Area, this would be a great substitute.

I have to say that I’ve had better Irish Coffees at the BV than just about anywhere else, even Ireland. It’s touristy, but it does stand up to its reputation, for a change. Must be the system they have.

The cream thing, by the way, has everything to do with fermentation and souring of cream. Raw cream starts to sour (or “clabber") and thicken almost immediately due to the natural bacteria and enzymes present in cow’s milk. Since pasteurization destroys these enzymes, you need to let the milk start to turn just the tiniest bit. Homogenization is hell on your thick cream, too, because it breaks the fat globules into parts that are way smaller than god ever intended, and they don’t clump the right way.

And if that’s not more information than you ever needed to know, I don’t know what is.

At Huber’s Cafe in P-town, where I first bartended, they use brown sugar instead of the granulated white. From my experience, this substitution seems to give the coffee drink a smoother and sweeter taste to one’s palate. It might be the presence of molasses in the brown sugar which interacts with the Irish whiskey and thusly offsetting the bittersweetness of the liquor. I’m not sure.

And may not only be the substitution of sugars that offers a smoother taste to this alternate version of the Irish Coffee. As in your demonstration, Huber’s uses Bushmill’s, not Jameson’s Irish Whiskey. The former I found to have a more refined and smokier finish than it’s oaky, “Catholic-green” counterpart.

No offense intended toward my Catholic bartending brethren. }:^}

the taste of coffee is a sensual pleasure in itself, existing in the same world as sex… For myself, I can enjoy the wicked pleasure of coffee… entirely by myself. Furtiveness makes it better.

I do have a chocolate site too, check this out
http://www.sarahs-sweet-fountains.co.uk

Thanks for letting me comment on your site :D

Belated thanks to Scott for those coffee suggestions. Stupidly, I forgot I’d asked the question in the first place, until now. Oops.

And there’s no such thing as too much information when drinks are concerned!

(I’m not the same Alex as in the post immediately above this one, by the way - perhaps time I got a more unique moniker around these parts)