I don’t know how hip it is anymore…and I don’t care. If you find yourself in the City this winter, get thee to the Buena Vista and have an Irish Coffee. When I was a bon vivant back in the early 90s, a crowd of us piled into the Buena Vista after seeing Emo Phillips at The Cannery. It was one of many moments back in those days that seemed right out of a movie. The Buena Vista version is a bit smaller than The Essential Cocktail‘s. I went with the book’s suggestion of an 8 ounce glass.
My recipe is:
1 1/2 ounces Tullamore Dew Irish Whiskey
1 ounce turbinado sugar syrup
4 ounces hot, freshly brewed Don Francisco’s Northwest Blend coffee
Stir together in a small (8 ounce) white wine glass (if you don’t have Irish coffee glasses on hand) then top with lightly whipped heavy cream.
It’s just absurd how good this is. I’m sure there have been some drinks I’ve written about here to which you’ve said to yourself “Ooh that sounds interesting. I’ll try that.” But really, this should become as regular to you as making scrambled eggs. The whiskey to coffee ratio is about 3 to 1 so there’s really no danger of getting snotflinging drunk on these. But it is worrying in that they are so good I fear never drinking regular coffee again. And when you are unemployed that is a lot of coffee.
My Small Batch Double Boiler: 1 ounce raw sugar with 1 ounce boiling water in a prep dish set inside a bigger bowl with more boiling water.
You could use regular simple syrup or brown sugar syrup per The Essential Cocktail…or you could probably just use the amount of sugar you’d use in a regular 1/2 cup of coffee…BUT DO NOT OMIT THE SUGAR. Even if you take your coffee black, the drink needs the sugar. Any kind of sugar syrup is easy to make. Just melt 1 part of sugar in 1 part of hot water. Voilà. Whip the cream just enough so bubbles no longer form on the surface. You could probably use half & half for this, but milk won’t whip up stiff enough. You could use Cool Whip or canned whipped “cream” but the drink will probably taste like crap. What you want to happen is to get a little bit of the whipped cream in every sip and prepared whipped toppings are too stiff for that. It’s easy to whip up a tiny bit…just put 2 ounces or so in a little bowl and whisk it by spinning the whisk handle between your palms.
This is probably as story as old as time, but I started drinking coffee at a young age, maybe seven or nine years old, on Sunday mornings watching football with my dad. Also probably typically, it was mostly milk and sugar. This Irish Coffee is a great traditional return to that. This Sunday, brew a pot of your favorite brand, make a round or two of these and sit down to watch your team with dad. Go Rams. They may be 1-10 on the season, but I’ll always have this:
