Irish Coffee

 

How to make an Irish Coffee

With one small exception, Irish Coffee is idiot proof. (For the exception, read the paragraph below that starts with “Here’s the slightly tricky part.”  Do it now or you’ll definitely regret it.)

You’ll need a 12 oz. mug.  Fill it with hot water to ensure that the coffee remains hot when you pour it in.  Then, obviously, before you start building the drink, pour the hot water out.

Pour in 1/4 oz.  Demerara syrup.  (It’s 2 parts Demerara sugar to 1 part water.)

Add about 3 oz. of coffee.  (You can make the coffee yourself, but since the coffee is a key ingredient, unless you’re a coffee aficionado it’s better just to do what I did:  stop at the local Starbucks and bring home a large cup of breakfast blend coffee.)

Stir long enough to make sure the syrup and coffee are well mixed.

Add 1 oz.  of Irish whiskey.  Traditionally Catholics favor Jameson while Protestants prefer Bushmills, information that may come in handy if you’re a religious bigot.  I’m not, so although I’m Protestant I went with Jameson.  Some recipes call for 2 oz. of Irish whiskey, but if you want to get bombed there are more efficient ways to do it.

Add more coffee, stirring to keep the ingredients well mixed, until the coffee is about an inch from the top of the glass.

Here’s the slightly tricky part.  You will need to have on hand some heavy cream—I went with a pint although you won’t need nearly that much, and before you make the drink you’ll need to whip the cream lightly— roughly enough that if you put a drop on your forefinger it will remain a drop.  But you want the whipped cream to remain liquid enough to pour.  (If you screw this up you can recover by adding a bit more cream.)  Put all of it into any container that has a spout; the obvious and ideal choice is a liquid measuring cup.

Then take a spoon—I went with a table spoon, not a bar spoon—and place it over the glass with the convex side up; that is to say, the side you don’t eat soup with.  Pour the lightly whipped cream, slowly, onto the middle of the spoon.  The lightly whipped cream will slide off the spoon, evenly, into the drink. (In other words, use the standard technique for making a layered drink.  It turns out to be a lot easier to do successfully than with most layered drinks.)

Keep this up until the lightly whipped cream reaches the lip of the glass.  The Irish Coffee is now ready to drink, and appropriately enough, it looks almost exactly like a Guinness.

(You can top this off with slivers of chocolate or grated nutmeg, etc., but that’s kind of foo foo and I didn’t.)

The result was awesome.  I dislike whiskey but in this case it was no problem.  The whiskey didn’t announce itself, but you could definitely tell it was present in the background, and by the time I downed the whole thing I felt exactly like anyone would who’d had a shot of whiskey.  Overall the coffee was an ideal balance between sweet, creamy, and bitter (assuming you think of black coffee as bitter).  It totally lived up to its reputation.