What Makes a Good Irish Coffee?

July 10, 2012 - PRLog -- Let’s start with what makes a good coffee cocktail, beginning with a strong hot coffee, whiskey (Irish of course) and sugar.  Some recipes state brown sugar makes a better choice.  Then give it all a good stir and top with a large dollop of thick or whipped cream.  

The Irish coffee is really an Irish American creation which had its beginnings, if we listen to legend, in Foynes County Limerick (now Shannon) air terminal in the 1940’s.   It was supposedly to give American passengers stranded in a winter storm a quick pick-me-up and a stiff belt. Joe Sheridan, a head chef at Foynes invented and named the drink which in 1988 the National Standards Authority of Ireland published ‘Irish Standard I.S. 417: Irish Coffee’ to ensure the integrity and ingredients of the drink.

Then in 1952, on 10 November, Jack Koeppler, then-owner of the Buena Vista Café in San Francisco, challenged international travel writer Stanton Delaplane to help re-create the highly touted "Irish Coffee" served at Shannon Airport in Ireland.

After much stirring and tasting the two men realised they had a couple of recurring problems. The taste was "not quite right" and the cream would not float.   After a visit to Shannon Airport, Jack continued to try and make the perfect Irish coffee.  The cream problem was solved by aging it for 48 hours and frothed to a precise consistency, so it would float on the top perfectly.  Finally, with the new recipe solved, they had re-created the Irish coffee which, it is said that the Buena Vista had served more than 30 million of glasses of the drink.

Although whiskey, coffee and cream are the basic ingredients in all Irish coffee, variations in how best to make it still exist. The choice of coffee and the methods used for brewing it differ significantly. The use of espresso machines (http://www.espressocoffeeclub.co.uk/espresso) or fully automatic coffee brewers is now typical: the coffee is either a caffè americano (espresso diluted with hot water) or some kind of filter coffee, often made using a coffee capsule (http://www.espressocoffeeclub.co.uk/shop/).

Irish coffee is only one of the many drinks made using hot coffee (http://www.espressocoffeeclub.co.uk/overview/) with a distilled spirit, and cream floated on top.  Also known as liqueur coffees these include Jamaican coffee which is made with rum and Highland coffee which contains Scotch whisky.