Irish Coffee Recipe

However, don’t assume that it’s challenging to craft an Irish Coffee at home. Although its creamy top layer looks difficult to achieve, our Irish Coffee recipe is entirely doable for novice mixologists who may or not also be lazy mixologists.

In other words, if we can craft an Irish Coffee so can you!

As the legend goes, travel writer Stanton Delaplane introduced the Irish Coffee to the Bay Area bar after he became besotted with the boozy beverage in Shannon. It was only a matter of time until the drink’s inventor jumped the pond and joined the party. Yes, Sheridan eventually moved to San Francisco and crafted Irish Coffees at the Buena Vista Cafe to a steady stream of Irish Coffee fans.

Fun Fact
Mindi drank her very first Irish Coffee at the Buena Vista Cafe on a frigid San Francisco summer day.

Although the Irish Coffee tastes like it has a slew of ingredients, its ingredient count is both short and sweet. In fact, you probably already the following ingredients at home:

Don’t worry if you’re missing an ingredient or two. They all should be available at your local shops.

We craft Irish Coffees with Jameson Irish Whiskey for a couple reasons…

First, the popular Irish whiskey is readily available in Lisbon. Since Jameson is the most popular Irish whiskey, it’s should be easy to find in your corner of the world as well. Second, and more important, the triple-distilled whiskey tastes great in this and other cocktail recipes.

Book a tour and tasting at Jameson’s original distillery in Dublin if you want to learn more about this ‘grain to glass’ whiskey produced with both malted and unmalted barley, French maize and Irish water.

While people typically brew these type of beans with a Haribo V60 or Chemex, we use an automatic coffee machine. But not just any automatic coffee machine. We splurged and bought a stylish SMEG with no regrets.

You can purchase a SMEG automatic coffee maker from Amazon if you like its style too.

These are all of the tools we used to craft Irish Coffee:

Don’t worry if you don’t have any or all of these tools. You can improvise if you don’t already own them. This is especially the case in regards to the automatic coffee maker and immersion hand blender. However, you’ll want to use an Irish Coffee glass for maximum visual and flavor impact.

Discover 10 essential bar tools for home mixologists.

The most efficient technique is to pour boiling water into the glass and let it sit for a minute or two before discarding the water into the sink.

Fun Fact
We often use this same technique to warm our coffee mugs in the morning.

Once your glass is warm, measure two teaspoons of brown sugar and dump them into the glass.

Pro Tip
You can use granulated white sugar instead of brown sugar in a pinch. However, we prefer the rich, deep molasses flavor that brown sugar adds to the cocktail.

Pour freshly brewed hot coffee into the glass.

Pro Tip
If your coffee isn’t hot, you can give it a quick 30 to 40 second warm-up in the microwave.

Measure Irish whiskey and pour it into the glass.

Warning
Our recipe calls for a healthy amount of Irish whiskey. After all, it’s a boozy beverage.

The final step is the most challenging and is the one that may take a bit of practice.

True Confession
We got lucky on our first try and then failed the next two times. In other words, you may want to practice floating a layer of cream on top of the coffee mixture before you craft Irish Coffees for guests.

Our best advice is to blend heavy cream with a hand blender until it achieves a batter-like consistency. This will help the cream to float atop the coffee. A lot of recipes call for lightly whipped cream which didn’t work for us.

Once we pulled out the hand blender, getting the batter-like blend was a piece of cake (pun intended).

Floating the cream sounds difficult but it’s actually easy.

Instead of pouring it directly into the glass, pour the batter-like cream onto the back of your bar spoon. The metal utensil will act as a buffer, dispersing the cream so that it forms a layer instead of sinking to the bottom of the glass.

Pro Tip
Do NOT stir the cream. Instead, sip your boozy beverage through the creamy layer for maximum satisfaction and possible cream moustache.

Irish Coffee may be a classic but that doesn’t mean you can’t make it your own. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Irish Coffee FAQs