Irish Irish Coffee (with recipe)
Visiting the neighbours one Christmas afternoon. Including a recipe. Making it to taste.
As we approached our first Christmas in Ireland it felt like we had settled in and made a life for ourselves. We had some friends. We knew our way around the city. We had a home.
We had also taken quite well to the Irish enthusiasm for leaving Ireland to get some sun on a cheap and easy direct flight south. Our destination: the Canary Islands.
I had loved the idea of the Canary Islands ever since I learned they were the last stop of Columbus before sailing west. They seemed an exotic location, a good distance already away from Europe toward what would be called the new world, yet still part of Spain.
A few evenings of research and we had found Lanzarote, the island of the Canaries we thought best suited our needs. It promised quiet, natural spaces and easy enough access. We proposed the idea to friends living in Bonn, Germany and booked a week to meet up with them.
In our settling in to Dublin we’d also gotten to know our neighbours. On one side, Kiel lived with his rarely seen girlfriend Jess. He swore she existed. On the other side, a young family: Karen and Vincent and their daughters Julia and Clara. Some days we could hear Vincent playing his guitar through the walls. Julia was a year older than our son and he was suitably smitten with her. Realizing this, she ensured she ran the show, choosing the games they played and, as importantly, the princess costumes they would wear.
A few days before we were to depart for the Canaries we ran into Karen and Vincent and Julia and Clara all coming home from the shops in a chatty heap, and they invited us over for an afternoon holiday drink. We had nothing on so accepted.
We made the 10-metre trip from our stoop to theirs and the kids scurried off to play. Vincent asked us if we’d ever had Irish coffees. To us, Irish coffees were fairly mediocre things, often ordered by ladies after church or men at brunch after a night out. In our experience, an Irish coffee was simply coffee with Bailey’s liquor. Often it did get served with a wink, as if to say, this will look like coffee and cream but we’ll know there’s booze in it there, won’t we? But it was unremarkable at its best.
We relayed our Irish coffee expectations to Vincent. He was dismayed. Well, those aren’t Irish coffees at all. How could anything so pedestrian could bear the name? He rose to the challenge. We couldn’t be leaving without a true Irish coffee.
And he delivered. And it was revelatory — rich and savoury and sweet and spicy and boozy all at once. It was so good I have stolen it and repatriated it as our own holiday tradition back to Canada. I made it for the Slack Vancouver office. I make it for an open house we host each year. The recipe I use is below. I encourage you to try it out as your own holiday tradition.
There’s no guarantees, though, mind, that it won’t result in some unforeseen happenings.
That first afternoon when Vincent made us Irish coffees, it ended up turning into an evening quite quickly. The children put on princess dresses and ran around the house as if possessed by banshees, shedding layers of veils and skirts as they went. At some point, bowls of pasta appeared and the children were quiet for 15 minutes. There may have been a charcuterie platter with cornichons.
Much later, after the pasta reenergized the kids, then they burned off that energy, my son came to us. We adults were in mid conversation. He took our hand and led us to the door to get our shoes to take him back to our house to put him to bed. He was done.
My wife tells me she woke at 2 am with heart palpitations from the combination of caffeine and alcohol. I didn’t notice but I did wake up the next morning wondering if I had slept at all.
So, all that to say, I recommend holding the line at a maximum of 2 Irish coffees in a day, and finishing the last one before 2 pm in the afternoon. But you do you.
Irish Coffee Recipe
It may take some planning, but it’s worth it. The perfect time to have an Irish coffee is 11 am on a weekday, with friends. Say, the last Friday before a holiday break, before the kids are home, when you have little of consequence to come the rest of the day.
Ingredients
Irish whiskey (Jameson will do, nothing fancy needed)
Whole cream / Heavy cream (~30% milk fat)
Brown sugar
Strong black coffee
Ground nutmeg
Step 1: Whip your cream until it’s firm and holds peaks, about 4-5 minutes. Place your bowl of whipped cream in the fridge with the serving spoon.
Step 2: Make a pot of strong coffee. The best option I’ve found for this is a French press with freshly ground coffee. Let it brew for 5-10 minutes before plunging.
Step 3: Sweeten your whiskey. On a stovetop heat your whiskey in a saucepan over medium heat. When it starts to gently shimmer, whisk in the brown sugar to taste. You want something just starting to look and taste syrupy — about a 2:1 ratio of whiskey to sugar. You don’t want to boil off the alcohol so back off the heat when bubbles start to form. Let it steam on the lowest setting.
Step 4: Make your Irish coffee. Ladle one or two fingers of sweetened whiskey into a mug. Pour over the brewed coffee. Spoon on a generous dollop of whipped cream to cover the whole surface of the drink. Sprinkle with ground nutmeg and serve, optionally with a teaspoon.
Step 5: Adjust your recipe as you and your guests see fit. Sweeter? Boozier? Stronger coffee? Figure out the ratios that work. Keep putting the whipped cream back in the fridge. Maybe hold the line at two. Maybe.
Up next — Values of the Slack Product: Thinking out loud about the values we sent into the world. Reviewing The Real World of Technology. Seeing changes over time.