KISS ME, I’M IRISH
YEARS ago, I had the fortune to be in Dublin on St Patrick’s Day. I spent the day as any lit major with an Irish Catholic heritage and an interest in history would: visiting the worlds of Yeats, Wilde and Joyce, and exploring sites related to the complexities of the Republican cause and the “still indomitable Irishry” Yeats wrote of.
I trust readers will understand that by “visiting the worlds of writers and exploring sites of the Republican cause,” I mean I mostly spent it pub-crawling.
I wasn’t a beer drinker at the time, so over the course of the day I sucked down about seven Irish coffees. Late in the evening, after hours of jigging and reeling to a local band at the last of a string of pubs, I confessed to my beer-sozzled friends that in this day-long application of whiskey, sugar, coffee and cream, the caffeine had proved victorious: I was stone-cold sober and possibly permanently awake.
The combination of hyper-caffeination and my own social awkwardness meant that, while others in my party were dancing and flirting with a charming global lineup of giddy young people, I was sober enough to focus on what I was drinking, noting differences between one pub’s Irish coffee and the next. The majority were pretty godawful, suffering primarily from the realities of the bar coffee, which had probably sat on a burner for hours, developing unlovely scorched notes that weren’t drowned out by sugar or booze.
My recollection was largely confirmed by Sean Muldoon, managing partner at the Dead Rabbit Grocery and Grog in New York, an Irish bar that repeatedly turns up on lists of the best bars in the world. “The Irish coffees served in Ireland are typically not good,” Muldoon told me via email. “I’ve tried hundreds and haven’t had a good one yet.” This, he says, is because Irish bars don’t really take the drink seriously.
They tend to roll their eyes over it, confirms Kevin Hurley, global brand ambassador for Teeling Whiskey. Which is a pity, because Irish coffee is the only cocktail on the International Bartenders Association drinks list – a roster of standards that any bartender should know – that specifically calls for Irish whiskey. Yet it’s “one of those Irish anomalies that’s far more popular in the States than it is in Ireland,” Hurley says.
There’s plenty of blarney around the history of cocktails in general, and the Irish coffee is no exception. The most well-known origin story is that it was born in the 1940s, when a bartender at the Foynes airport in County Limerick served it to passengers who had disembarked half-frozen from a seaplane that had turned back due to bad weather. One of the passengers asked whether the delicious libation was Brazilian coffee, and the bartender replied, “No, that’s Irish coffee.”
It’s a story Don Draper could be proud of, but there are contradictory ones, including the possibility that the drink was invented by Michael Nugent, proprietor of the Dolphin Hotel in Dublin, to conceal the taste of bad coffee.
Made well, an Irish coffee is a thing of beauty. It perfectly suits the often damp and chilly weather of the country it’s named for, as well as the contemplative and happily convivial feeling conveyed by a good Irish pub late in the afternoon as the shadows are lengthening and the day is slipping away.
The Dead Rabbit, Muldoon says, serves between 50 and 250 Irish coffees a day; it’s the bar’s most popular drink. The bar has long made a great Irish coffee, but the version it serves now is a revision concocted a year ago with the help of renowned bartender Dale DeGroff.
Fitting, because it was DeGroff who inspired Muldoon to give the drink a serious look. During a seminar years back, DeGroff queried the crowd as to how many of them had ever had an Irish coffee. “Of course everybody in the audience raised their hands,” Muldoon said. But when DeGroff went on to ask how many had had one that they actually liked, “not a single hand was raised.”
DeGroff explained that most bartenders treated the drink as an afterthought, and that as a result the coffee was often burned, the cream sprayed from a can, and the ratio of sugar to coffee to whiskey off. He went on to lay out some key principles: Always use freshly made coffee (never espresso); use a lightstyle, high-grain-content whiskey (so that none of the drink components will overwhelm the others), a rich demerara syrup, and fresh cream whipped by hand and kept cold till use.
Irish coffee shares something with many celebrants of St. Patrick’s Day, who hail the Irish diaspora by sportin’ a bit o’ the green even if their own genetic makeup doesn’t sport a lick of the Irish.
Sure, you could argue it’s just an excuse to have a wee dram, but I wish we had such a celebratory approach to more immigrant groups. If everyone wants to be Irish on St. Paddy’s Day, so be it. Rather than ordering a DNA test, I think I’ll have a drink.