Today's cocktail: Irish coffee

Today's ingredients: Irish whiskey, coffee, (whipped) cream, brown sugar

Today's gadgets: French press

I started this post just before the 930am EDT kickoff of the Lions-Falcons game in London yesterday, the earliest-ever start time for an NFL game. It also felt like one of my earliest wake-up calls following a long night of steaks, baked potatoes, bourbon, and poker at the brother-in-law's place. This morning, by necessity, there was coffee. By design, there was also Irish whiskey. Hair of the dog and all, right?

Mount Hood

Rose garden

I went to Portland, Oregon, several years ago as my annual "I haven't been here yet" trip and had a great time. Froze my nether-regions off on Mount Hood (it was mid-October), wandered through the rose garden (actual garden, not the basketball arena), and had lots and lots of great beer. One of the great things about being on the West Coast in the fall is early football. Here at home, alcohol cannot be served before 12pm on Sundays, what with the blue laws and all. Football starts at 1pm, and we're off and running. In Portland et al, bars open at 9am, breakfast buffets are not that uncommon to go with your drink(s), and games start at 10am, meaning you wrap up watching the day's games at a respectable 9pm-ish rather than an obnoxious-going-into-Monday midnight.

If you're a mobile phone-using beer drinker, you might be aware of Untappd. Basically, you get points and badges for trying different beers in different places at different times. I do like beer on occasion, and I like adding to my Untappd profile when the opportunity presents itself. One of the available badges involves having a beer in an airport. I don't get to fly as much as I would like, so when the wife and I flew back from Chicago last year, I took the opportunity to score beers in both Midway and Charlotte-Douglas. Since our Chicago flight was semi-early, she wasn't feeling beer and so ordered an Irish coffee.

When her order showed up, she happily took a couple sips, then offered me one. I wasn't ready for the whiskey, being in a beer mindset, and her drink caught me a little off guard. On handing it back to her, I asked, "what part of an Irish coffee is coffee?" Without missing a beat, she replied, "the hot part." Point to the wife.

Irish Coffee

Now, that's not entirely true, of course--an Irish coffee is mostly coffee, if made according to its IBA recipe:

• 4cl / 1.3oz Irish whiskey
• 9cl / 3oz hot coffee
• 3cl / 1oz fresh cream
• 1tsp brown sugar
• Warm the Irish whiskey over a burner.
• Pour into a glass the Irish whiskey and hot coffee, add a teaspoon of sugar, and stir.
• Float cream on top.

That's brown sugar in front, though my brain keeps saying "bacon bits"...

Okay, so four ingredients. Still not bad, and really nothing that probably doesn't already live in your house except for maybe the whiskey. Let's talk about each item.

Irish whiskey must be aged in Ireland. That's pretty much its only constraint, second in leniency only to Canadian whiskey. Personally, I tend to find Irish whiskey less woody and more peppery (like rye), but as always, take a taste or two straight to get an idea of what it contributes since you may taste something different. Jameson is a standard, affordable option ($25 for a 0.75L bottle here) and is robust enough to fight through the other ingredients to let you know it's there without being overbearing. As we do more Irish whiskey drinks, we'll start exploring this particular line of spirits a little more.

Coffee is another, albeit less developed hobby for me. Every batch of coffee in this house is done via kettle and French press rather than a filtered machine. The difference in flavor and mouthfeel is similar to that between filtered and unfiltered beers (think about the visual difference between, say, Bud Light and Blue Moon, to pull some common examples). I'll probably spend an entire post talking about filtering and how it affects different drinks. For now, do whatever it is you do to get some good, strong, black coffee.

The IBA recipe says to float the cream, and so I did. Well, I tried, at least. Cream by itself is relatively very heavy compared to the coffee/whiskey/sugar mix, so even the most delicate of attempts to float still gets some comingling, though a layer of cream can set up on top. If you want to shortcut it, grab a can of Redi-Whip and call it a day. The wife chimed in with a mixing bowl and beater, wanting to actually whip up some cream. Who was I to argue? Whipped cream magically appeared, something about beating sugar into the cream to make it pile up better... donde es la bibliotheca?

I think it worked out okay.